The housing theory of everything
Metadata
Highlights
- The total cost of this regulation-induced sprawl in the United States may be enormous. According to one study, if just three cities β New York City, San Jose and San Francisco β loosened their rules against building denser housing to the national average level of restrictiveness, millions would move to jobs that made the best use of their skills and total US GDP would be 8.9% higher.
- Part of the reason is that geographical closeness is especially important for the transfer and combination of ideas. And for unconventional ideas, the most valuable combinations are often not obvious in advance and may depend on chance interactions or mixing of individual elements.
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So by limiting the number of people who can go to live in places like the Bay Area, by limiting the number of homes there, we may not just be hurting productivity directly by restricting who people can work with. We may also be missing out on the new ideas that drive society forward and that can lead to dramatic improvements in how we live.
- The aggregate, countrywide effect of housing being so limited in supply has been that economic growth in most Western countries has accrued more and more to landowners and less to everyone else.
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So itβs possible that preferring sprawl over density, and the housing shortages that kind of policy creates, may be damaging health, equality, average wealth and the number of children we have. Yet the health effects of more, denser housing are often ignored.