A progressive claims “towers everywhere” will bring the Bay Area’s housing costs down. Manhattan tells us a different story
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High density housing promises to radically transform the character of Bay Area cities, but will it lower prices? In his Substack R-Curious, Gus Mattammal rebuts a misreading of basic economics, brought to us by progressive Substacker Darrel Owens. Before we zone high-rises into every Palo Alto and Woodside, says Mattammal, consider Manhattan: dense, yet unaffordable. Maybe the solution is to alter the demand side of the equation, to construct world-class cities in California’s interior.
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“The solution is housing, towers everywhere, that radically transforms the character of the city.” —Darrel Owens on Substack. [Read the whole thing here]
Manhattan level density is [Mr. Owens’] progressive fever dream. And yet, what do progressives in *Manhattan* say about housing? That it’s unaffordable and they need more housing!!
I regret to inform you that if Manhattan-level density does not, in fact, solve your affordability problem, then your affordability problem is not solvable on the supply side at all, period. You will never build your way out of the problem. And even if you could, what drives me bananas about the progressive worldview on this issue is the mentality that they are righteous and morally superior because they are YIMBYs, and meanwhile every person that made the biggest investment of their lives to buy into a neighborhood in Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Woodside, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, or my little hamlet of El Granada is some kind of selfish, slack-jawed troglodyte for wanting their neighborhoods to remain what they bought into.
So what’s the solution to the affordability problem? It’s to take note of what cities like Austin have been able to do, and then take advantage of what California does have, which is lots of undeveloped flat land in the interior of the state. I (and others) have proposed a “Housing Opportunity Area” (HOA) that would be a no zoning area in the interior. Here’s how it works:
With no zoning, people can build what they want on the land, and the only requirement would be that any development has to factor into its cost structure the marginal cost of the physical infrastructure required to support it (water/sewer lines, power lines, etc). What the state government should do is then encourage businesses to move out there with incentives, build another UC campus or two out there, have them specialize in some of the cutting-edge tech areas (green energy, AI, nanomaterials, robotics, etc), and then some of the housing demand that today is being forced into the Bay Area would divert to the HOA, which would take the price pressure off the Bay Area, and would get California really growing again. There’s so much that’s useful that the state could be doing to really address the affordability problem, but instead it’s just focused on forcing housing down the throats of communities, whether they want it or not.
Maybe I could make my peace with that if it had any chance of working, but the existence of Manhattan, which is still unaffordable, proves that it won’t. So as much as I appreciate the irony of seeing the progressive left bearhug the idea of supply-side solutions to problems, I’ll be opposing supply-side solutions to housing affordability most, if not all, of the time.
Read part one of the two-part series here.
And read part two here.
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