The Great Downzoning

New cities vs. fixing existing ones

• Some propose government-built new cities on cheap land as a way to break bad equilibria.
• Strong pushback: demand is where jobs, ports, and historic trade routes already are; most “empty” land is in unattractive places.
• Company towns and SpaceX’s Starbase are cited as rare cases where new employment justifies new settlements.
• Others note UK-style new towns and satellite cities (e.g., around London or potentially around SF with fast rail) show incremental expansion near existing metros works better than desert megaprojects.

Upzoning, prices, and homeowner incentives

• One camp argues: in high-demand areas, upzoning raises land value more than it lowers structure value, so developers can outbid normal buyers; more units per lot lower unit prices and cost of living.
• They stress indirect benefits: more local workers, fewer shuttered shops, potentially less crime and offshoring.
• Critics emphasize non-financial preferences (quiet, low traffic, neighborhood character), sentimentality, and the complexity of assembling parcels and getting approvals.
• There’s a long back-and-forth on whether borrowing against home equity or “aging in place then passing on the house” makes high prices genuinely beneficial, with skeptics highlighting illiquidity, interest costs, and locked-in low-rate mortgages.

Markets, power, and “shortage” vs. misallocation

• One side sees US housing as fundamentally supply-constrained by regulation: many small landlords, lots of willing builders, but bans on density.
• Others stress power: homeowners and large owners use zoning to protect interests, and voting doesn’t reliably follow narrow economic self-interest.
• Debate over whether SF’s high prices reflect a genuine unit shortage versus vacancies, underused space (empty offices, AirBnBs, land banking), and inequality. Data on vacancy and landlord concentration is challenged and seen as unclear.

Density, quality, and regulation

• Experiences from France and UK: rapid postwar building without strong design oversight produced ugly or dysfunctional neighborhoods and towers.
• Some argue for combining higher allowed density with strict technical/design standards; deregulation alone risks low-quality or “slum-like” outcomes.
• Others respond that in most sectors safety is regulated and quality comes from competition; throttling supply forces developers to cut quality because buyers have no alternatives.
• Counterexamples from consumer goods markets are used to argue that competition often pushes quality down except at luxury tiers.

Demographics, preferences, and geography

• Several comments tie rising demand to urbanization and smaller households rather than raw population growth.
• There’s disagreement over whether “we have enough units nationally” matters when people specifically want walkable, job-rich cities, not distant regions.
• Suburbs are framed both as a revealed-preference escape from dysfunctional cores and as a spatial form that entrenches inequality and car dependence.