Building more housing in a city raises its local prices, because density is what people are moving there for.

Added to korrents 7 Sept 2026 · How quotes work · Something wrong? Tell us

Where this collides

• Cannot both be true

  Housing affordability is almost the direct inverse of how many new homes are built, so the answer is to build more houses.

  Smith and Levels hold that affordability is almost the direct inverse of how much gets built. Alexander argued the opposite in May 2023 — density is what people are moving to a city for, so building more of it raises local prices — and abandoned it eighteen days later after a poll found only 5% of readers with economics degrees agreed. The claims cannot both be right, and the man who made the losing one says so himself.

Shared subject first, then similar wording. They may agree or disagree.

• A house is built by trades that barely coordinate with each other, which is what makes housing cheap to design and almost impossible to redesign. BPBrian Potter2 Apr 2024housing
• Affordability is not a property of a building; it is a price set in a transaction, so there is no such thing as affordable housing, only affordable prices. DHDaniel Herriges4 Jan 2023housing
• Building a lot of housing in an expensive city will not lower rents there; it lowers them in the cheaper places that were absorbing its spillover demand. DHDaniel Herriges29 May 2024housing
• Building materials are already about as cheap as civilisation knows how to make them, so cheaper materials are not where housing savings will come from. BPBrian Potter2 Apr 2024housing
• Chinese factory workers are more motivated than American ones because what they want has been getting cheaper against their wages while American housing has not. MHMolson Hart25 Dec 2025housing

On the map

Open the map on its own page