Right. And despite the cruelty of Nauru and a general immigrant-phobic vibe, they also take a lot of immigrants as a percentage of population, i think? Do we need to give MAGA intuitions about immigration and housing more credit than we want to? 1/

Why haven’t these big, land-rich countries been able to stabilize housing prices holding constant safety and amenity levels? I want to say the MAGA view is dumb, because there’s no inherent scarcity, no bottleneck immigration must clog, and yet actual recent experience seems not great? /fin

do Canada’s nosebleed average price statistics mask a bifurcation, then, certain favored locations growing super pricey while much of the rest remains restrained? do the price statistics then overstate the problem, or do the pricey places reflect scarcity of desirability for safety, schools, etc.?

what should be done? YIMBY complaints, but you just showed us apparently a lot of success by YIMBY criteria. would restarting social housing be your prescription? where and in what sort of form?

i tend to be skeptical that YIMBY policy can make much of a dent in near-term affordability issues — over years more elastic supply might restrain growth relative to not, but near-term demand conditions dominate. 1/

still, i find myself surprised the apparently much higher supply growth coincides with the shocking rate of price growth Canada seems to have experienced. /fin

Inland Empire is a kind of existence proof that population an be steered to new places, but it’s terribly done, still under the spell of the greatest mistake in history, the SFH-and-car-centered vision of the American dream. 1/

Condense it into even bus-connected Euro-style districts and you’d have something interesting. /fin

Brownfield is a form of greenfield. It just has to be greened first. The contrast is between greenfield and infill, and greenfield is much, much, much easier to develop at scale. 1/

See the history of San Francisco, or Houston for that matter. You get fast, near-in growth for as long as there are near-in greenfields. Then, suddenly, it stops. 2/

You are left with sprawl dominating, because infill is hard and we unfortunately don’t regulate to ensure that outward expansion is dense. Eventually sprawl self-limits, as distance overwhelms the pull of urban amenity, and even the Houstons stop growing. /fin

I know YIMBYs love to imagine there is nothing sympathetic about NIMBYism, it’s some cabal of bloodless but bloodthirsty financial parasites, but what local governments are responding to is largely the intense preferences of their most enfranchised constituents, homeowners, yes, neighbors. 1/

Sure, there are wrinkles. Prop 13 reinforces at the local government level the already intense preferences of homeowners. That sucks! But people highly levered into places they carefully chose and committed themselves to really do work to “protect” — meaning largely to “conserve” — them. /fin

California Forever is a debacle only because it can’t be built. It would do fine. It can’t be built because its proponents adopted a foolish, deceptive, forgiveness-not-permission approach to siting and acquiring land for the project.

It depends on the region. The demand in and around the SFBA is so intense, and the work requirements so varied, that you can get prosperous neighborhoods of even the shittiest design way out towards Dublin + Livermore. De novo districts at a distance can be debacles, or can be successes. It depends.

the question is always relative. yes, "NIMBY"-ism fights everything. nevertheless, it is much, much easier on a per-unit basis to succeed in developing greenfield than infill. 1/

(per-unit meaning not "one unit", but comparing the bulk of housing you successfully place in eg San Francisco Bayview relative to trying to build the same quantity infill elsewhere in the city.) 2/

people have all these stories intended to flatten really obvious distinctions. but even though, yes, there are the same forces everywhere, there intensity, the quantity and likelihood of overcoming resistance at scale differs a very great deal. 3/

re buses and distance and commutes and all of that, another defensive mechanism of overstuck YIMBYs is to presume that all shards of urbanity need to be an easy commute to SF or Santa Clara. 4/

but if you create any kind of high-quality urban district, anywhere on the penninsula, or in Marin or even north of Marin, towards Petaluma, there's a population of people willing and eager to live and be integrated by G-bus style transit. 5/

the desire for living in the region is intense. the slow ferries from Larkspur to downtown SF are well utilized. not everyone in the region needs an everyday commute, and people with greater remoting flexibility will sort themselves into more remote districts. 6/

if their only trade-distance-for-price-and-space choices are SFH developments, they'll fill them, as they are already (tragically) on parts of Mare Island. 7/

but if we build nice, dense, Eurostyle districts, integrated by upscale bus, if we let @holz-bau.bsky.social work with future residents to design living spaces for communities, people would pour into those in preference to what Lennar or DR Horton are endlessly building. /fin

Transit can mean buses, including upscale buses like the Google buses or intercity buses in Mexico. 1/

It’d be great if the US had trains everywhere and a capacity to build out more, but it doesn’t and won’t for at least a while. That doesn’t mean new districts can’t be built and integrated with surrounding communities by transit, if we are flexible and creative about forms of transit. 2/

As a person who lived almost 9 years in SFBA, this claim that there’s nowhere to build in high-priced US metro areas strikes except super contentious infill directly in someone’s neighborhood strikes me as laughable. 3/

Much of the valley from San Mateo through Santa Clara is undeveloped outside of the 101/Camino Real corridor. The coast from Pacifica to Half-Moon Bay to Santa Cruz as well. Plus tons of land in Marin, Napa, Solana, and around the bay. 4/

Sure, there’s always a reason why it can’t be done there or isn’t good enough. The commute would be too long, it’s important for nature, the terrain isn’t right, wildfires. 5/

But nowhere is perfect, every piece of land has stakeholders that will object to changes. Quantity and intensity matter. Yes, people will object to developing a nearby greenfield, fearing traffic, parking, etc. 6/

But the number and intensity of objections declines with direct proximity to people’s homes and single, overwhelming, highly levered financial assets. 7/

These things are not the same, as much as YIMBYs with sunk psychological investment in fighting on the most costly and difficult front possible might find it comforting to tell themselves it is. /fin