“The Year in Housing: The Middle Class Can’t Afford to Live in Cities Anymore” (WIRED) is interesting to me because it demonstrates an apparent blind spot for Americans. Here was my comment on the piece:
The word “population” doesn’t appear in the article. Why isn’t this what we expect as the U.S. population has grown from about 150 million post-World War II to 320 million today? Also, demographers predict immigration-driven growth to about 441 million by 2065 (see Pew Research). Wouldn’t the real estate market also reflect expected future demand based on this growth? (Note that I’m not arguing for or against population growth, merely pointing out that if we have it we will also have a rising cost for housing.)
What do readers think? We do have a lot of land in the U.S. so in theory we could build some more vibrant cities. On the other hand, we don’t seem to excel at building efficiently, so that leaves us with the same cities that we had 100 years ago (plus a lot of exurban sprawl).
Also the US lost a lot of urban areas to the war on drugs, so the actual stock of walkable/livable cities is actually declining.
The fact that many Americans consider living in an apartment as a socialist nightmare, regardless of availability of amenities/parks for kids, etc. Probably doesn’t help convince real estate developers to deviate from the suburban model.
It seems like most cities haven’t come close to reaching the limit of how far they can build vertically, so land area isn’t really the issue. I’ve lived in Houston for close to 20 years now and the pattern of building seems to be “knock down this crumbling two-story garden apartment block and build a four- or five-story “Texas Donut” (apartments wrapped around a core parking garage)” or “knock down this single-story bungalow with a big yard and replace it with four three-story townhomes”. This would seem to be enough to keep up our burgeoning population. (Whether or not the roads, sewers, and what public transportation we have is able to cope with this kind of density or not is another question – and, of course, we have a huge unfunded public employee pension problem).
The cities with the highest housing costs (e.g. San Francisco) seem to be, by all accounts, the ones that make it hardest to build new housing.
There really isn’t more land. The sites with viable logistics and water supply and sewage processing are already full, if not over-populated. The best urban sites were obviously taken first. In fact, what we’re seeing now is that a lot of towns where they have to truck everything in as opposed to having vastly more efficient rail & water transport, well these places don’t actually make economic sense. These places can’t generate the tax revenue necessary to keep repairing the roads, which are destroyed by trucks, and also keep pumping in the water.
The cheap energy age is over. You could do dumb things like build a city where everything is trucked in and out over vast distances fifty years ago when oil was still practically burbling up out of the ground. That’s just not where we are anymore. We have rapidly declining net energy produced per capita. The future necessarily looks more like the past in many ways. You can support some small to mid-sized cities near natural rail-hubs that have access to water. Those spots are already taken. Every other large population center has to be on rivers, where the cities already are.
A longer term sustainable population of the USA is under 200 million as we stare down the developing energy supply situation. For national security it is imperative that we deport millions and shut down immigration right now.
My (outside) impression of the US is that national politics are overemphasized, while a lot of the decisions that actually matter for day-to-day living happen at the local and state levels. (e.g. zoning, schools, etc)
Like Bill Burr said: blaming the President is like yelling at the airline employee because your plane is late at the gate.
These are the same people who wanted the government to inject massive amounts of money into the housing market in 2009. Now the government has created the worst housing shortage in all history & the homeless are dying in warehouse fires. It’s another example of central planning being an absolute failure at providing for its people.
If word were ever to get out that immigration is good for property owners and bad for poor people, the jig would be up. We can’t have that.
bobby,
No way. The U.S. will continue to grow, and the banks will never run out of money. It may not be worth much, but there will be lots of it. The crunch will come when the dollar loses out to an Asian currency as the reserve currency. Then the USA will be like the UK and Europe, a vast theme park for tourists with a small economy along for the ride. A problem for our grandchildren; they can’t finish f’ing it up in our lifetime.
The timescale for the serious energy problems we face hitting crisis levels is five and ten years, not “grand-kids” stuff. This is happening now. The economy can’t grow like it used to because there is less and less spare energy at a cheap enough price. The frackers are all going bust right now and they will stay busted, because the energy they produce is not affordable.
Absent gobs of cheap energy the current population and standard of living are totally unsustainable.
@bobbybobbob,
France didn’t have a problem developing cheap nuclear power, the only energy problem I see is the irresponsible use of natural gas for stationary power generation, natural gas is versatile, useful for chemical feedstock and transportation, power plants should use coal or fission as heat sources.
If we got off our high horses, embracing nuclear power and reverse osmosis, the constraints on cities would be few.
The big problem is that people with the drive that result in job creation flock to extraordinarily expensive places. This problem is hard to solve, perhaps if we relaxed discrimination laws, allowed the absolute right of freedom of association, in which case productive people could build a new city, and let a city charter determine who can be allowed to live there.
Nuclear power is not a solution because we are just about of viable uranium and the whole breeder reactor idea turned out to be a dud. As it is we have enough fissile uranium to keep the plants running for maybe another 25 years. Any major ramp up in number of reactors would bring that down proportionally.
@bobbybobbob @Viking: BrilliantLightPower claims to squeeze the electrons in hydrogen atoms a bit closer to the nucleus, and in doing so releasing energy somewhere in the middle of chemical and nuclear power densities. This despite the standard model quantum physics saying it’s impossible. Yet their latest videos on YouTube show them producing lots of energy from something. If they are right then 80 years of physics has been wrong, cheap clean energy is imminent, and all energy related stocks are about to head to zero.
While population growth overall is a problem, I think the larger effect is the urbanization of the population. China has the same challenge. The internal shift of population from smaller towns and medium sized towns to large urban areas is causing the spike in demand in cities. And the highest earners really go nuts to be near a “cool” city center, like San Francisco, thus driving the price through the roof. In San Francisco, middle class families can’t possibly compete with high earning singles or double-income, no kids households. We moved out of San Francisco to the suburbs for exactly this reason (plus better schools). Having made the transition, I am not sure urban areas are better for raising children, compared to the suburbs. And this is from two people who loved living in San Francisco very much, and we really couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, when we didn’t have kids.
The real problem is rent control. All of the most expensive areas have it. And like all government price controls it hurts the people most that it tries to help.