alt Hacker NewsThis argument always comes up when discussing a specific place.
"Everyone would move to ________ because it is the best place in the spiral arm of the Milky Way", where ________ is Boulder, Bend, Austin, Portland, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Hawai'i, Santa Fe, etc.... etc....
It cannot be true for all of them. So they all need to build and people will figure out where they actually want to live.
Bozeman, Montana, a small city of 50K people, is seeing falling rents because they built a lot of housing:
https://montanafreepress.org/2025/06/23/has-bozemans-rental-...
And it's very much the kind of small place where "everyone wants to live there".
If everyone could live where they wanted to live, then ya, why wouldn't everyone want to live in the best cities?
If you have fixed demand, then you can definitely "build" your way out of a housing crisis. Bozeman, for example, doesn't have many jobs, so you can't really live there if you don't bring your own money. A big city like Seattle or Denver... they have lots of jobs, so they will grow at least to the point that all those jobs have people working them...but then a city like that attracts even more jobs (the way cities work since they concentrate talent, which attracts more businesses looking for that talent), more people, it could grow from a million people to 10 or 20 million easily.
> And it's very much the kind of small place where "everyone wants to live there".
MT is a bad place if you need to work for a living: high housing prices, jobs don't pay very well if you can find them at all. My mom moved to Helena in the late 90s and found that out first hand. If WFH took off as expected, then you definitely could make a good life in Bozeman or Missoula or Butte, but alas, the opposite happened and we regressed greatly.