Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Dave Stuhlsatz's avatar

I think that regional bias is embedded in human thinking. It takes the form of "our cave is nicer than your cave" and "The Joneses have a nicer cave than ours--let's go kill them." Comparisons, resentments, and place-based loyalties will always factor into the prices that people are willing to pay for housing. Every country will have a dominant metropolitan area that is regarded as THE CITY by virtue of population and the inhabitants will reap considerable benefits from agglomeration--at the same time as they're complaining about prices, congestion, and the constant failures of their local sports teams.

However, agglomeration theory doesn't imply that you can rank metro areas in a large country like the U.S. and conclude that any place with less than 5,000,000 people is Crapville. Nor can you look at certain metro areas on the basis of housing price and conclude that they've reached a point of population saturation because of those prices---which ties back to your debate w/ Yglesias & Sumner. A benefit of agglomeration should be a "superfiltering" of housing price points and a broad spectrum of living conditions. In many places in the world billionaires live in high rises a few blocks away from crowded slums. A natural policy goal isn't to get rid of the billionaires but to raise the housing standards of the slum-dwellers--which is basically what Singapore did (and China has been trying to do, but with some recent setbacks).

Expand full comment
Logan's avatar

I totally agree with your analysis of the housing problem, but sometimes I feel there's a bit of a blindspot around the interactions between housing and "urbanism." A list of "most urbanist US cities" has a lot of overlap with the closed-access cities - NYC, Boston, SF. Then DC, Chicago, Philly, and to a lesser extent Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis probably round out a "best US urbanism" list, which might be cheaper, but all still have housing production problems of their own.

Since college-educated people tend to prefer walkable urbanism, and can afford it, "opportunity" will coalesce around these places. I'm thinking along the lines of Ed Glaeser's "Triumph of the City," or Joe Cortright at City Observatory

Link: https://cityobservatory.org/the-talent-divided-2018/

and link: https://cityobservatory.org/youth_movement_june2020/

Young talented people graduate college and want to move to the city. You want to be a city that attracts those young, talented people, because if you attract and retain them, they will pay your city dividends for the rest of their life. Those young, talented people are attracted to "city life," and that means, at its core, walkability. Even if they move to the suburbs later, as long as they remain attached to the metro area, they're still contributing to the city's economy. This is what I see as making NYC, SF, Boston, DC, etc., "special," both culturally and economically—concentration of educated people. The "superstar" designation on the basis of incomes might be spurious, but the idea that these are special and uniquely desirable places is not.

LA is really in a category of its own of lacking walkability, but still being desirable to powerful/"special" people because of entertainment industries. That makes perfect sense because a lot of what makes walkable cities special isn't that they're /broadly/ more desirable, it's that they're more desirable to people who have more powerful voices. Of course people in entertainment have very powerful voices, and so LA gets mega-bonus "culture" points that are amplified out in our movies and TV and music.

From this premise, I'll admit, San Diego just makes no sense at all. It is obvious though, that San Diego has some of the best weather in the world, and people are really irrational about how much they'll pay for good weather. I'll just have to chalk some of this up to the insanity of California.

Expand full comment
6 more comments...

No posts