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0 pointsImPostingOnHN5mo ago0 comments

Do you have more details on this 1 example, specifically the trends of city housing prices and demand? A quick search [0] seems to show city housing prices increasing, rather than decreasing.

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...

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cyberax5mo ago· 2 in thread

> Do you have more details on this 1 example, specifically the trends of city housing prices and demand?

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.

ImPostingOnHNOP5mo ago

> I think it is mutually exclusive

Is there any evidence of this? The demand for living in the city (rather than outside of it) already exceeds the supply.

> 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

Yeah, but that isn't housing in the city, it's housing in a place that isn't the city. Even setting aside the cultural differences of Japan, where homes are rebuilt every couple decades, and even setting aside that it has a declining population: a place where people don't want to live will naturally have lower prices than a place where they do.

It kind of sounds like when you're talking about reducing the density of a city, you're actually referring to keeping the density of the city the same, and building SFHs in places that aren't the city (which actually increases the density of those non-city places). Is that what you mean? Or did Tokyo replace skyscrapers with SFHs? And were those SFHs within the city cheaper than a unit in the skyscrapers was?

cyberax5mo ago

> a place where people don't want to live will naturally have lower prices than a place where they do.

But that's not true, is it? Most people in the US want to live in suburban SFHs, yet they are often forced to live in apartments. But that's not a viable option for them because the jobs are only available in dense cities.

> It kind of sounds like when you're talking about reducing the density of a city, you're actually referring to keeping the density of the city the same, and building SFHs in places that aren't the city

Correct.

> which actually increases the density of those non-city places

And technically increases the housing price there from zero to some value, just as predicted :)

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