Prices going up is a clear market signal of desirability.

Desirability as housing or as investment? Because speculation has a tendency to overlook the little things that make a quality product.

Housing as an investment is driven by scarcity. Commit to making housing abundant and it starts being a much less interesting investment.

If the housing isn't desirable for housing, why would it go up as an investment?

Because your analysis indicates that many other people think it will go up even more later.

Oregon has a severe housing shortage:

https://www.opb.org/article/2025/01/28/oregon-needs-to-build...

That is the root cause of homelessness:

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-...

This video also does a good job of explaining it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQW4W1_SJmc

Eliminating costly parking regulations are quite helpful for building the kinds of housing that will help people get out of homelessness.

Thanks for introducing me to Justine Underhill ( https://www.youtube.com/@justine-underhill ). She is a new YouTuber (4 videos so far) with excellent urbanist content! Her well-argued essays remind me of Oh The Urbanity!, Not Just Bikes, and About Here.

This is clearly why people pay less for housing in locales like New York or San Francisco with very efficient land use than, say, rural Oklahoma.

San Fransisco housing is cheaper than rural Oklahoma? Source, please. San Francisco is notorious for being an extremely expensive place to live.

In my experience, housing outside cities (suburbs or rural areas) is usually much, much cheaper per square foot than housing in metro areas.

As the other poster notes, I was being sarcastic. People pay a ton of money to live in denser cities like NY, London and Paris.

But in that case that's already what the comment you were replying to was saying: that higher density results in higher costs. So I guess I'm confused about what your point is. Were you just trying to say you agree?

The high costs are because an area is desirable, not because it's dense. Density is how you do something to mitigate the high costs of a place like NYC. Imagine if you chopped off the upper half of all buildings there, what prices would do!

You could build a bunch of dense housing in Burns, Oregon and you wouldn't be able to charge much for rent there!

It's a bit of a chicken and egg thing because the density is a huge component of the desireability.

This is obviously sarcasm.

How does down zoning lower housing costs? I'm having trouble wrapping my head around it.

By forcing companies to expand away from dense city cores. Ideally into smaller cities.

Assuming you don’t believe in forced sterilization there is actually no public policy way to reduce density.

It’s just a mathematical fact. More people means on average the population density increases.

Since all solutions involve increasing density somewhere the argument actually reduces to the question of where.

Assuming you think Oregon, specifically, should be less dense or remain the same, then you are necessarily an advocate for increased density somewhere else.

So maybe tell us where?

> Assuming you don’t believe in forced sterilization there is actually no public policy way to reduce density.

There is. Restrict the dense office space, by cap-and-trading it. Like we did with sulfur emissions.

Also, "forced sterilization"? WTF are you talking about?!? The US population is likely peaking within the next decade and the peak population will likely be 5-7% more than the current level.

Indeed.

When the US population is 7% higher the country will be 7% more population dense.

As mentioned this is a mathematical certainty.

Since all outcomes have higher average density, anyone who argues against density has some further explaining to do.

The average US population density is 4 people per square kilometer.

Correct. And when we have more of them, the density will increase.

The argument is not about higher or lower density. The answer to that question is higher.

The argument is about where these people will live

The area of the United States is 9.8 million square kilometers. Its population is 347 million. Average population density is 347/9.8 = 35 people per square kilometer.

This is entirely untrue. You are responding to a poster who has provided high-quality sources by just saying "nuh-uh".

> Homelessness is through the roof

Allocating space for car parking does not help address homelessness. In fact, it hurts it a lot.

Nope. Allocating space for cars and prohibiting the orgy of real estate densification improves the homelessness situation. It puts less stress on people to move into The Downtown, so they are more likely to stay in more reasonably-priced areas.

The argument that density puts stress on people to move _towards_ that density seems to me to have the direction of causation reversed. People look at prices when they move, not density.

No. I have the causality arrow correct. Density forces people to move, it acts as a black hole of misery.

The _main_ reason people move ever closer to Downtowns is economic. They _have_ to do it, because that's where the high-paying jobs are.