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Higher density brings both good and bad:
upside: - high paying, specialized jobs - specialized, high quality services - stores open late - better dating (more fish in the sea)
downside: - more traffic - more noise - more pollution - more anonymity, crime (people in small towns leave their doors unlocked and say hi on the sidewalk)
The people who benefit most from higher density tend to be young professionals, which tend to not currently live in the neighborhood and will move in if density goes up.
These are often true, but not inherently so. I've lived in remote rural, suburban, and dense city environments. My dense city had disadvantages, but it was quiet and had little traffic or pollution. In my experience the suburban environment is the worst for all three once you get off the residential streets, there's loud, polluting traffic (3/3).
In two of the places I lived, I couldn't keep the window open due to the constant tire noise. It wasn't an issue in the densest place I lived, which was a low-car-traffic place and pleasant to be outside in. Now, I live right next to a freight rail yard, but I don't find the train noise grating like the highway noise.
These aren't all foregone conclusions. For example, Arlington, VA (11th highest density county in the US) most likely has the lowest combined traffic/homicide fatality rate in the country. Traffic peaked in 2000, and by 2015 it had gone down 20% while population rose 20%. This of course required a lot of planning and investment, but that is enabled by the higher property tax revenues that more housing brings.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-11-18/how-ar...
- more noise: From traffic? electrification is making transportation quieter than before. From people in the streets? again the streets are way less busy compare to pre-COVID at least in SF. People either do not work, or work from home, get delivered everything from movies (Netflix), to food (UberEats) or shopping (Amazon), etc. foot traffic is WAY lower than pre-COVID. So if we double the population, yes there would be some additional foot traffic. But how would it compare to 10 years ago ?
- more pollution: From traffic? electrification is offsetting some of it. From trash, well those people were trashing elsewhere too.
- more anonymity, crime: That is cultural. Tokyo is fairly dense city, and with fairly low crime compare to US standards.
"The people who benefit most from higher density tend to be young professionals": Go visit a major city in Europe (Paris, Barcelona, etc) that has high density, and you would see lots of different generations, not only young professionals. It is possible to live from cradle to grave in those cities. It does not have to transition spot when you are young, professional and looking at dating. It could be where you go to kindergarten, up to university, work and retire.
I feel like the main thing that NIMBY fear is change, any change. Hausmann, where are you ?
Broadly disparaging large, diverse groups of people like this is what makes things harder, not easier. This is tribalism.
It's valuable to know where people are coming from, so you can persuade them out of unproductive policy positions (or at least deactivate them so they're less in the way of change). It's important to be respectful of people. It's often counterproductive to be respectful of bad ideas.
Ah, yes, we live in a black-and-white world where this always happens, and so does this:
> upside: - high paying, specialized jobs - specialized, high quality services - stores open late - better dating (more fish in the sea)
There plenty of VERY affluent rural-ish areas.
There are also plenty of very nice places to live with high density that have FAR less crime rates that typical rural America, minimal traffic or noise, and far less pollution than you can find anywhere remotely rural and industrial or even agricultural areas.
The reality is - there's a lot of Karens that will do anything they can to deny everyone else of anything else they can possibly deny.
That's a large component of NIMBYism. These types will find any reason to justify it.
This contradicts every common theory of economics I've heard.
Which one has more expensive housing units?
Part of the purpose of development is to make more shit happen and increase demand. It's rarely just "new increaesed supply vs constant demand"
Or rather: a demand that would result in anyone producing new housing units does not happen in a vacuum. And outpacing that rate of demand rarely happens from construction alone.
If you built more houses in Dubuque, would it increase or decrease Dubuque house values?
That's an interesting question, because it's often — not necessarily in this case, but often — asked by people who ignore capitalism when it's inconvenient to their case. Other askers simultaneously claim things like "Dubuque has a lower cost of living" and "Dubuque is a better place to live". That ignores the fact that Manhattan is more expensive because more people want to live there, to the point that they're willing to pay several times more for the benefits they believe it gives them.
When someone argues that city X is n% more expensive than city Y, it's another way of saying that residents believe they're getting at least n% more value from Y than they would from X.
If increasing the amount and density of housing increases the desirability of a place thus increasing the value of the housing, this still has limits.
The SF bay area has had a housing shortage for 30 years. Its driven by people wanting to move in that have lots of money AND the refusal of local cities to allow housing to be built, also there isnt new land to build on. However the number of vacant plots in Mountain View is disgraceful.
If we allowed people to build high-rise apartments in downtown Mountain View rent would drop.
More saliently, I don't believe you're right to imply that "young professionals" only want to live in dense areas. Sometimes they have to, but that's something we can change.
NIMByism can be killed with a land value tax/a property tax that approximates LVT and vice versa.
It was kicked into overdrive in California thanks to prop 13 which capped property taxes.
It's not a bad idea, but it doesn't moot the underlying questions, because it will never be deployed at the scale where it would be dispositive.
tl;dr: “while demand remains steady” is doing a lot of heavy lifting that doesn’t really make sense in a real dynamic urban system.
To me the issue is that densification (in the US; can't speak to other countries) usually comes with more downsides than upsides.
Mainly this is because of the US's focus on cars: the biggest downside is usually increased traffic. Unfortunately it feels towns in the US do the bare minimum to address it, like adding some traffic lights and maybe a lane or two.
Instead I wish the US had more good examples of densification for existing residents, where along with the increased housing larger steps were made to improve the community. E.g. significantly expanded mass transit, bicycling infrastructure, community third places, etc. And I get it, these things are really expensive and hard to do. But turning densification into something that more clearly benefits the day-to-day experience of existing residents would do a LOT to combat NIMBYism.
Freezing the SFH neighborhood also doesn't protect the community long term, as NIMBYs believe. When supply gets restricted, prices go up. It prices out the local teachers, service workers, aging family, and even the NIMBY's own children get priced out, until now it's just a neighborhood of million dollar+ SFHs with no young families, no local workforce. It's economic segregation.
Continuing to allow local vetoes and restrictive zoning just pushes us out further and further into unsustainable suburban sprawl, without the transit to match, and boosting emissions.
Not popular in individualistic America, but when we have the housing crisis we do, the needs of the many are going to have to take priority over the needs of the few NIMBYs.
This is how it's done in the rest of the world, certainly Korea, Japan, and China. I see this in England and France as well. They develop a high density area with new facilities that can grow and evolve for how people want to live there, rather than mowing down houses (in communities of color) or plopping 5-7 story apartments without parking or parks right next to single story SFH, as developers like to do in the US.
I assume it's because it's more profitable for the developers. They don't have to build anything, but the part they can immediately sell, and they ride on the value of the neighborhood created by the people who already live there. I think some infill near commercial districts or malls also faces much less "NIMBY" criticism.
To give a more personal example: I like the location and view of where you live. I like the plants you water, and you keep the house looking clean. I want to just build another large room on top of your house, where me and a bunch of friends will live. We'll just share the stairs, hallways, and front door, and of course our share of the water and electric bill. We probably won't be too loud most nights, and usually when friends come over they won't use your bathroom or take anything from your rooms, or at least we'll ask them not to. Sorry about the construction noise while we do it, and just think you'll get to meet so many new people! Sorry that the part of your house you still own will be worth less than your neighbors when we're done, but that's the price you need to pay for living in a nice place and keeping it up.
The argument that SFH infrastructure repair is subsidized by new building is a much better one. Of course that was true of the tax increases and subsidy of the original town, when the SFH were built as well.
It depends on where said SFHs are. Cities need to eventually grow upwards! If we never allowed land-reuse Manhattan would still be 2 stories on the whole borough.
I live in Toronto and the harshest NIMBYs are adjacent to downtown and/or subway stops. They fight tooth and nail against even 6 story condominiums on the major high streets (Margret Atwood, who lives in a large SFH close to downtown was among them recently-ish). The ultimate result is that we have a handful of extremely dense clusters of condominiums centred around a few subway stops that then super-concentrate people and cause extreme crowding on transit, amenities, etc. It would be better if you had mid-rise multi-unit dwellings more spread out.
It's actually become an acute problem in so many ways. The people who own the SFHs tend be over 50 and childless. The result is that many schools in these neighbourhoods are at barely 20% capacity, while the condominiums (where most younger families can afford to live) are causing the schools near them to be overflowing with kids.
> This is how it's done in the rest of the world, certainly Korea, Japan, and China. I see this in England and France as well.
The countries broadly speaking default to higher density than North America for historical and economic reasons. They have their own issues, but the majority of Koreans live in high rises and Japan rebuilds their buildings constantly: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusabl...
Not to go full Hausmann (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann's_renovation_of_Pari...) and eminent-domain the half of the city and rebuild a 1/5 of the city in higher density buildings, in 15 years. But we could ramp it up and start with the low hanging fruits, with empty buildings, parking lots, gas stations, etc. Show results. Show the building owners that they could building higher on their lot, do the math for them, stream line the permitting, help with financing.
Here is also pace to consider. We are biological creatures, and we only support change at a certain pace, without going fully stressed.
[1] Here are some for reference: City / Metro Area Residential Land Zoned Single-Family Only (%) - San Jose, CA 94% - Arlington, TX 89% - Charlotte, NC 84% - Seattle, WA 81% - Chicago, IL 79% - Portland, OR 77% - Los Angeles, CA 75% - Minneapolis, MN 70% - Washington, D.C. 36% - New York City, NY 15%
Seattle, Chicago, and Los Angeles are surprisingly high, but hundreds of square miles of SFH offsets a lot of lakefront high-rises.
But this is the whole reason people complain about NIMBYs - there are no other backyards left!
Because I've lived in a few of the largest urban areas and the answer is "nowhere near the jobs."
Or in reality, desirable locations remain desirable, and the current residents who had a hand in making it desirable have a right to prevent a reduction of their quality of life for the benefit of people who would prefer to live there but are unable to successfully compete with others in the housing market.
I don't believe you.
Financial investor mindset is a real and dramatic example, but a minority in the set of reasons that individual people care about the community they worked so hard to live in.
Citation needed*
It seems natural to me that the majority of emotions regarding one's home and community are in regards to the idea of home and community, rather than their monetary value, since that's the obvious human perspective. And of course you can care about both things at once, which maybe you assumed I was omitting? I only said the the majority of people care about their home/community, and implied that I believe it's the stronger emotion, not that the majority of people do not also care about the investment (which does materially affect their actual life, as opposed to the more common image of a wealthy "investor").
I could be wrong. It's a sentiment, so it's not something easily measured (unless you fall for the trap of over-interpreting statistics, which is common in an engineering-minded folks).
What people want, even in those denser supply-choked cities, is basically just stability. "I don't want to be forced out because a bunch of rich people move in next door, and I don't want it it turn into something dramatically different experience-wise than what I bought."
If everyone in those areas just wanted to maximize the financial side they'd be looking to flip their single family home for a fourplex and put the profit into another, etc etc.
"We don't want this to turn into Manhattan" is NOT what anyone owning land in a maybe-could-turn-into-Manhattan place if they were just interested in the money.
(That's less viable in the middle-of-the-country suburbs because the "increased land value" of the old empty pasture next door could still result in lower land value for your on-the-suburban-fringe neighborhood, if there's high amounts of empty land and more new identical suburbs popping up. But that's not where the problem is most acute, anyway!)
A big factor in why housing was affordable for most of the 20th century was the Savings and Loan associations, a product of New Deal era banking regulation. S&Ls were the only financial institutions allowed to take deposits in most communities due to limits on bank branching. They had access to very cheap financing because of regulations prohibiting interest on checking accounts, and limiting interest rates on other types of deposits. They were also only allowed to lend money for local real estate projects. This meant that you had a captive market where local savings could fund local housing development. The system fell apart after Reagan era deregulation forced the S&Ls to compete with national institutions offering higher returns. The S&Ls were pressured into offering higher returns themselves by shifting from residential financing to more speculative commercial real estate projects. The result was the failure of many S&Ls, and the rest of them being absorbed into the larger banking system.
The S&L system meant that it was possible to finance housing ahead of demand, which caused a relative decline in housing costs. Between 1950 and 1980, rents in urban areas rose by about 30% less than the CPI as a whole. Meanwhile, in the last 10 years, rents in urban areas rose by about 30% more than the CPI. (see https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SEHA , https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL ). Housing prices will always increase more than inflation as long as new housing development has to compete with all other types of investment.
The YIMBYs are right that blocking any given building from being built will push housing prices up higher in that area, so new development is overall good for housing prices. What they miss is that deregulation will never reduce housing prices back to what they previously were or lower because developers will never come in and build new housing in a market where rents are stagnant or decreasing.
I don't care. I want to live in my house, not sell it.
I agree that this is needed, but regulation would be required to compel neighborhoods to allow increased density as well...
this is a shitty article with no understanding of reality
Umm, what? If you start with "If this all sounds like wishful thinking", maybe departing into even more unhinged fantasy isn't the next step that helps you? The supposition that _deregulation_ could cause the price to go to zero is crazy; houses are built with labor using materials, on land. In the absence of regulation they shouldn't cost significantly _more_ than their labor+materials+land value, but they shouldn't cost _zero_. If you wanted the world where you don't pay for housing, I think you need a _lot_ of regulation -- after all building millions of Stalin blocks took a lot of intervention.
Throughout the piece, Caplan seems to assume that the only impact of regulation worth discussing is on prices, which seems suspect. But assuming that the only source of prices is regulation is worse.
If you think that NIMBY policies are ultimately harmful, maybe the only thing rougher than talking to NIMBYs is seeing a supposed expert try to argue against them but do it really really badly.