" it is ironic how the modern urban population that is so quick to assign blame for climate change (to car owners, carnivores), social injustice (to white men, preferably older), or simply a lack of mobile network coverage fails to understand their own contribution to the problems of a modern city."

What are you talking about? Cars ARE half the problems of a modern city. Car owners are the other half. Rip out the damn parking and put in flats. Ban cars and put in bike lanes. They're far, far more efficient, and have the added benefit of not mowing down pedestrians and boiling children.

The main issue is when you're still basically on-grid but a long ways away from everything, and depend on a car.

Though I am probably biased because I just bought a bit of land and hope to grow my own food on it. Pretty easy bike ride from the train station, though, and I work 100% remote.

If you want to remove car ownership you should try to provide an alternative that is actually better. If you want to avoid congestion, don't create a massive black hole in the center of each city that everything gravitates to.

There are many many people in the world who love cities. All the things that you hate about cities, they love.

Cities make up like 1% of the world wide land use. How about we leave this 1% of land to the people who love cities, and let the rest of the people who don't, to have the other 99%?

They rise in places with bad public transportation and good. The rise in supposedly under-priced Berlin and supposedly over priced San Francisco.

Land is not a normal commodity and the market has never fixed this anywhere using indirect tweaks. By all means, build more public transit but it won't fix housing prices anymore than it did in LA

Buying and selling houses merely moves wealth around (typically from younger generations to older). It creates nothing, incentivizes nothing and looses more and more to mortgage holders. It can indeed make people rich but only to the degree someone else gets poorer.

The trend is for an ever growing number of single family homes to become rentals owned by investors. As prices rise further and further above middle class ability to afford, this trend will increase. You can make far more money buying a house and renting it than buying it and sitting in it. So in the long term owner-residents are never going to be able to compete for homes with large investor in an unregulated market.

Berlin will do anything to reduce housing costs except build more housing.

The pipeline from planning to construction is a bit long and most of the projects are still a year or two away from breaking ground, but it is coming. There isn’t too much NIMBY opposition to housing, with the notable opposition of one successful referendum banning the re-zoning of (parts of) old Tempelhof airport.

1. Property owner do not want to see their quite significant loans, or investments, decrease in value. 2. Renters do not want to get priced out of the city, having to leave a good job and move their kids away from their friends.

In addition to that while seemingly intuitive in practice building doesn't seem to decrease costs. Presumably because:

3. Land owners and construction companies want to make as much money as possible.

Unless you can override these three groups, or get them to agree, it is a social issue and building more will make things worse. Look at the record from essentially every city that has been building. If just building more worked there would be good examples and the far majority isn't.

Everyone does. Greed is only greed when it's someone else. Developers in cities with permissive land-use and zoning laws aren't better people than developers in cities like San Francisco or Vancouver. It's just that there are enough of them and there's enough development that they need to compete with each other.

Unless you can override these three groups, or get them to agree, it is a social issue and building more will make things worse. Look at the record from essentially every city that has been building

Stop. Just stop. Seriously. This trope needs to die now.

This is exactly what anti-housing advocates in Vancouver are claiming right now - that the city has been building and building and building, and prices just keep going up. So why give those awful developers what they want, right?

What they don't mention is that the metro area population is growing by more than 2% per year and compared to the number of homes being built each year, we're hopelessly behind. The reason prices keep going up is because we're not building enough, such is the incredible demand to live and work here. And I suspect this is the case with most cities with crazy-low rental vacancy rates and crazy high prices.

Berlin (and Vancouver, and San Francisco) will do anything to reduce housing costs except build more housing.

Fix this.

People live within n time of where they want to be. If people can travel faster then the space within n time can be greater.

This is the key to Tokyo and other very large metropolis cities.

Have public transport offer high speed and frequent rail routes, and then many local solutions from cycling, walking, buses, trams.

But they also live in small apartments and homes. I'm not convinced that Tokyo is a good example here.

The key to this problem is to have jobs in places that aren't large urban centers. This way the population spreads out and housing becomes more affordable.

In Japan, a middle class family can own a somewhat cramped (say 900 sqft?) 3bedroom house/apartment walking distance to a world class rail system and generally walking distance to schools and some stores too.

In America's top cities, a middle class family can't afford to own a 3 bedroom apartment with rail access generally, so they move outside the city to the suburbs where they often have to drive to work - which means they need to buy a car, buy gas, etc

But if you don't want the lawn and the picket fence, why is this the only option available? We've taken a one-size-fits-all approach with covering the vast majority of the country with big suburban houses, and the free market is proving people want options, evidenced by wildly inflating prices of urban properties.

What are you talking about? The collateral is the full property, not just the structure.

Its fair to say that the jobs could move to other city centers, but the solution isn't suburbia.

What would it take for America to have 20 New Yorks, instead of 50 Atlantas [1]

[1]: https://www.citylab.com/life/2014/04/ranking-most-sprawling-...

A better way may be to create new urban centers or develop lesser ones.

That creates a very different lower-density city. Think about a sprawl like LA rather than a squeeze like Manhattan. Public transport won't work but parking spaces might actually exist. Your Afghan Bagel place will be 1 hour drive rather than 15 minute by subway on the way to work etc. More space, but less selection and diversity in terms of food, entertainment and other venues.

If the government wants you to use public transport instead of private cars they have to provide great service 24/7

So if higher prices are indeed a problem, holding people back from urbanizing, you'd think they'd urbanize faster if the pressures against it decrease.

But in the case that you dont build units, you're still going to get some of that urbanization by those who can afford it (or are willing to struggle to survive in the city), and this will drive up prices even further.

I want to live as far from that place as possible.

The current model basically has all the good jobs in the CBD. The further you go from the CBD - the less jobs and the lower paying they are. So of course you get a housing crisis the closer you get to the CBD.

In my neighborhood, all kinds of hip coffee shops and boutiques keep opening and close just as fast. The only ones who hold out for longer have been there for decades, so they're probably protected by the cap on rent increases. It also helps to be an ordinary baker rather than specializing in Afghan Bagel, because that way they can get enough customers to keep the business afloat.

Thus cities filled with high-level management types as they're the only ones that can afford the rent and the mortgages.

To be fair, not everyone hates commuting, but many people do, thus the drive towards urbanization.

Furthermore, even if people don't mind commuting, they'd want to find a reasonably nice area to live to commute from. Those nice places get populated and overrun and people lower on the food chain get priced out; again the cycle continues.

Until all the people lowest on the food chain must commute very far distances. At some point, many of them realize that if they were to calculate the commute as unpaid work hours, that they're actually being paid way less than what they make on paper.

So now even those people lowest on the food chain move away in search for higher wage jobs with shorter commute times, and the cycle continues again and again.

The sweet spot is finding a short commute time with low-cost housing. That's truly maximizing your wage.

It's not just about being a hip urbanite.

I don't agree with this assumption. Most people just want to live reasonably close to their job, a grocery store, and maybe a few restaurants, while having enough space that they feel is sufficient. Maybe add in some constraints for feeling safe or being in a decent school district.

It's a bit like when Russia privatised in the 90s and American economists told Russia that it really didn't who (i.e. oligarchs) owned everything provided everything is privatised.

No, people want to live near their jobs. If we build enough office s for X people and in order to find X home, you have to include places more than an hour away then you're going to fuck up housing prices.

There just isn't enough building going on. Building in Germany is expensive, and complicated. Even though almost anything would improve upon this clustereff of 60's communist architecture, you can not even build a skyscraper because people don't want it.

Berlin is Berlin. Removing it from Germany would increase its GDP. Nothing makes sense here, and its a chaotic antithesis of the other large cities in Germany. Heck, they can't even finish the airport because our socialist officials just had to show they can build it themselves (they could not).