From the article: "One hardheaded answer is to build more housing. An increasing supply of housing would theoretically put downward pressure on prices. The reality, unfortunately, is that almost all urban construction happens too late."<p>That last sentence does not sound like an argument against this approach, but an additional argument for it. If there is a secular trend of urban rents outpacing inflation, it sure seems like a "better late than never" situation.
I am concerned that we will kill the golden goose...neighborhoods will consist of only the elderly (who remain by virtue of prop 13), and the wealthy. Seems inevitable that neighborhoods of this composition can only support service industries (hair salons, restaurants etc) and will eventually become economic dead zones.<p>In this model, the Bay Area becomes a glorified version of Sand Hill Road...cozy offices for a very few at the top...and every other facet of industry pushed out to affordable areas.
Maybe we could actually let people work remotely, and not waste billions of hours commuting. Then we could leave these fucking urban and suburban hellscapes, and go live somewhere with green grass, and trees, and mountains, and human-scale communities. Maybe people wouldn't be so neurotic.
> It would mean, more or less, an urban Marshall Plan for housing.<p>I would like to see this, at the national level: federally strip all downzoning from urban cities, then increasingly tax single-occupancy houses, focusing on subsidizing and activating high-density housing for all income strata. There's no reason Seattle, San Francisco, LA, etc can't all be turned into high-density high-efficiency Manhattan-esque locations. With the increased density comes a more effective tax base and a better scale for urban services.
Cities are inherently places where wealth begets wealth. I can say after living in LA I see the process of its Mahattanization. My guess is my kids won't even understand a suburban LA other then as a historical artifact mostly represented in old films and TV shows.
SF specific anecdote - I had a radical idea while walking up Divisadero last week. What if we removed Divisadero and Geary St. and built apartments where the road is today. You'd have European style narrow streets for pedestrians and could increase the density massively. Imagine taking out the multiple lanes across Geary St and how much housing could be built. Would there even be a NIMBY problem since the road is publicly owned?
Article doesn't seem to assert that it's bad for everyone, just those who aren't already at the top of the ladder. The author even goes so far to say that city living is a "luxury good" for those who can afford it.
There are some inherent problems with making cities affordable.<p>Dense construction is more expensive per unit area. So even if you could spread out the cost of expensive land among many units, a high density building will cost more per unit to build. Shrinking living spaces can only be taken so far before they hurt quality of life.<p>So city dwellers will always pay more per unit area because of building costs.<p>Second, traffic from density imposes costs on transportation. So movement is more difficult in a dense environment.<p>Eventually, these costs overwhelm the networking benefits of cities, and dispersion is the result. This has already happened with industry, which requires more space than services to be profitable. We are now seeing the service economy priced out of the Bay Area, leaving only the rentier economy.<p>Density is not a panacea.
Because of urbanization which will continue to go on for a long time it's going to be next to impossible to drive prices down around the big cities.<p>People will simply just move as close to opportunties as possible and that will drive prices further up.<p>This is why cost of living is going up not down. For all the great things technology does it doesn't solve one of the most fundamental needs of humans.
The best thing about a city is the forced contact with people who are radically different with each other. Only with time spent together can you begin to understand one another [1]. Given the vitrol and hatred being dished out between disparate groups around the country and the world, making city life affordable has an undeniable macro-level social good aspect to it.<p>[1] one reason why many of us are hopefuly that the Internet will increase our contact with others around the world with radically different upbringings and world views from our own, helping us understand and empathize with one another better.
One of the key point that the article makes is that change happens over decades. That's not to say that <i>some</i> change can't happen over shorter periods but anything fundamentally altering is something that may produce effects in thirty years--and probably in a way at least somewhat different from what was intended.