Yes, they are. What do you think "anti-gentrification activism" boils down to, in practice? Build more and drive prices down? Of course not, the activists will conveniently tell you that this makes gentrification worse! Which totally defies economic logic: there's only so much demand in the world for places like Manhattan!
> Which totally defies economic logic: there's only so much demand in the world for places like Manhattan!
How much demand "in the world" to live in Manhattan do you think there is?
The more the price drops, of course, the demand will go up. So how much "in the world" at both current prices and also if, say, prices went down by 5%? 10%? 50%? 75%? I think there's enough currently-unmet demand to keep the prices from falling far even if you add supply.
(You can also increase demand by building. This is the goal of every property developer ever, after all. To make it worth more than it was when they found it.)
Who knows? Pretty easily 40 million like Tokyo has, and that would already be more than double the current population. Possibly much more.
There are a lot of people held back by nothing but cost, so dropping prices would increase demand. There are also people held back by other factors, but some of those would also likely be relieved by building more housing.
Think about it - that works just as well if you take it to the extreme as "rebuild the entire city denser" - once you knock down the entire city, that land is gonna be worth a lot less.
And the demolition approach has the advantage of costing less than rebuilding everything after you demo it!
It's also a good way to force demand to move around, right?! Hell, if you demolished Manhattan and everyone there moved to other cities in the US, I wonder if the average rent and/or mortgage payments of the displaced people would go down...
> Hell, if you demolished Manhattan and everyone there moved to other cities in the US, I wonder if the average rent and/or mortgage payments of the displaced people would go down...
Is that a rhetorical question?
You've asked the wrong question. It should be whether the sum that everyone in the world spends on housing will increase or decrease, not only the displaced Manhattanites.
The effective demand for places like Manhattan comes from the highly productive economic activity that can be pursued in such places. So if the demand for places like Manhattan (or Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai etc.) really was that boundless, that would be plenty of reason to build as many of them as possible and speed towards that post-scarcity techno-utopia.
(But the ghost cities of China actually show how this can go wrong. So, as it turns out, you can only YIMBY so much.)
I don't think the demand is literally boundless, but I think the idea that we could easily outpace demand with construction to dramatically increase affordability is wildly optimistic.
I'd rather build new Dallases, or denser Dallases, than try to double the density of Manhattan, because it will both be easier to find/acquire un-utilized land to use, and because the amount of work required to double the density of Manhattan is much more intense, construction-wise.
Of course density should be pursued wherever it's cheapest to do so. The point of thinking about the Manhattan case is that this is the natural endpoint of any sort of "more housing and higher density always leads to higher prices" argument. It clarifies to what extent that argument can possibly work, as a matter of basic logic.
As far as I can tell, the Manhattan case tells us that we aren't even close to the "building more will cause prices to fall" point anywhere in the US. And because of that, building more where it's cheaper is a better strategy for controlling costs than building more where it's already expensive.
Manhattan was brought up to mock the idea that construction could make prices worse for existing residents, I don't think it shows that at all.
Is it any wonder that "you're dumb, building more will lower prices" hasn't been a persuasive argument to people who've seen construction push up prices around them for decades without the promised lowering of prices yet? That's just asking for a leap of faith that this time will be different, we'll hit the magic tipping point, without any actual evidence for that.
> Is it any wonder that "you're dumb, building more will lower prices" hasn't been a persuasive argument to people who've seen construction push up prices around them for decades without the promised lowering of prices yet?
You're making an assertion about causality that often gets thrown out, but typically without being backed up.
Certainly construction often correlates with prices rising. However, the arrow of causation could run in either direction. It's possible that construction itself increases demand in the area enough to raise prices. However, it's also possible that increased demand (due to agglomeration effects, etc) raises prices and results in construction to meet that demand, which lowers prices in the area relative to what they would have been without the construction.
This doesn't necessarily mean that construction will lower housing prices, but it does mean that without it prices will be even higher, because the construction is attempting to meet new demand that's already there regardless.
"Expensive" city centers in the U.S. have comparable density to bog-standard suburban towns in the rest of the developed world. By all indications, we're nowhere near the "tipping point" where trying to increase density there would physically be so costly as to be unsustainable. That's something NYC can perhaps legitimately worry about, but I'm not sure how that could apply to other high-demand places in the U.S.
The tipping point of concern for the anti-gentrification crowd isn't "is it profitable to upzone", it's "will upzoning make things cheaper" and those are VERY different questions.
But just going on the numbers for the former question, the "expensive" city centers in the US generally start with Manhattan, Brooklyn, SF, and whatever you'd call "center" of LA. And they don't seem that far behind a lot of the rest of the developed world...
Manhattan is >70k/sqmile.
Brooklyn is 37k/sqmile.
SF is ~19k/sqmile.
LA is 8k/sqmile.
So what are the "bog-standard suburban towns" you think they're comparable to?
I can't think of many, and my searching isn't turning many up. Milan appears to be 20k/sqmile while Rome is 6k/sqmile. And those aren't "bog standard suburbs" like a Marietta, Georgia; those are central cities! Let's go bigger and even more central - London is 15k/sqmile, Paris is 53k/sqmile. Tokyo is ~17k (and larger, more like a double-size LA, there), but not overall denser than the US's expensive city centers. Manchester, in the UK, is 5450/sqmile. Stuttgart is 7,800/sqmile.
Manchester is apparently comparable to San Jose! So again, seems like the way to fix is it to focus on the places further down the list, like an Austin, TX, at 3k/sqmile.
> the ghost cities of China actually show how this can go wrong
Except most of them filled up and now it's just another one of these Chinese misconceptions in the west that of course isn't newsworthy to clarify. Pudong was a prominent example a decade ago and is now a thriving financial hub.
Very much a case of build it and they will come, whereas us in the west seem to require significant undersupply and rampant social problems before we even talk about building housing or infrastructure to meet basic needs.
There's nothing wrong at all with overbuilding.
> any developments initially criticized as ghost cities did materialize into economically vibrant areas when given enough time to develop, such as Pudong, Zhujiang New Town, Zhengdong New Area, Tianducheng and malls such as the Golden Resources Mall and South China Mall.[16] While many developments failed to live up to initial lofty promises, most of them eventually became occupied when given enough time.[7][17]
> Reporting in a 2018, Shepard revisited a number of the so called "ghost cities" several years his book and noted that, "Today, China’s so-called ghost cities that were so prevalently showcased in 2013 and 2014 are no longer global intrigues. They have filled up to the point of being functioning, normal cities ...
