Build More Housing for the Sake of Housing

A quick point about urban zoning. I am stealing this point from Matt Yglesias, but his decision to delete all his old tweets has freed me from the obligation to dig up the specific tweets that I'm thinking of.

The point is simply that the main virtue of allowing more housing construction in urban areas is that there will be more housing in urban areas. I'm not convinced that housing will be significantly cheaper in the long run as a result of upzoning. If upzoning does drive prices down in the long run, it's probably because it makes the city less livable, not because of supply and demand effects.

But all of that is speculative and mostly beside the point. It is simply good for more people to live in dense, walkable cities. Adding housing to dense, walkable cities means that more people will live there. And allowing supply to expand when people live there means that choosing to live there doesn't simply displace someone else.

In a perfect world, lots of cities would be dense and walkable, and existing cities would become more dense and walkable over time. In practice this is difficult and maybe impossible in a lot of places (not that we should stop trying). But we do have cities that are dense and walkable, and they are capable of housing millions more people than they presently do, and we should try to make that happen.