This is called the Napkin Fallacy. When you write down some solution to a long standing social problem on a napkin in a coffee shop, and then instead of asking
"What is wrong with my solution, that it hasn't been adopted?"
you ask
"What is wrong with the world, that it hasn't adopted my solution?"
The world needs a lot more people asking the first question rather than the second. Virtually no one should be asking the second question. As the saying goes "For every problem, there is a solution that is clear, simple, and wrong." That's usually the napkin solution. When you stop to really think about what is wrong with the napkin solution, you start down the path of solving real problems. It is highly unlikely that long standing social problems have napkin solutions.
As a slightly toxic corollary to the Napkin Fallacy is the Virtue Fallacy, which tries to answer the second question with
"It is because the world is run by bad people"
This is bad not only because it is an easy way to avoid the difficult work of understanding why the napkin solution doesn't work, but also because it caricatures one's opponents, and it is close to self-deification. While the saying "Let God be true, but every man a liar" is sound, the saying "Let me be true but every man a liar" is unsound. There is generally nothing about any of us that makes us better than others. Do not assume the world is run by people worse than you.
When it comes to housing, the napkin solution is correct. There are no technical or practical problems with it. To many, there are aesthetic and social problems with it, and we choose to prioritise those. That’s not a given.
All problems requiring this type of collective action are social problems.
There are many vacant houses in the U.S., and many cheap houses -- pretending this is about shortage of physical housing is just foolish.
This is about shortage of desirable housing, and instead of stopping to ask what are the mechanisms that cause desirable housing (for you) to be so expensive, you just assume the problem is like a shortage of lumber or "space" or something equally irrelevant. If you build lots of affordable housing in Livermore, what would happen is that Livermore would stop being desirable for you, and you would end up wanting to live in some satellite area that was created outside of Livermore in which the exclusivity was maintained. Then good jobs would move there, because over the long term, the jobs follow the skilled workers and not the other way around. Then your utopian project in Livermore would find itself turned into a low income area where there is a shortage of good jobs, and most of the good jobs are elsewhere, in more exclusive areas, that are within commuting distance of the Lab. Then the Lab would find itself having trouble hiring enough people, and it would open satellite offices elsewhere. Then you would complain about a shortage of housing there, and want to rinse and repeat, not understanding why your intervention failed to solve the problem.
A good example is San Francisco. Most tech jobs were in Santa Clara county, not San Francisco. But a lot of tech workers enjoyed living in SF and did a long commute. Then tech companies realized they could hire more easily if they opened offices in San Francisco. Then companies began to be founded there, etc. All of a sudden, lots of tech jobs in SF. The jobs follow the skilled workers, and skilled workers have a lot of options in terms of picking where they want to live. They vote with their feet, and the jobs follow. How did the jobs end up in Santa Clara? Or Belmont. Through a similar process. Jobs chase high skilled people.
So you have to come to grips with why people that have a lot of choices choose to live in expensive, more exclusive areas. Why does the average high income person really not want to live in a neighborhood with a lot of poor people? Or, for that matter, even average income person? Why this hatred towards average people (something that can easily be found even on this site)? Why are they willing to commute elsewhere, and even take a pay cut, to be in a more exclusive area that is surrounded by other high income people? (And so signals to employers to open an office nearby). This is a social issue, not about lack of nails or space or a shortage of lumber.
I think we have opposite assumptions here. Afaict, young upwardly mobile professionals love density and (income++) diversity. SF was kinda sketchy before it got gentrified by tech, no? Tenderloin was bad, I’ve heard? The notion that people primarily move from less to more exclusive places don’t match with what I see. And people who are actually poor can’t afford new construction, so poor people (and the real social problems they often have) aren’t going to move into unsubsidised new-builds. Will upper-middle class people move away from an area just because craftsmen move in? Area you sure you’re not getting the causality the wrong way around? High-income people move out of area for various reasons not related to their neighbors, property values fall, lower-income people can afford to move in. That sounds more plausible to me.
I do have some arguments in favor of your position, but they’re mostly specific to the US: 1. Many people’s primary retirement plan and emergency fund is often their house, so property values are exceptionally important to them. 2. School funding per student goes down if less wealthy parents move to the district. 3. Violence in poor neighbourhoods can get really bad. None of this is God-given, though, which is why nimbyism isn’t quite as bad in many other countries. And while important, these factors don’t seem to be dominant.
I think you are ignoring the racial angle here. San Francisco became trendy because it was a major urban center, a walkable city, with less than a 6% black population, and that population was relegated to the Bayview area, which of course did not become popular with tech workers as a residential destination. You have a similar situation for Seattle. And Austin. Or Portland. But why is there is no big tech gentrification happening in South Chicago? Or DC? Or Houston? Or Gary, Indiana? Or St. Louis? Show me one urban core area that has more than, say, a 20% African American population that is popular as a target for tech gentrification. I'll wait.
The fact is, there just aren't that many cities that fit this bill, and those that do experience rapidly rising real estate prices. As with many issues, race is a taboo factor operating behind the scenes in determining which neighborhoods are targets of gentrification and which are not. When you create a lot of low income housing, people viewed as more undesirable move in and the high income earners go elsewhere. Then you rinse and repeat. But of course the problem is not that there's a shortage of housing or even a shortage of affordable housing. Median value of owner occupied units is $245K, which is 3.5x the median household income[1]. That's perfectly affordable. But the median home value in a major urban city with less than a 10% African American population is a different story. So there's a shortage of housing in our diverse society that has the "right" kind of demographics. As we become more diverse, the number of locations that are predominantly white or asian will get more and more scarce -- and more and more expensive.
You see a similar situation in Sweden, which accepted a large number of migrants and put them on the outskirts of major cities, and of course the house prices of units in the urban cores that were free of migrants skyrocketed. People are paying to not live in areas with large migrant populations. So all of a sudden housing is becoming 'unaffordable' in Sweden. But the unspoken part is that housing with few migrants is become unaffordable, not all housing. Again, this is a social problem, it's not a problem of a shortage of lumber or space.
So building more low income housing doesn't have the effects you believe, in terms of increasing the amount of housing in highly desirable areas. It will have the opposite effect, by removing one area that has the desired demographics, it makes the remaining islands even more desirable and thus even more expensive. At least this is my reading of history. It was very clear, after the race riots of 2020, how home prices in predominantly white/asian enclaves began to rapidly increase, at which point those who wanted to live in these enclaves began complaining about a "housing crisis" because they could not bring themselves to complain about a racial crisis.
But hey, I could be wrong -- housing in St. Louis or Detroit is still affordable. I'll wait to see tech workers scramble to move there, rather than, say Salt Lake City.
There is gentrification in some of the southern Chicago neighborhoods. If you're asking why there isn't much in Englewood or Grand Crossing, it's because Chicago is geographically huge, and decades of redlining tore a giant gash in the west and south sides of the city that will take many, many more decades to heal. There simply isn't enough demand, across the entire city, to make high-end development in Grand Crossing viable. Gentrification is pushing harder against the west than the south side right now, is my impression.
I don't know what all is happening in Sweden, but what happened in Chicago wasn't an organic process; it was deliberately engineered.
> There is gentrification in some of the southern Chicago neighborhoods
Fun Fact: The Obama Administration was instrumental in tearing down a number of low income housing projects in Chicago and exporting them to nearby cities in Illinois, in an attempt to "unlock value" in downtown Chicago housing by removing poor black families. This has had limited success, although South Chicago is still overall a no go zone for gentrification. This explains the slight gentrification you are referring to. There were multiple lawsuits over this, as the nearby suburbs did not want to receive these housing projects, and were basically forced into it by the Obama administration. This was portrayed not as an effort to enrich administration-connected housing developers in downtown Chicago, but rather as an effort "integrate wealthy suburbs" so that they do "their fair share".
Bottom line, you have to be aware of race and what is really going on when you complain about "lack of affordable housing". There is, of course, plenty of affordable housing. But not where you want to live.
There is plenty of affordable housing all over Chicago, which is why it's going to be awhile before Grand Crossing has a Sweetgreen. Housing on the west and south sides of the city are, by CA/NY/WA standards, beyond "affordable". The median home price in Portage Park is somewhere around $350k --- freestanding houses, yards, low crime, Chicago property taxes, Blue Line connectivity. The median home price in Grand Crossing? $120k.
Public housing projects as implemented by cities like Chicago were a failed experiment. The people that used to live in those places get Section 8 vouchers now, and live in houses on blocks like mine. They're better off, and the city is better off.
Recently a study evaluated one Canadian city's strong efforts to build housing. It was found that prices didn't go down because the builders colluded to build far less housing in the surrounding area, keeping overall supply down, and prices up. That's in their interest. The napkin solution is correct ... unless Marx is right about how elites behave.
This is called the Napkin Fallacy. When you write down some solution to a long standing social problem on a napkin in a coffee shop, and then instead of asking
"What is wrong with my solution, that it hasn't been adopted?"
you ask
"What is wrong with the world, that it hasn't adopted my solution?"
The world needs a lot more people asking the first question rather than the second. Virtually no one should be asking the second question. As the saying goes "For every problem, there is a solution that is clear, simple, and wrong." That's usually the napkin solution. When you stop to really think about what is wrong with the napkin solution, you start down the path of solving real problems. It is highly unlikely that long standing social problems have napkin solutions.
As a slightly toxic corollary to the Napkin Fallacy is the Virtue Fallacy, which tries to answer the second question with
"It is because the world is run by bad people"
This is bad not only because it is an easy way to avoid the difficult work of understanding why the napkin solution doesn't work, but also because it caricatures one's opponents, and it is close to self-deification. While the saying "Let God be true, but every man a liar" is sound, the saying "Let me be true but every man a liar" is unsound. There is generally nothing about any of us that makes us better than others. Do not assume the world is run by people worse than you.