Firstly, your link is focused on zoning changes, specifically how they are insufficient to prompt addition supply to be built.
From your linked blog post:
> Freemark finds extremely mixed and uncertain evidence for the effects of upzoning, and one of several reasons he identifies is that the link between upzoning and actual housing production is tenuous. In other words, “Are they allowed to build it?” is a different question from, “Are they building it?”
Secondly, building more suburbs and more cities increases the supply… which indicates agreement that the price problem is one of insufficient supply.
EDIT: To be perfectly clear, the data I disagree with is that increasing supply in Minneapolis failed to impact price. This is the contention of the comment I responded to, and it is fundamentally different from the claim that zoning changes fail to increase supply.
> Firstly, your link is focused on zoning changes, specifically how they are insufficient to prompt addition supply to be built.
Yeah. The misery pushers (urbanists) can't admit outright that their ideology is leading to disaster, can they? So they now need not only zoning restrictions lifted, but the state must also build housing and give it out to "deserving" people for cheap.
> Secondly, building more suburbs and more cities increases the supply… which indicates agreement that the price problem is one of insufficient supply.
I'm not arguing against supply-and-demand in general (I'm not a communist idiot). I'm arguing against the _density_ increases.
> EDIT: To be perfectly clear, the data I disagree with is that increasing supply in Minneapolis failed to impact price.
But it did. The real estate transaction index clearly shows that there were no positive effects from the new construction.
Moreover, I analyzed all the real estate sales in the US, Canada, and parts of Europe since 1995. I have not found a single example of a large (>100k population) city that decreased the housing sale prices by increasing density.
Even during the crash of 2007, the dense housing crashed less than comparative nearby sparse housing.
The scholarly literature is also unambiguous. The best effects of density increases are either mild (transient effects on rent), or indirect (migration chains).
You keep referring to people who like cities that function as cities as "misery pushers" and then in the same breath doing as much as you can to create an association between increased density and all these hypothetical negative possibilities. Likewise it just seems as though you've developed some level of prejudice based on the negative experience you're contending with in your neighborhood, and then extrapolating that quite severely, because you think you've been lied to. It's tricky to reconcile how if you were inclined to be optimistic about the prospect of urbanism to begin with, you'd be so intensely and easily convinced otherwise, or surprised that the creation of an arbitrary higher density building didn't turn your low density town into European capital city overnight. Like how does it happen that you lived in no specific place in Europe for example, then to where you are now, and one thing gets built which convinces you that actually every city in Europe is and has always been wrong.
Your chart shows two lines that seem to represent sales of something over time in nearby cities, which may or may not be relevant, but are at most a narrow slice of what one would need to look at in order to understand what's going on over in Minneapolis if anything.
You then create a strawman who thinks the removal of zoning restrictions will automatically lead to a utopia in which we have no other human problems or economic systems to contend with, even going so far as to dismiss someone on the basis of a lacking argument against a claim that nobody made.
> You keep referring to people who like cities that function as cities as "misery pushers"
That's an apt description.
> in the same breath doing as much as you can to create an association between increased density and all these hypothetical negative possibilities.
Why are they hypothetical? Density has long been associated with worse outcomes (higher crime, etc.). I can provide plenty of citations to scholarly literature.
> Like how does it happen that you lived in no specific place in Europe for example, then to where you are now
I grew up in Russia (Izhevsk), moved to Germany (Karlsruhe), then to Ukraine (Kyiv), and (briefly) to the Netherlands before coming to the US. I did not have a car in any of these places.
> and one thing gets built which convinces you that actually every city in Europe is and has always been wrong.
Yes. I'm able to compare the life in the US and in Europe first-hand. And Europe has plenty of dark secrets of its own. For example, Copenhagen in Denmark became the world's most liveable city by ruthlessly controlling its population. It still has not reached its peak number in 1970-s. Bet you didn't know that?
> Your chart shows two lines that seem to represent sales of something over time in nearby cities, which may or may not be relevant, but are at most a narrow slice of what one would need to look at in order to understand what's going on over in Minneapolis if anything.
I have real estate data with street-level information. It's not a public dataset, so I'm replicating my results using public datasets.
> You then create a strawman who thinks the removal of zoning restrictions will automatically lead to a utopia
No. I'm saying that removal of zoning limits to allow increased density does NOT lead to lower prices. It leads to increased density and increased misery as a result.
Minneapolis is simply a good example of this. There is another very good one: Seattle (where I live now). It increased its density by 25% over the last 12 years, many times leading the nation in the number of active construction cranes. The result? Faster price growth than even in SF.
Austin is an interesting case. It tripped me up a bit when I saw it.
But it turned out that my prediction was correct because the Austin population went _down_ during the pandemic.
Population:
2019 - 978,763
2022 - 975,418
2023 - 979,882
The overall Travis County population went up a bit. And the prices, in the places other than Austin, are also up.
I can also give a prediction, if Austin population growth recovers (not a given), the price growth rate will quickly outpace the surrounding Travis County.
Sorry. The reality doesn't care about your defiance.
Upzoning does not lead to lower housing prices. Even the most extreme urbanists admit that: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-might...
> and the law of supply/demand has been proven too frequently
Ah, here it is. Have you considered that there, you know, might be "too much complexity" for "Economy 101" to fully explain the situation?
The _only_ way to decrease the housing prices is to BUILD MORE SUBURBS. Or even new cities entirely.
You don't have any other options. Sorry again.
Well, maybe one more: the Detroit route. Reduce the city population and the prices will go down.