Seeking Abundance

The status quo of scarcity costs more than we realize

I asked ChatGPT to visualize “abundance.” There’s a lot of housing in this image!

Whenever I try to sit down and write about the challenges in our cities, and the opportunity that lies ahead of us, I struggle to decide where to start. There are so many threads to pull on, and they're all interconnected. It's impossible to write about everything, and also hard not to.

Calling this stack “the Post-Suburban Future” is an attempt to keep myself on a specific theme. In short, I think the problems we're dealing with are largely either caused by or intensified by our pattern of development, and that's good news because (a) we know how to build better patterns, and (b) new technologies are emerging that will make this not just easier but much better. This makes me fundamentally optimistic about the future, and makes me want to write primarily about the solutions I see on the horizon.

But going straight to solutions without identifying the problem has never sat quite right with me. If we aren't clear on the problem we're trying to solve, then we can't actually evaluate whether or not our “solutions” have helped. So today I want to outline my personal rallying cry, why I find the issue of land use and development so intensely motivating.

The status quo has produced critical scarcity of housing, especially of housing in diverse, walkable areas. Housing scarcity has many deeply negative effects, the worst of which is surely homelessness.

But for me, personally, these three impacts are the most motivating:

Entrepreneurship and upward mobility

Housing market effects on entrepreneurship are complex. Research has shown that, because home equity loans are a common source of startup capital, homeowners in places with substantial appreciation are more likely to become entrepreneurs (1,2). But of course, this benefit only accrues to people who owned homes before prices went up, while it crowds out potential future entrepreneurs from accumulating home equity in the first place (3).

In the long run, high housing cost stifles upward mobility by raising barriers to entry and "pulling up the ladder." This effect is the major driver of wealth inequality across the Western world.

I don't want to live in a world where the rich just get richer, I want to live in a world where the barriers to entry are low and the dream that "hard work is all it takes" could be closer to true.

Art and Music

Being from Austin and married to a professional musician, I care more than most about the health of the arts in our cities. Cheap housing helps create incubator environments -- as Willie Nelson said about moving to Austin in the 70's, “Well, rent was cheap and pot was cheap, you know?”

But high housing costs lead to the displacement of artists out of urban centers. And while musicians can, in theory, commute in from cheaper suburbs, the venues they depend on struggle to survive as real estate prices continue to climb.

Thanks to the Baumol Effect, we're going to need to make housing cheaper if we want to maintain a vibrant culture.¹

I don't want to live in a world without the arts, I want to live in a world where people who want to can pursue a career in the arts, and live modestly but comfortably even if they aren't a huge commercial success.

Family Formation

Birthrates are declining across the world, and the US recently hit a new record low. We don't know the cause, but we do know that women in the United States report having fewer children than they wanted.

As a father, I think one of the contributing problems is that the world simply isn't built for kids! I think that parenting isn't as hard as people fear—it isn't as hard as I feared it would be, anyway—but there are many joys of modern living that are really only available to able-bodied adults; namely, personal transportation. Thus having kids means you're pressured to spend a lot of time chauffeuring them around, and logistics for work are more difficult. So when you have kids you end up spending a season of life limited to a subset of family-friendly activities.

This is the issue that speaks to me the most. It's possible for us to have more autonomous children, and children need this for healthy development. But parents in the modern world are increasingly loathe to let their children do even simple things, like walk to school or to a friends house unsupervised. This is usually physically impossible due to distance, but even when that isn't an issue, it's rarely safe for children to cross a street.

I don't want to live in a world where it's difficult to raise a family, and where children are over-dependent on their parents until age 16. I want to live in a world where everyone is able to have as many children as they wanted, and where kids can free-range and enjoy a great life.

We can do better

The Post-Suburban future can be better for all of us. We can have abundant space for families and businesses, low barriers to entry, upward mobility, an easier life for parents, and happy free-range kids. We'll have to overcome stifling zoning practices, make our streets safe, and maybe develop some new financing models. But the pieces exist and are mostly in place, just waiting for us to put them together.

1. Lest this seem too niche, the Baumol Effect that musicians face equally affects many other valued professions, perhaps most famously the teachers, nurses, and firefighters that can't afford to live in the communities they serve. It's difficult for these personal-skill professions to become more productive, which means that it's inherently difficult for them to keep up as the rest of the economy becomes wealthier.