alt Hacker NewsYour daily reminder that urbanism leads only to more misery. Dense cities will never have cheaper housing. And it will only get worse and worse as the density continues to grow.
And we know that the misery won out when people pose it like this:
> If you can't afford a home up to our standards, better that you should be homeless?
The third option is to LIVE IN CHEAPER PLACES. The US has 1.1 housing units per household. We literally have more homes than families! And this doesn't change much if we assume that illegal immigrants are undercounted.
The whole housing policy must focus on making MORE locations feasible, not trying to strangle the democracy with bike lanes.
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I live in a big city with decent transit. I'm in my late 20s. Neither I nor any of my (white-collar professional) peers own cars. Do you have any idea how much money we save?
And yeah, bike lanes are part of it too. They make it easy to get around quickly & cheaply. Our bike lanes are packed with bicycle couriers and the impact on traffic is practically zero. Bike lanes are popular because they work.
High rent is caused by low supply of high-density housing. Apartment blocks are cheap. It's bad zoning, NIMBYs, and a slow pace of construction due to disproportionate focus on luxury units that cause housing supply issues.
> The third option is to LIVE IN CHEAPER PLACES. The US has 1.1 housing units per household.
Yeah, you know why people don't live in those places? They're in exurbs of Arizona, a thousand miles from anything. During the housing bubble, we built a bunch of homes in unlivable areas and now we're dealing with the fact that they're functionally useless.
> Dense cities will never have cheaper housing.
Yeah there’s a correlation but I doubt it’s causation. There are underlying aspects like zoning (and other regulations as mentioned in article) that can make an impact on housing prices. Other reasons are because employment and career prospects are higher so that attracts more people, which creates more demand.