bigpicture7
Senior Member
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- May 5, 2016
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As much as I agree with critics that jklo's assertions lack causal and empirical evidence (which, as I wrote about upthread, is almost impossible to obtain because SFH correlates with variables that have nothing to do with housing layout/geometry), I nonetheless agree there are actually interesting hypotheses in there.
We talk about housing "availability" as if it is binary. But it's really not. There are dimensions of "how hard are you willing to try" (i.e., make sacrifices) that manifest as gradients.
Assuming agnosticism regarding housing format, If a person wants...
- An outstanding public school for their kid
- Room for an inlaw to stay over
- A "yard" or easily accessible shared yard/neighborhood park
...then there are different ways to achieve those at different costs and different levels of convenience and niceness -vs- austerity.
Some people are willing to "try harder" on finding housing than others depending on how much they value things like working in person, being in a city, their passion for their careers or other causes that are location-specific if that's the case (note: I am NOT saying a career with an in-person component need be a source of passion, but it is for some people and decidedly is not for others). My definition of "try harder" is about making sacrifices you wish you didn't have to make.
It is a reasonable hypothesis to assume there are some people who go to places where the housing configurations that maximize good school/ room for family/ outdoor space are more affordable because they care less about reasons that would make you try harder to find an urban condo....even if neither "urban condo" nor "suburban or exurban SFH" are your actual search criteria. We just have no way to know how large this "some people" group is - hence the lack of evidence for jklo's assertion. And as others have pointed out, we also lack the necessary comparison case in the form of plentiful dense condo-style housing far from city centers. So, I don't think jklo's is a crazy hypothesis.
We talk about housing "availability" as if it is binary. But it's really not. There are dimensions of "how hard are you willing to try" (i.e., make sacrifices) that manifest as gradients.
Assuming agnosticism regarding housing format, If a person wants...
- An outstanding public school for their kid
- Room for an inlaw to stay over
- A "yard" or easily accessible shared yard/neighborhood park
...then there are different ways to achieve those at different costs and different levels of convenience and niceness -vs- austerity.
Some people are willing to "try harder" on finding housing than others depending on how much they value things like working in person, being in a city, their passion for their careers or other causes that are location-specific if that's the case (note: I am NOT saying a career with an in-person component need be a source of passion, but it is for some people and decidedly is not for others). My definition of "try harder" is about making sacrifices you wish you didn't have to make.
It is a reasonable hypothesis to assume there are some people who go to places where the housing configurations that maximize good school/ room for family/ outdoor space are more affordable because they care less about reasons that would make you try harder to find an urban condo....even if neither "urban condo" nor "suburban or exurban SFH" are your actual search criteria. We just have no way to know how large this "some people" group is - hence the lack of evidence for jklo's assertion. And as others have pointed out, we also lack the necessary comparison case in the form of plentiful dense condo-style housing far from city centers. So, I don't think jklo's is a crazy hypothesis.
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