From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Fri Apr 11 2003 - 16:32:26 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
> ...
>
>It turns out that, according to what I read, the main reason that
>rent and the price of land is so high stems from government policy.
>Houston is the great counter-example.
>
>But it's said that zoning and other government regulations, always
>well-intended, of course, are what make the cost of housing so
>high. Then, besides that, what else is more expensive in constant
>dollars? Nothing that I know of, except possibly---again due to
>people fucking with the market place---medical care.
>
>Lee
>
Think of how supply - demand works. If there's more demand for a house,
then the price of a house goes up. Government controls have limited
impact here. If prices are controlled, then substandard housing can be
sold until the decline in the quality of the area decreases demand
sufficiently. If prices aren't controlled, then the price will rise
until it is satisfied.
Now consider what happens when something is generating a large number of
jobs near a small amount of housing. Either the price of that housing
will rise incredibly, or some means will be found to allow people from a
wider area to reach the source of jobs. This is the simple case of a
"company town".
Now consider that there are five sources of jobs surrounded by a certain
amount of housing, with a time cost to reach the job for each unit of
distance. This requires a complex dynamic programming model.
Now consider that other things are important: neighborhood character,
schools, libraries, gardening clubs...
Each person ends up with a different optimum house, but there are a
large number of "nearly optimum". But if there are a large number of
people desiring them, we are back to the "Supply & demand" situation,
with the addition of a large cost for finding a good choice. So the
price goes up. The harder it is to find the "sufficiently good" house,
the more the price goes up, because the costlier it is to find a compeitior.
But the amount of living space around a souce of jobs is limited. So if
the source supplies a very large number of jobs, there will be more
demand than can reasonably be satisfied at any price that people (on the
average) can pay. At this point more expensive/less desireable
solutions, like apartment houses, began to appear.
Choices made by governments do have many effects, largely on the quality
of life. But the demand is nearly inelastic, so they don't have much
effect on the price/quality. Until one starts reaching the limits of
elasticity. Signs of that are people without housing, etc. I haven't
been particularly impressed by ANY of the solutions to what to do at
that point. Archologies sound better than most plausible choices, but I
really doubt that they would be the idealized structures portrayed by
Soleri or Niven&Pournelle. The feudal government, however, seems all
too likely. I just find it quite unlikely that it would continue
benevolent beyond the first generation. (Still, that might get us to
the singularity.)
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