Reply to Overriding local zoning to allow multi-family units in suburban neighborhoods in VA

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
You don't think there's 100,000 people who'd happily move to Arlington if prices came down? That's 1.6 percent of the 6.2 million people in the metro area.

You'd run out of places to put housing before you could ever accommodate everyone who would move there. [/quote]

That's why its so wonderful that you (or your pal) referenced DC above - though you omitted new development, actual and potential, in Alexandria City, Falls Church City, in Bethesda and Tysons Corner, etc.

That's why this needs to be a regional initiative and why MWCOG has established regional goals.  [/quote]

[b]The general point is that increasing density in Arlington wouldn't reduce housing prices in Arlington because people would trade up from other neighborhoods. You would expect to instead see lower housing prices in the least desirable places in the metro area because that's where supply would finally exceed demand.

It would be like if New York decided to build apartments in Central Park. You wouldn't expect living in Central Park to become cheaper than living in Queens. People would move into those Central Park apartments from other, less desirable places in the city. As those people left, other people would take their old units, moving into them from even less desirable places in the NYC metro area. Those least desirable places are where prices would fall. [/b]

As for MWCOG's regional goals, it's nice they wrote something down on paper but these are the same people who can't stop the public from abandoning in droves what used to be a world class subway system.

[/quote]

This is what the Federal Reserve paper implies. It's obviously not talking about Arlington or New York or anywhere specifically, but it's general analysis that building more housing units in desirable areas to live doesn't reduce housing prices, because it encourages more people to move to that area suggests this. [/quote]

That's not exactly what the paper said. [b]Adding additional units doesn't manage to satisfy demand.  Since the demand remains unchanged, the rent doesn't change. [/b]The paper strongly indicated that the only way to influence prices was to make the lower prices rentals more attractive by increasing available amenities. People would move to the cheaper rentals and force the more expensive rentals to lower their price to be competitive.

The paper implies that people don't upgrade when new units become available at a higher price.[/quote]

But this, in bold, is the key point. The demand for housing in Arlington, for all intents and purposes, is limitless. It far exceeds the number of housing units that could ever be added. [/quote]

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