That doesn’t imply this, but it’s entirely possible that density increases demand.
The central coast of California is amazingly nice, temperate, and sparsely populated. It’s not cheap, but much less expensive than LA or SF.
I think this is definitely true, up to a point. You need certain critical masses before various amenities become available. The more dense a city the more likely it is that some niche product/service/career/whatever is readily attainable, which makes it a more desirable place to be.
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Yeah. We all talked about SF back on 2p2 and I submitted that it would incredibly hard to lower housing prices by building more units. There’s just soooo much demand. And a lot of new buildings, unless they were intentionally terrible, could just increase demand. You could double the population of SF and just raise housing prices.
Id still end land ownership move you all into arcologies and let the buffalo roam free again.
If increasing the supply of housing drives such a big increase in demand that the price stays the same, that actually makes the new housing more valuable than if higher supply decreased demand. Willingness-to-pay is not a perfect proxy for value in an absolute sense, but if people are willing to pay more to live in a densified SF, then that suggests that densified SF is a much better place to live than the current version. (And you have to remember that the marginal resident of 2xSF is someone who is not even close to being willing to move to SF now. That’s the guy who’s willing to pay higher rents in 2xSF!)
In reality, I think it’s probably not realistic that increasing supply creates so much value that prices don’t fall. (Which is a separate question how much you can feasibly increase supply by changing land use regulation.) But if were true, it would be a rebuttal of the argument that densification is bad for residents. Now, it’s true that absolute prices are important for distributional reasons, and if development doesn’t lower prices, the government needs to subsidize low-income renters or build public housing or do something else. But that’s easier to do with a bigger tax base. In a perfect world, you implement a land-value tax and use the money to benefit low-income residents, but even if you can’t do that because of your CA GOAT ballot initiatives, there’s a lot more income/sales/property tax money in 2xSF.
I don’t think it changes the outcome, but population-weighted density is a very bad stat to use for this purpose. (Probably more relevant in international comparisons.) Weighted density tells you how dense the area where the average person lives is, which is an interesting fact, but for land-use questions, the important question really is how dense is the average (buildable) plot of land. In particular, weighting density by population obscures the impact of mansion zoning in inner-ring suburbs. Because only a select elite are permitted to live there, the low density is given little weight, but the fact that no one lives there is exactly the problem.
I imagine that the bad stat doesn’t impact the ordering in your example because extensive mansion zoning is close to universal in the U.S. Speculating, but a place like Tokyo that is more successful at providing cheap housing might not score that great on weighted density, but might have higher absolute density because there are fewer housing deserts.
This should really have been posted earlier itt.
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Everything is lookin swell
Hey SoftBank, if you can’t spot the sucker…
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It’s pretty sound unfortunately. Right now as we speak Uber is busy offering customers in my space lower rates than their competitors costs… and then turning around and paying the exact same costs we are. They’ll tell a customer paying 4,000 for a truckload that they can do it for 3200, and then turn around and pay the same 3600 the guy who used to source that truckload was paying usually on the exact same truck.
The only silver lining is that there is only one Amazon. They can actually execute this strategy and capture real market share… most of the knock off versions don’t execute well and can’t keep the business even while losing money.
And they often aren’t planning to raise the price to the customer, their plan is to gain enough market share that they can force the suppliers in that space to cut their prices considerably so that they can turn a profit. You already see Uber/Lyft doing that to their drivers by steadily reducing the total payout. Thankfully trucking is much too big a space to do this with. It’s like trying to drink the ocean and these ‘Uber for trucks’ operations are hemorrhaging money without gaining any real market share… and as a result they’ll never gain enough leverage to dictate price to the trucks.
What a load of shit, Uber stock is still at $30 and these people got thousands of shares boohoo 
.
Maybe stop losing billions of dollars a year
It’s a pretty bad outcome for being an employee of a ‘unicorn startup’ that actually managed to go public. Especially given the fact that they probably took at least somewhat reduced up front compensation to get those stock options.
I’d be pretty salty if I were them.
Uber is a straight up evil company.
They’re also no different from WeWork, fundamentally. They are losing billions of dollars a year, lose money on every customer and have no path to profitability. With the added bonus of enormous pending litigation/legislative problems. The company is worth roughly the same as We: less than 0.
And I’m not the least bit sorry to hear that. If I hear one more person ask me if I’m worried about ‘Uber for trucks’ I’m going to scream. My job is already heavily automated and the long term trend is for people in my role to get less $ per transaction but to do an ever increasing number of transactions. We’re already disrupting ourselves. Yes there are developing countries where app based freight brokerage is a thing, and in those countries the market is both more expensive transactionally and less efficient in terms of trucking utilization.
To be fair I was scared of Uber for trucks until Uber freight actually arrived on the scene lol. They’ve spent over a billion dollars to create a brokerage that you could buy with less than a month of searching for <50M dollars. And their ‘tech’ is a worse version of what’s publicly available as SaaS to literally every broker in the game.
Dunno, but seems like WebVan did something similar where they spent way way way to much money setting up grocery distribution and went out of business, but the assets didn’t completely disappear. Like Vons ended up at least with a lot of the vans and did delivery. I would expect someone used all the fancy warehouse stuff they built.
The issue with the Uber freight setup is that they have very little in the way of sales and all of their technology already exists elsewhere in a better form with the two big load boards. They really haven’t created anything new of value or infrastructure that is even worth maintaining.
Seriously you can buy a profitable (they aren’t) brokerage with 100-250M in revenue for 50M dollars. It’s just not that good of a business for investors and the top line just isn’t that impressive.
The problem with all these takes is that they struggle to identify the harms. Low prices are good! Even more importantly, competitive pressure between firms to cut their profit margins as fine as they think they can is what drives innovation.
The classical theory about why low prices are actually bad is that there’s a cunning two-stage plan to take over the market, then raise prices extra high. The reason predatory pricing is usually not viewed as an anti-trust problem is that this strategy never happens and doesn’t make much sense in real life. What’s to stop someone from starting a competing business against your monopoly? (There’s a textbook model where the incumbent can deter entrants with a threat of money-losing competition, but it doesn’t happen in real life.)
The I-need-to-build-a-social-media-brand-around-discredited-economics-from-the-1930s solution is to replace the logical but false harm of future monopoly with a new harm:
As euphoria in capital markets takes hold, predatory pricing scheme come to entirely wastes capital on money losing enterprises, and eventually these companies become Soviet-style generators of white elephants and self-dealing.
The antecedent of “these companies” is a little vague. Walmart and Amazon are the most recently named big money-losing companies in the article, but I’m going to assume that the two most ruthlessly cost-conscious companies in recent American business history are not Soviet-style white elephants. Is it Uber and Lyft, who toppled the historically honest and dependable taxi industry into discredit? Maybe Netflix, whose infinite pockets enable it to bear sustained losses (has never actually shown a net loss)? It’s not really clear, perhaps because the thesis is dumb.
This seems true for companies like Amazon and Netflix and particularly Uber. But is the theory completely debunked for extremely capital intensive industries like auto manufacturing, aluminium, steel or paper? It takes several years and tens of millions of dollars to start up a small paper mill. Large integrated pulp and paper mills can cost high hundreds of millions of dollars and take even longer to build. And then the communities that are centered around these mills and factories can be decimated not by fair competition but rather state-backed and subsidized competition.