141–150 of 177 posts
Why not: "increased local prices increase density"? People want to build where they can sell for more money. Supply and demand still apply.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two are not mutually exclusive. A city can be formed around the "opportunity" of a river or whatever a thousand years ago, and yet provide new opportunities like tinder having loads of people nearby nowadays.
The people themselves rarely create the opportunity. Take the Bay Area/SF for example, the opportunity is the digital economy and not the people who are mining it. That is, you can have a bunch of software developers (or miners), but if there is no gold to mine, they'll just sit idle (and eventually disperse). Most cities around the world (except some cities in the US) are "strategically" located near a river or on s…
It's impossible to separate the people from the social institutions which do create the opportunity in the services sector which dominates modern advanced economies.
In the Bay Area/SF the digital economy is defined by the ecosystem of big tech, VCs, thousands of software engineers and maybe tens of thousands of support services like accountants.
Tokyo built tons of housing (and transportation to that housing) and while price per square foot is high, actually living centrally is not very expensive. It probably goes up at first, then comes down once you’ve hit some level of density relative to demand.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nobody pays more for "density". You do, actually, pay more for "density". Moving things closer together, incurs extra costs (Even ignoring all other factors). Building codes have to be stricter (for equivalent safety levels), when buildings are closer together. Walls and insulation need more expensive materials (for equivalent sound dampening levels), when buildings are closer together. Insurance rates get higher (…
What I mean is that basically nobody looks at two options and desires the more dense one simply because they find density attractive. If offered to rent a large home on a 1/4 acre in downtown Manhattan, or a dense condo for the same price, almost everyone would choose the less dense option. People want space, and put up with density because they have limited money and like the location.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am glad that this is the top comment. Imagine you build housing such that 5 Million more people can move to Boston. Imagine that housing prices do not go down, and do not go down in other cities either. That implies that that 5 million more people are now earning Boston-level salaries and 5 million more people were able to make the personal choice to move to Boston. These 5 million people are on average doing highe…
Call me stupid (I am not an economist) but I can't see how your conclusions follow from one another. > That implies that that 5 million more people are now earning Boston-level salaries and 5 million more people were able to make the personal choice to move to Boston. ...How did those 5 million better-paid jobs got created? How did the 5 million people connect with them? Not everyone is 18-25 y/o you know, a lot of p…
There's no way that urban living isn't far more climate friendly than rural, even if the rural housing is getting some energy from solar or burning wood.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you got it the wrong way around - cities _form_ around opportunities, rather than produce them. Initially, geographic advantage (such as being near harbour, river, or some other geographic feature) gives a settlement that's not yet a city a big advantage in attracting more people there. This in turn, forces the city to grow as more people cram in. To artificially build denser by policy doesn't produce opportu…
> To artificially build denser by policy doesn't produce opportunities - those opportunities would have to be there first! Density is an effective way of substituting for transport speed, which is the binding constraint on many opportunities. The number of coffee shops I can choose to visit on my 15 minute break after stand up is limited by the density of the urban environment, for a given mode of transport. Many pub…
What is the dynamic in "this dynamic" ? Do you have an examples with social enterprises?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> To artificially build denser by policy doesn't produce opportunities - those opportunities would have to be there first! Density is an effective way of substituting for transport speed, which is the binding constraint on many opportunities. The number of coffee shops I can choose to visit on my 15 minute break after stand up is limited by the density of the urban environment, for a given mode of transport. Many pub…
> Many public, private and social enterprises have this dynamic. What is the dynamic in "this dynamic" ? Do you have an examples with social enterprises?
I intended the phrase "this dynamic" to capture the relationship between transport time and viability of the enterprise.
> Do you have an examples with social enterprises?
Sure thing. Food banks, soup kitchens and homeless shelters all need to be within a viable transport time of the people they intend to help.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are lots of planned cities that are natural experiments in this... They ... produced mixed results at best, eg Brasilia's original strictly separated zoning has been widely panned as a disaster. I'm not sure if there's been some slight shift of topic here. By "planned", I think we originally meant "deliberately built in relatively undeveloped land". But then you mention as an example of a failure of deliberat…
>Washington DC, for instance, is an artificial city with top-down planning, but it was built at a time when people had different ideas about what made a great city, and it doesn't really seem to be a failure. As I recall, DC was designed by George Washington himself (probably with help from his friends), back in the late 1700s, but the city as a whole was not: what they designed was the Federal district only. The Cap…
I am from DC and it's pretty well known that it is a planned city. Look up the L'Enfant Plan.
I'm not really sure what you are talking about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two are not mutually exclusive. A city can be formed around the "opportunity" of a river or whatever a thousand years ago, and yet provide new opportunities like tinder having loads of people nearby nowadays.
The people themselves rarely create the opportunity. Take the Bay Area/SF for example, the opportunity is the digital economy and not the people who are mining it. That is, you can have a bunch of software developers (or miners), but if there is no gold to mine, they'll just sit idle (and eventually disperse). Most cities around the world (except some cities in the US) are "strategically" located near a river or on s…
not sure this is a good example - while it's true for actual gold mining, in the case of software developers, having other software devs around (plus also good computers, which you could argue is like gold) can be an opportunity in itself - look at all the devtools startups that happen in the Bay Area.
A large group of people is an opportunity in itself.
I feel like this (along with many discussions about urban housing) slightly misses the real issue. A lot of these discussions center around how to make housing affordable in cities and whether denser construction leads to lower housing costs or higher housing costs. But cities don't exist to minimize housing costs. They exist to maximize opportunities: job opportunities, dating opportunities, friendship opportunities…
> But Manhattan and London have the highest house prices in their respective countries, primarily because of their density and the opportunities density provides.
....
> But if becoming just as big as Manhattan or London would make Oakland more expensive, shouldn’t we assume that a little step in that direction would make it a little bit more expensive?
....
> No; I think the missing insight is that there’s some pool of geographically mobile Americans1 who are looking for new housing (or who might start looking if the right situation presented itself).