This was a thought I had the other day. As a city becomes more wealthy and grows and with ever larger companies forming / coming to the city, the city becomes more wealthy. This drives up the cost of housing to the point where while the on paper the average person makes much more money than in a smaller city. Any increase in wealth gets effectively absorbed by landlords and increasing property taxes. Making it more difficult and competitive for the average non tech non finance worker to be able to live there. In the end it seems kind of pointless? A lot of cities could very well be better off being composed of mostly traditional jobs. Baristas, barbers etc rather than these higher paying jobs.
Houseing-as-an-investment isn’t an unalterable fact of the cosmos. In fact, it took a lot of effort to make it happen. The benefit of housing-as-an-investment isn’t just that it makes landlords money, it makes all capitalists money, because it cripples labour’s ability to negotiate a fair wage. It’s no random happenstance things are this way.
You also run into the problem that existing homeowners like it to, and homeowners typically vote more in local elections.
The point is to funnel wealth to a tiny number of people; cities are an efficient way to do that
Wait until you hear about suburbs.
Wait till you hear about War.
It benefits rich people, since they have less contact with the ‘unwashed masses’ this way. On top of that, many invest in real estate.
You have to look at the bigger picture.
The idea is that owner class extracts everything…
You make 40k, they take it all…
You make 200k in NYC, believe or not, owners still take it all.
I live in Seattle, where housing is very expensive. However, because of the high salaries here, I have more disposable income than I did when I lived in less expensive locations. I know others here who have the same experience.
So there’s that.
This fun city nerd video is somewhat relevant: www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsbkvsyN-O8 Cities where the lowest percent of median income goes to median (housing + transportation). The winners were Seattle and San Francisco. This suggests that salaries may be able to compensate for increased housing costs. Of course, a longitudinal study would be necessary to answer this question.
Anecdotally, as a Seattlite, this is very much the case.
There’s no benefits as such. It’s not an intentional process. Success and money attract more success and money. In short term it’s beneficial in long term it’s a disaster.
In some ways it’s another rehash of the tragedy of the commons.Bro you just discovered Gergeism
It isn’t the city getting wealthier, it’s the capital owners. This is one of many mechanisms by which they absorb all wealth increases.
Most of the world’s cities look a bit like your putative utopia. Almost everyone works in low-skilled jobs: market vendors, barbers, cafe owners, “baristas” in fake Starbucks. And most of these cities are not places you would choose to live in.
I would include trades people also. Yes you’re right that many of those places I wouldn’t like to live there due to other conditions, but then the question I have is. Are these places how they are due to a lack of big business / wealth driving up housing costs? I’d argue that you could very much have a city be a good place for more average people to live without the expensive cost of living that some industries end up bring to their cities.
Having these higher paying jobs in an area effectively just makes everything else more expensive due to increased costs of living, which just brings us back to square one, if not even lower since some of these low skilled jobs, which are arguably the most important in making an actual city function may not be able to keep pace with the increases. What’s the benefit of this
This boils down to a critique of economic inequality. And I agree with you. Reducing inequality has the potential to solve lots of problems, including this one.
