No. All the new housing is consumed quickly by new arrivals who aren’t unhoused. Build it and they will come, induced demand applies as much to housing as it does to freeways.
Speaking from personal experience people move to Seattle not because there’s large supply of housing but because it is where there are high paying jobs. It’s the only reason I’m in Seattle and I can say the same for several coworkers, so wouldn’t call it induced demand.
People move to where they can make a decent living, which increasingly means big cities. Saying it’s induced demand makes it sound like it’s insatiable but really it just the ratio of housing to high paying jobs is way out of whack.
It’s induced demand in the sense that the housing enables those jobs, or to say, less people would come here for those high paying jobs if the housing market was more bonkers like in SF or Hong Kong. If they weren’t building housing at a crazy clip, Seattle would be less appealing even to you who is just here for the job.
That demand can't go to infinity, though, right? I would think the new arrivals would be stimulating factor to build more houses, on the economy, produce new tax dollars for roads, etc.
No, it can’t go to infinity, and in fact, we are only limited by the USA population plus anyone who can immigrate. Are you suggesting that Seattle build its way out of the nation’s homeless problem on its own?
Does everyone have the right to live in certain popular cities? This is an important moral question I guess, because our housing crisis isn’t evenly distributed.
No, I don't think I'm suggesting that Seattle build a house for everyone in the US + immigrate; only maybe that there is some curve where building more doesn't result in increased demand.
I don't see why some would have more of a right than others to live in a place on a baseline level and at the same time I don't think it would be right to force people out of their homes just to make it fair to everyone to have a chance to live there.
If a place is desirable, the people who were already there are more likely going to be the ones who have been contributing towards making it a desirable place to live than ones who were not already there.
Everyone has the legal right in the USA to live anywhere else in the USA, we don’t have a residency or hukou system. But without some other limiter, like price via supply and demand, this legal right alone is unworkable.
Seattle is a destination not just for rich techies, but also for the unhoused. Spend any amount of time at the greyhound bus station and this will be obvious, or take a greyhound across country, people get on at prisons with an open bus ticket, if they have no where else to go, they will head toward one of the west coast cities to survive, and who can blame them?
So we have a net influx of professionals with money who want to live in a popular city, and unhoused people who want to live in a city with more generous social services and mild weather so living outside won’t kill them.
On top of that, you have the residents that were already there, feeling like they are being attacked on both sides: rich young professionals pricing them out of the housing market, and poor unhoused neighbors stealing their Amazon packages and pooping on the sidewalk.
So how does building more housing alone get us out of this cycle? The rich professionals will gobble up the new housing, and tell their friends in the Midwest to come move to where the fun is. The unhoused neighbors couldn’t afford that house anyways, but they might be lucky and eventually score a free apartment or tiny home from the various social services in the area. So they move from their camping spot, but someone else has just arrived on a greyhound to take their spot over.
Maybe building more doesn't get your out of the cycle. Maybe it helps. Personally, I've only visited Seattle once and don't have any desire to return to live or visit. I would likely be happy taking up space in the MidWest that the rich young professionals are leaving behind.
I only think that there's usually a balance to things that sometimes require a lot of time to pass in order to correct.
Anyway, I appreciate all of your responses and your perspective.
I think not wanting to live in Seattle is fine, there is much to offer in the Midwest, although I lived in Toledo almost a lifetime ago. More to the point, we are pretty full, our growth should have ended and we should be losing people ATM until we level off, we can’t grow like this forever. It’s time for Charlotte and Raleigh to grow, or maybe Cincinnati. Or Texas. It wouldn’t be Seattle’s loss, we can stand to be less popular for awhile.
> only maybe that there is some curve where building more doesn't result in increased demand
In theory sure, if the supply approaches infinity then at some point an additional housing unit has zero value. But these are houses, which in practice are expensive to build so supply will never approach infinity.
Can you name at least one US city where housing used to be expensive and they built so much that it resulted in excess supply and a consequence it is now cheap to live there (and the city continues to thrive - not talking about bankrupt ghost towns)?
As far as I know (but curious to see if I'm wrong) there isn't any case where that point in the curve has been crossed.
The densest area in the country is Manhattan, not known for cheap housing. So if even the densest housing area has not crossed that point in the curve, it's an argument that maybe it's just not possible to do so in practice.
