> Not being adjacent to a major urban area is in many respects like going back in time some proportion to your distance from one.
This whole conversation devolves into this single point, in my opinion.
There is land out there that is cheap as fuck-all. Lots of places will flat out hand you the deed if you promise to live there and build a house.
Some places will subsidize you moving into a house for $1. You just have to do it. Vermont and Ohio will literally PAY YOU to have you move into some areas (10k).
The problem is that young folks generally don't want to live in those locations.
So while I'm certainly a fan of increasing housing supply in existing metros, I think as long as metro populations keep rising, prices in those areas will continue to to beat inflation because demand is rising.
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If the US wants to alleviate housing costs, the most effective route I think we could go is to simply make it more appealing to live in rural areas. (ex: force those cable companies we paid billions to for rural broadband to go actually install rural broadband)
The whole "Californian diaspora" effect we got during covid is actually a wonderful example of the right way to do this.
If the high price metro is roughly equal in appeal to the lower cost areas, people will exist the high price metro in favor of the lower cost areas, working to equalize costs across the two (prices fall in SF, prices rise in the small towns around it).
I've lived all over the country (35ish moves in 41 years). There are a lot of things you can do to make other areas more appealing vs California (or the west coast in genera), but one thing you can't really fix is the weather. A lot of people really hate super cold winters or super hot humid summers, and for them there is no replacement for the rather unique climate conditions that exist along the west coast.
Here is a map of the world which shows where that relatively mild west coast climate exists - it exceedingly rare:
The push to spread further out makes no sense to me. Suburban communities are already unsustainable, rural communities even worse. Economies of scale matter a whole lot here. The number of miles of road needed to service a rural community is exponentially higher than urban areas. This cost is not borne by those communities, but rather is subsidized heavily by urban workers. Rural areas also have a higher carbon footprint per-capita because of all of these different services which now have to be pushed dozens of miles out to support a handful of people. Pushing more people into areas with few opportunities just exacerbates this problem.
> “What we have found is that the underlying financing mechanisms of the suburban era -- our post-World War II pattern of development -- operates like a classic Ponzi scheme, with ever-increasing rates of growth necessary to sustain long-term liabilities . . .
> “In each of these mechanisms, the local unit of government benefits from the enhanced revenues associated with new growth. But it also typically assumes the long-term liability for maintaining the new infrastructure. This exchange -- a near-term cash advantage for a long-term financial obligation -- is one element of a Ponzi scheme.
> “The other is the realization that the revenue collected does not come near to covering the costs of maintaining the infrastructure. In America, we have a ticking time bomb of unfunded liability for infrastructure maintenance . . .
> “We’ve done this because, as with any Ponzi scheme, new growth provides the illusion of prosperity. In the near term, revenue grows, while the corresponding maintenance obligations -- which are not counted on the public balance sheet -- are a generation away.”
Everywhere was once rural(ish - depending on how far back you want to go).
Nothing you're saying is wrong, but it belies the point.
At some point, someone has to do the investment that makes a place appealing. I'm not saying "everyone should live like current rural residents".
I'm saying the investment that should be happening is "take a rural space and make a medium/high density area". Usually by creating a foundational lynchpin for income (ex: battery factory, chip factory, etc) and encouraging remote work.
> Pushing more people into areas with few opportunities just exacerbates this problem.
Pushing more people into areas with few opportunities creates opportunities in those areas.
I've lived most of my life in rural areas. People are leaving these communities in droves because of the lack of opportunity. It's folly to think sending more people back to them will make them somehow viable. I'm not convinced you can artificially create demand for housing folk in rural areas. China has been trying that for decades and the results are ghost cities.
Edit: To expand on this, the internet has killed rural communities. There's little to no need for corner stores which used to support these areas and hell you can get alcohol shipped to you as well so you dwindle down to a few bars. Maybe one hairdresser, but everyone knows someone's aunt who cuts hair out of her house. Same with an auto shop. There's maybe one attached to the only gas station in town. Most people know someone's uncle who can fix anything with a motor so there's little demand for more. There's just not enough people there to sustain the support community that would prosper from moving in. You can't artificially create either the supply side or the demand side in rural areas short of forced migrations and the supply side is unsustainable in these areas short of banning online orders or removing mail subsidies for shipped packages so that you can force more local commerce.
Forget about anything culturally divergent. Theaters require specific tastes which require a significant enough of a population to support performances outside of a churches Christmas pageant. Same with food. You'll get a few mom and pop shops one Mexican restaurant and maybe a Chinese restaurant if you're lucky. Otherwise it's chain stores like McDonald's and Pizza Hut. Oh and gas station pizza is popular. There just isn't a large enough of a population to support more eclectic food options. There's no draw to providing these services to a population too small to create a living off of.
And company towns aren't the solution either. Very, very few companies require enough people concentrated in an area to justify building a town much less a city around. And it's been shown time and time again that companies are perfectly willing to abandon areas when they can find more profit elsewhere. See the entire history of cities built around shipping and mining and logging and automotive construction being completely wiped out when the sole industries which supported them collapse or move elsewhere.
The rural part doesn't explain why housing in places like Tokyo has not increased despite population increase, or why dense metro area used to be affordable.
We need to fix the root problem. There are people getting priced out of places they grew up in because of bad housing policy. Start with the zoning laws.
This whole conversation devolves into this single point, in my opinion.
There is land out there that is cheap as fuck-all. Lots of places will flat out hand you the deed if you promise to live there and build a house.
Some places will subsidize you moving into a house for $1. You just have to do it. Vermont and Ohio will literally PAY YOU to have you move into some areas (10k).
The problem is that young folks generally don't want to live in those locations.
So while I'm certainly a fan of increasing housing supply in existing metros, I think as long as metro populations keep rising, prices in those areas will continue to to beat inflation because demand is rising.
---
If the US wants to alleviate housing costs, the most effective route I think we could go is to simply make it more appealing to live in rural areas. (ex: force those cable companies we paid billions to for rural broadband to go actually install rural broadband)
The whole "Californian diaspora" effect we got during covid is actually a wonderful example of the right way to do this.
If the high price metro is roughly equal in appeal to the lower cost areas, people will exist the high price metro in favor of the lower cost areas, working to equalize costs across the two (prices fall in SF, prices rise in the small towns around it).