Nope. The ONLY way to get cheaper housing is by reducing the city population.
> Supply and demand.
Sigh. No. You assume that the demand is fixed. It's not. By building new housing, you _increase_ the demand. And always faster than you can satisfy it.
I just love this example:
Forbes 2016 - "Tokyo's Affordable Housing Strategy: Build, Build, Build", "The Great Urban Myth: 'Cities Can't Build Their Way To Affordable Housing'"
Reuters 2023 - "Surging Tokyo property prices squeeze out young professionals",
Japandaily 2025: "Housing Crisis: Families Struggle to Buy Homes in Tokyo" ( https://japandaily.jp/housing-crisis-families-struggle-to-bu... )
> Rentals in a dense complex are cheaper than standalone rentals or duplexes, townhomes are cheaper than SFH, etc.
Try to find a city where dense housing made it cheaper.
Are there cities where replacing denser housing with single-family homes made housing cheaper?
A really good example is Copenhagen, the world's most liveable city. Its current population is still _less_ than during the 1970's peak: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/20894/cope... The driver for the decrease was suburban migration, as cars became more accessible.
The US _itself_ is a great example. The suburban development created cheap housing for the rapidly growing population in 60-s.
Obviously housing built outside the city will be cheaper than within it, and that might work for people who are fine living just anywhere (like away from the city), but the hypothesis is that the prices within the city increase when more housing (denser housing) is added within the city, right?
It's just hard to imagine how replacing a 300-unit occupied building downtown with 4-8 single-family-homes would result in the SFHs being cheaper than a unit in the skyscraper was.
0: https://www.courthousenews.com/copenhagen-housing-prices-dou...
I don't have all the information on Copenhagen yet. The stats from 1970-s are not available online, so I commissioned someone to get the data from the archives.
The available data basically shows that prices were stagnant during the 70-80-s and started rising in the 90-s.
> After all, building more housing in the city isn't mutually exclusive with building housing outside the city.
I think it is mutually exclusive, exactly because of the population growth (the lack thereof). Each dense apartment in a city core means one less house in a rural area somewhere.
Japan, that I gave as an example, has literally free houses that anyone can get for nothing but the government real estate transaction fees. Just 3-4 hours away from Tokyo.
The problem with this is that you can’t forcibly reduce population. Halting growth in one area just displaces it. This can be a good trade if the area into which growth is displaced is underdeveloped with few other potential uses. But it can also create Atlanta or Houston style sprawl, or destroy natural areas that would be better to preserve.
Japan is an unusual example because most job opportunities are in a handful of areas. You can get impossibly cheap properties in the countryside but there are few jobs or young people. Properties in the city keep getting more expensive because of demand and because building codes are constantly evolving to keep up with new developments in earthquake protection. There are older urban properties available for cheap outside of trendy areas, but the cost of renovation is often too high to be worth it. There’s also a cultural stigma around older properties.
We don't need to. The population growth in the Western world is mostly over, the US will likely peak at barely +10% to the current population numbers. Europe is likely already at or near the peak number.
And Tokyo managed to get a bubble within a country with a _falling_ population. Not just stagnant like in Europe, but actually numerically decreasing.
> Halting growth in one area just displaces it.
That's EXACTLY what we need. The US already has 1.1 houses per household, except that they are not where the demand is.
So the fix is to shift the demand, not try to satisfy it. Ironically, this is exactly the same method that urbanists propose to fight congestion: instead of just adding more lanes to busy roads, you shift people to other modes of transportation.
How can this be done? Exactly like we did it with pollution: tax negative externalities, incentivize clean technology. For cities: tax dense office space (cap-and-trade can also work), incentivize work-from-home, incentivize offices in less dense cities, etc.
This doesn't even have to be a huge policy shift.
If the combination of AI, declining returns on service and knowledge-based work, and national security priorities create a resurgence in manufacturing then factory towns may make a comeback.
During the pandemic, some research had shown that something like 70-80% of jobs can be remote.
The kicker is that remote work is less efficient. So in the long run and on average, companies with in-office jobs outperform fully remote companies. This is just like the situation with pollution: a company that spends money on waste recovery is less competitive than a company that can just dump toxic sludge into a nearby river.
And just like with pollution, centralized regulatory changes are needed so that all companies are affected similarly.
> The policies you suggest also seem difficult politically since most environmentalists seem to want more density, not less.
Yet they are misguided because they keep looking at the very tip of an iceberg. It's just one example out of many (see: nuclear power plants).
To give an example, light rail is more efficient than individual EVs. So it's great that Seattle is building light rail, right? It'll result in fewer "headline" CO2 emissions.
But then you realize that Seattle is going to spend $180B ("B", as in "billion") to build about 50 miles of tracks. It's more than the yearly GDP of 130 countries! All these resources could have been spent on something else, perhaps on building more renewable generation.
