> Popular cities are still ultra-expensive around the world, in spite of development.

Not nearly as expensive than popular cities in the US.

To be more precise, many non-US popular cities have a lot more supply of rental units at low cost than most US popular cities. The cheapest apartment available to let immediately in many non-US cities is far cheaper than the cheapest apartment available to let immediately in, say, Los Angeles area or SF.

For instance, there's apartments you can let in Tokyo for $500 (or even less!) (https://resources.realestate.co.jp/rent/what-can-you-rent-fo...) but there's literally no equivalent in the US. Like at all (if you find a counterexample please let me know!).

That is why allowing dense and tall development (free of NIMBY interference) matters.

For one thing, those are single rooms--about $200 sq. ft. Also see Singapore and Hong Kong. (It's difficult to make these comparisons though because of different local wages and exchange rates.)

> but there's literally no equivalent in the US.

You’re kidding me, right? How hard did you actually look? You can find loads of $500 or less apartments (real ones, not like the shoebox you linked) in the US, and you don’t have to live in the middle of nowhere. Here’s a bunch in Raleigh, NC, which is part of a major tech hub (Research Triangle Park):

https://www.apartments.com/raleigh-nc/under-500/

The US doesn’t have a housing affordability problem, we have a problem with everyone and their brother, regardless of income level, thinking they should be able to live in heavily populated, high cost of living cities.

> The US doesn’t have a housing affordability problem, we have a problem with everyone and their brother, regardless of income level, thinking they should be able to live in heavily populated, high cost of living cities.

The US also has a problem with home-owner NIMBYs imposing their ideas with the force of law on what kind of housing should be allowable on other people's property.

Yeah, but that's a shoebox.

It's an apartment with a kitchen and bathroom and bedroom, not a "shoebox". If you don't want to live in one, that's fine, but prohibiting this kind of housing altogether is a horrid idea.

In America, we don't even have the option to live in that sort of apartment, we instead can only 1) rent a room in someone else's house (and be at the mercy of their awful idiosyncracies and have negligible amounts of privacy) or 2) not have a place to live at all.

There are a lot of different ways of adding supply:

http://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-w...

True dat. Supply is necessary but not sufficient. I don't think this is too popular amongst YIMBYs, but some of us do support limited rent-control for the sake of displacement protection.

Yes. I have come across a number of SF YIMBY types who used to live in NYC; they seem to think scoffing at SF's shorter buildings is sufficient argument. I've never understood their theory though. Is it that if we build up as high as Manhattan, we'll suddenly have Manhattan's low rents?

Their analysis often seems to me to be of the same level as the multitude that thinks the solution to traffic is building more freeways. Yes, the first-order effect is more capacity. But what are the second-order effects?

It’s ridiculous how Manhattan is always brought up as the thing to avoid, when Manhattan has much more humanity and interesting activities than San Francisco.

The problem with Manhattan is that zoning trapped Manhattan in amber, along with most of the cities in the US, so it is no longer responsive to grow with demand.

> It’s ridiculous how Manhattan is always brought up as the thing to avoid, when Manhattan has much more humanity and interesting activities than San Francisco.

Those are inherently subjective assessmentd, and I suspect thst people who choose to live in San Francisco instead of Manhattan often disagree with that subjective assessment.

I get that some people prefer Manhattan. I don't see that as an argument for why SF should become a clone of Manhattan.

This seems like an odd thing to say, in that I didn't say we should try to avoid Manhattan.