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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   33681 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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The steelman for the NIMBY argument is that the demand for dense housing in the US is so high that building more density will always stimulate demand.

By building more big apartment buildings downtown, Eugene will become a more desirable place to live for wealthy people who will move there and drive up prices.

On a national level more housing will lead to lower prices but on a local level it might not.

That just means most of the benefit goes to the local property owners. It's still a net benefit to the community, which could be redistributed if necessary.

Yeah, in aggregate it's a good thing which is why it should be allowed to happen for the most part. But there are losers and the money likely won't be allocated to them in a meaningful way. Kinda like free trade that way.

The overall point stands that building new luxury housing in a community doesn't necessarily reduce the prices for housing in that community.

Moving isn't easy though and it's actually hard for people to figure out that things are better in a different place. Comparisons are hard and people have ties to their current communities. So it probably does help people in that community. It would take a long time for things to reach equilibrium again.

I believe the counter to the steelman is that 'stimulated demand' is just known elsewhere as 'demand,' which is to say the exact thing you'd expect to see from a supply and demand curve interaction when you increase supply.

In a contained system yes, but in this case you're inducing demand from outside the system.

With roughly 100k people, Eugene can't build enough to satisfy all people in the US who want to live in a dense environment. For the same reason, they can't solve their homeless problem by building shelters.

If those people are able to buy houses in Eugene, they are within the system. It's still just demand.

Now, it may be a demand curve that needs to be adjusted by different legislation- such as restricting property purchases by non-residents or some such- but that's different from a claim that the demand is stimulated.

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