People want to be in close proximity both to their jobs and to the businesses they want to patronize. Your suggestion would reduce or push away those businesses but retain the dense housing stock, but whose value would dramatically drop because those businesses are restricted or moved. You've created slums.
It is not necessary to obliterate the local business environment, only to limit it to the extent that the available jobs roughly match the available workers. Yes, it is true that house prices would fall to be more in line with construction costs, but that is the point, if you want cheaper housing, the housing must actually be cheap.
This talks about it a little without fully committing to the actual problem https://blog.lgim.com/categories/investment-strategy/why-lon...
Seems to me remote working and the improvement of "cheaper" areas, organically (as more people spend money in these areas and increase demand for services there) is the most viable solution but something governments can't seem to grasp or choose not to grasp
I hadn't thought about remote work and you're right. It's an excellent solution, at least for the jobs that don't require presence. I don't think politicians necessarily need to do much for remote work to be successful, as long as they don't block it. It is very attractive to employees, because commuting is terrible, and I have seen a lot of pressure in companies to allow remote working. Hopefully it will be more widely adopted in the future.
The people who live there? Maybe not so much.
Is infinite growth desirable? Should we make policy decisions to distribute things more instead?
Compare Dallas with LA. The denser one is much more expensive. Maybe get denser, like Manhattan? Oops, still expensive. Manhattan just needed to build that much more and get even denser? Where exactly is it believed it would stop? That the growth machine would say 'ok, that's enough, now we will just start lowering prices!'?
Yet Dallas-the-city wants to get those businesses - and will crow for days about being more "business friendly" or brag about this or that company moving to Dallas - but Dallas-the-incumbent-residents don't like the influx of people who can out-spend them for housing.
There are a few places that understand the less-direct effect of feeding the infinite-economic-growth-business-machine, that zone for overall stability, to prevent big industrial/corporate development, not just to prevent housing. But for that to work they generally need to have something well-established to rest their hat on instead, to avoid drying up and drying out.
The people in a city want businesses because they want good jobs and services to be available to them. Homeowners (the majority of the residents in most American cities) especially want that influx because the newcomers drive up their property values.
So yes, the people of Dallas, on average, really do want those businesses and newcomers
Is it really so obvious? So many policies are implemented by government that people as a majority do not want like wars and tax cuts for the wealthy or not implemented by government that people as a majority do want like healthcare or rational immigration policy. The idea that the representatives of the people are acting in the people’s interest is quite naïve to be honest.
When I lived in downtown Dallas, I would have loved more housing. Part of the reason we left was because it was a ghost town. Very little to walk and see. At night it was desolate and unsafe.
LA has been maxed out for housing for decades. They’re constrained by geography. They can only build up, but they haven’t… only recently started loosening housing restrictions to allow for density at the state level, but even that is a half measure. They need to just swallow the pill and let density be built anywhere. Yeah, change sucks, but at least we’ll stop forcing people to move to Dallas.
Businesses would perhaps take a small efficiency hit because of the reduced availability of labour in the region, but even this would probably be compensated for by better worker mobility, because businesses would be less crowded in the cities and there would be more labour available in the low-density areas.
Businesses would probably also be able to pay a little less as less income is tied up in housing costs. A restructuring of business and population distribution would probably not have that much impact on overall productivity, but it could shift the available money between income levels significantly. If less money goes to rich property owners, then more money stays with the average person.
More seriously, if you are concerned the problem is the network effects of population density, the goal should probably be to replicate elsewhere rather than to disrupt.
Building more housing does alleviate the problem. It both alleviates (for the newly housed) and exacerbates (makes more people want to move in). Even if the queue length stayed the same, the fact that the number of housed people goes up means that proportionally, more people are happy.
But, let's be realistic here: Tokyo has more affordable rent than LA, despite having ~4x the population. And Japan invented the concept of the intergenerational mortgage!
Except that we are not really applying ourselves into either, are we? One would naively think we need to work on all viable ones, but of course, society does the exact opposite.
As for mass transit, well, some countries just like 26-lane highways right through their cities. It is an ideological issue. Here in Europe I've seen a shift towards better public transport and cycling infrastructure, but that whole change will take time and won't be cheap.
It would be interesting to see if the shortage could be reduced by taking a different approach and making the area less attractive. For example, you could tax businesses much more if they are located in very dense areas, or even just limit the total revenue of all businesses in a certain area. Such things would have their own problems and challenges, of course, but there are few economic problems as bad as the housing crisis, and there is more than enough land to go around.