They would be if there wasn't so much money to be made in Manhattan.

The price of Manhattan apartments has almost nothing to do with how desirable it is - other than the fact that desirability is largely a function of the financial opportunities there.

Park City, Utah is expensive and nothing like Manhattan - so is Malibu and Ketchum, Idaho.

San Jose is a large city and much more expensive than NYC (in terms of house prices). Outside of downtown and a few neighborhoods nearby, it's mostly a car-hell.

Los Angeles isn't far behind in terms of prices - it's the second largest city in the US - and the majority of it is less walkable than halfway decent suburbs.

On the flip side, Chicago is mostly walkable and bikable - yet it's substantially cheaper. Does that mean people don't want that? I doubt it.

You can find plenty of counter-examples based on price and population and trying to extrapolate what people want.

People like a lot of different things. Looking at one desirable place isn't going to tell you much.

If you can make an argument that Manhattan has so much financial opportunity BECAUSE it's walkable, bikable, mass-transitable - I'm listening. But keep Chicago in mind. Because it has all of those things - is the second most densely populated city and the third most populous - yet it's basically average price for the country - which makes sense, because it also has average wages and high property taxes...

Manhattan does not sit atop some massive pile of natural resources. Opportunity is great there exactly because there are so many people. Network effects are large. By the way, I do not think New York is expensive because it is desirable. It is expensive because it is desirable, there aren't enough places to live, and they aren't building more because of regulations. But it would not be expensive if no one wanted to live there.

Everything you said is true about Chicago - and yet Chicago has median home prices.

Why is NYC so much more expensive?

Because people can make more money to spend on more housing in NYC...

Everything I said is not true of Chicago. Chicago has not underbuilt housing for almost a century.

When prices start to diverge from the 70s to today - Chicago's metro population grows from 7M to 8.9M (27%) [1].

NYC metro population grows from 18.3 to 19.8M (8%) [2].

It's harder for NYC to under-build for a century when the population has not grown as much. Chicago isn't exactly a developer's utopia...

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/22956/chicago/population

[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/states/new-york/population

If you isolate just the city - NYC does grow from 7.8M to 8.8M (12%). Manhattan goes from 1.54M to 1.69M (9%).

Chicago's downtown population growth is >40%.

This is pretty far afield at this point, but while Chicago may not be a developer's paradise, it's substantially better than New York.

In any case, though, the original question is whether population density actually makes a place less desirable. The mere fact that Chicago is not cheap (not simply inexpensive, but actually cheap) contradicts the claim that population density is something people don't want.

People want opportunity. Opportunity comes with density.

They don't want density for the sake of density.

NYC has better opportunities - that's why it's denser. It's not denser because it's more desirable, and then it just so happens that it also has opportunity.

This is true for Shenzhen and Beijing and Mexico City and Paris and London and Mumbai and every major city.

I'm not sure we're really disagreeing at this point. Density has a bunch of effects. It creates congestion. But it also creates opportunity. Without the people in New York, there would not be opportunity there. People _wish_ their front door led to downtown Manhattan, and their backdoor led to 100 pristine acres in rural Montana. What people _want_ is what they pay for. And that is to live in places with big network effects, which require large populations.

This is satire, right?

NYC is located at the mouth of the Hudson and one end of Long Island sound, two relatively sheltered waterways. For hundreds of years this facilitated huge amounts of resource extraction from the region. Upon this resource extraction economy resource processing was built. Naturally it was located where the labor was the the products flowed through, the port. From there industrialization and an industrialized economy way built upon the resource processing. Through little other than historical luck of geography of the industries (that really took hold in NYC was finance. It has been that finance industry that has carried NYC through the transition to a service economy.

So basically, NYC is valuable today because it was yesterday and if you follow the recursion back to the base case you find natural resources.

While the natural resources are now gone or irrelevant they were the startup capital for the NYC we have today. There is no inherent value to a mass of people unless there is some productive activity for them to engage in. NYC got lucky and developed a finance industry. See Detroit for what happens when you don't make the transition.

We are in agreement. In the past, natural resources were important for New York's population growth. Today, they are irrelevant, and the value of New York is in the network effects, which are due to the large population. "This is satire, right?" is a funny thing to write in a comment that doesn't contradict what I wrote at all.

You’re comparing incomparable values. San Jose house prices are high because you can’t amortize the land costs. Square foot by square foot, Manhattan land is far more expensive than San Jose. Chicago land may appear cheaper, but it’s only because they have higher taxes on it than San Jose.

> Square foot by square foot, Manhattan land is far more expensive than San Jose.

People can't finance land. You finance housing. Sqft / sqft for housing, Manhattan is not much more expensive. The land is much more expensive BECAUSE you can build much more housing.

In contrast to Manhattan, Tokyo apartments are cheap, or, at least, their price has remained flat when adjusted for inflation over decades. That's because of government policy that encourages housing supply. Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-housing-crisis-in-japan-ho...

If New York could similarly encourage speedier housing construction and replacement, as well as effectively building a similarly expansive and reliable transit network, they could achieve the exact same results as Tokyo. (Note: Even though Japan has had periods of economic stagnation and low birth rates, Tokyo itself has consistently grown in population with few exceptions as Japan has become more urbanized.)

If the suburbs are so great for housing supply, why do suburban Boston/San Jose/Austin/Denver homes cost so much? Why are Chicago's most prestigious zip codes more affordable than living an hour outside of San Francisco?

The truth is that the places with high housing prices don't have high prices based on whether they're suburban, rural, or urban, they have high prices when demand exceeds supply. It's that simple.

Agreed. My point was that the reason you can finance such high-density construction in Tokyo (and New York) is exactly because so many people want to live there, which in turn is because of the network effects created by the people who do live there. It's a virtuous cycle, if you can get it.

Manhattan apartments are subject to a lot of the same price forces as commercial equipment. Their cost reflects the ready access to money making opportunties.