So long as getting a decent place to live is dependent on income, it's unsurprising to me that cities - which are established because of their ability to produce outsized economic value - become the domain of people who produce outsized economic value. Yes, cities are fun as a side product, but people don't typically invest this much just for fun.
The market only cares about your quality of life if that translates to significant profit. Nobody has any claim in such a system to live near a city, with any level of comfort. So insanely long commutes and inhumane cage homes should not be a surprising result.
As the value of being in a city rises, the equilibrium will be to make life maximally miserable for those who can't afford the luxuries present in a city. And for those who can, the equilibrium is to make things minimally comfortable for those people to decide to continue generating economic value.
The market has no reason to provide affordable housing to people who cannot afford the economic value of the land beneath it, so the alternatives the article suggests - building a lot of housing (artificially distorting the market) or providing strong social services (artificially distorting the market), unsurprisingly, needs to artificially distort the market.
There are clearly things we care about that the market does not reflect. Money does not capture all the things we value in society, including economic diversity within a city, so expecting purely market-driven incentives to solve this issue is naive.
How about using zoning laws to enforce the mixture of types of home AND the amount of housing ratio to the number of jobs (commercial and industrial zoning)?
If you have more jobs than you have homes, don't zone for more jobs.
I'm all for policy like that, as well as generally reducing zoning restrictions in general as far as housing capacity goes. Japanese nuisance zoning is a pretty good system, for example.
But my main point is, it takes interventions that intentionally constrain the way the market works, to get a fair system going. To institute a sane proportion of housing to jobs nowadays that preserves a mix of affordable and luxury housing, you're going to need to do a hell of a lot of subsidizing to make that affordable housing worth it to construct in the first place. So who's up for subsidizing it?
I don't really think you have to subsidize anything. Zone for density and sq. ft ensuring there is a stable _variety_ of each, zone housing and business only so each can be equal to the other in population (basically as many people commuting out of your city as commuting in), and tax vacancy 10x occupied rates. Let the market free within those confines.
If a city does not want to add much density, I am fine with that as long as they are not allowed to keep adding jobs.
160,000 more people work in San Francisco than work there.
The market only cares about your quality of life if that translates to significant profit. Nobody has any claim in such a system to live near a city, with any level of comfort. So insanely long commutes and inhumane cage homes should not be a surprising result.
As the value of being in a city rises, the equilibrium will be to make life maximally miserable for those who can't afford the luxuries present in a city. And for those who can, the equilibrium is to make things minimally comfortable for those people to decide to continue generating economic value.
The market has no reason to provide affordable housing to people who cannot afford the economic value of the land beneath it, so the alternatives the article suggests - building a lot of housing (artificially distorting the market) or providing strong social services (artificially distorting the market), unsurprisingly, needs to artificially distort the market.
There are clearly things we care about that the market does not reflect. Money does not capture all the things we value in society, including economic diversity within a city, so expecting purely market-driven incentives to solve this issue is naive.