Do you know anything about Austin? There are cranes all over downtown, mid-rise apartment buildings sprouting up everywhere, etc. We’re certainly not perfect in terms of housing, could use more “missing middle” housing such as duplexes/triplexes/etc., but the idea we are not allowing new housing is crazy. Costs are still going up, definitely the most expensive big city in Texas at this point, but obviously nowhere near Bay Area levels.

The parent, responding to a comment that mentions Austin, never suggested new housing wasn’t allowed—you seem to have inserted that thought yourself. They simply observed that housing supply—and how well it matches (and avoids lagging behind) demand—has an impact on cost of living. They don’t even make a point about Austin specifically—Tokyo is the place they call specific attention to as a point of comparison to the GP’s thoughts.

I find it interesting you chose to defend Austin against an attack that wasn’t made.

Of course, I also think there may be more than housing supply at work to explain why cost of living increases in a place that starts to see a new uptick in tech hiring. I’m not sure if anyone has studied and documented the extent to which increased tech hiring in a new location leads to a surge of new people trying to live in that area before cost of living begins to increase. If that isn’t the case, and cost of living and goods starts increasing before population does, it seems likely there’s more than housing supply to blame— perhaps all the existing property and business owners start raising prices to get some of those sweet tech dollars in their pockets?

You are reading too much in to my psyche here, and I am not defending Austin. Like I said it has a lot more work to do, and it’s arguable whether much of the housing being built even constitutes a net social good or not, given the issues around gentrification and running minorities out of town, etc., etc.

My point was, responding to a comment that “housing costs are rising in Austin” by explaining it as “price rises are inevitable if you don’t build enough housing” is a very misleading statement. Maybe that is a true statement, but Austin does not satisfy the antecedent so it says nothing about the situation here. Unlike in many places, the housing is being built here, yet the prices are still rising significantly and forcing many out or into homelessness.

So clearly development is not a sufficient condition for keeping housing prices in check. Like you say, it could instead be totally driven by the job market. Or maybe development is a necessary condition, along with other things such as subsidized/public housing, job programs, etc. We have to move beyond armchair economist statements that are basically “har har har it’s supply and demand duh”, that don’t even capture all the straightforward/first order economics of all the various buyers and sellers of housing (demand for what type of housing? What type of housing supply is allowed to be built? etc.), much less the second order effects tangential to the economics. Your speculations are on the mark here, and we do need good studies that look at exogenous shocks to try to tease out cause and effect, along with lots of small-scale experimentation by governments.

Finally, I don’t know enough about Tokyo to comment in any way on that part of the post, so I did not.

I assure you I wasn’t reading into your psyche. Just observing a single curious point: you specifically called out and disputed that the idea Austin wasn’t allowing new housing supply was crazy—and yet neither the parent or GP had suggested such an idea. You suggested and responded to that idea yourself.

I think it’s interesting that we both seem to have read the parent and GP posts quite differently. You read that the parent was responding to a post that said housing prices are rising in Austin. I read that the parent was responding to a post that said FAANG companies are hiring in new areas to cut costs, and cost of living seems to increase wherever tech starts hiring (and Austin was just a city that came to the GP’s mind as an example of this phenomenon). Yes, the parent’s comment about housing supply was a rather shallow retort that I think we both agree provides little insight and comes up too often as if it possesses sufficient explanatory power on its own—but they weren’t quite suggesting what you responded to.

To put it into a different space, what I found interesting and pointed out was that your comment read like others we’ve probably both seen where Programmer A says Erlang has a great concurrency model that enables developers to easily build fault-tolerant distributed systems, and Programmer B comes along to argue that the idea that Java doesn’t allow you to build fault-tolerant distributed systems is crazy. The idea was never suggested by A in the first place, so B’s response stands out.

Anyway, this has been fun. Thanks. Apologies for my original response coming off the wrong way.