I don't know for sure how accurate this is—it's crowdsourced—but it seems to match other estimates of housing prices in big city centers:
This is one reason I'm so skeptical of urbanist arguments about American cities being uniquely expensive due to restrictive building rules and a car-centric culture. As you can see, there's nothing really very unusual about American cities. London is as expensive as New York. Paris is as expensive as San Francisco. Copenhagen is as expensive as Los Angeles.
All over the world, big cities in advanced countries are expensive because lots of people want to live there but residents have a limit to how much crowding and congestion they'll put up with. Good transit can help, I suppose, but London and Paris both have great subway systems (as does New York) and Copenhagen is famously bicycle friendly. That doesn't make them any cheaper than US cities with lousy transit systems.
Allowing more freedom of construction would probably help, but possibly not as much as many urbanists believe. I suspect that certain cities are essentially infinitely attractive: build more apartments and prices will go down, but that will immediately attract new residents and cause prices to go back up. If you could double or triple housing that might finally have a permanent effect, but this isn't really feasible. In the ordinary range of 10-30% housing growth, I'll bet prices wouldn't change much.
This is only for central cities.
a. What does that mean exactly?
b. What do costs for the metropolitan area look like?
And Tel Aviv? WTF?
I can't believe Tel Aviv is that pricey. But I can't believe anyone would voluntarily live anywhere at all in the Middle East.
Once the occupied territories and Gaza are incorporated it will be one vast conurbation with no central city.
No one gives a rat's ass about Gaza, aside from defectives and ninnies of course.
Folks, we got ourselves a bigot.
Sure thing, pinhead.
The real issue is never Gaza, it's always the West Bank. Gaza is a distraction from a distraction that exists as a distraction.
For the millionth time why doesn't this otherwise excellent blog not have things others do like alerting to unacceptable comments and/or blocking the serial offenders, or thumbs up/down?
Or a moderator doing the banning?
At least replies to a comment don't appear a mile below them after all the other comments, so there's that.
Maybe this will help: At one time I was absolutely sure they were a troll, based on their comments on everything from COVID to Gaza. Someone here -- I forget who it was -- pointed out that cld might be more of a clueless crank than a troll. I looked back over some of his choice comments I had bookmarked, and damn my eyes, wow! He wouldn't be out of place as a USENET crank circa 1990 or so.
You're a raving idiot, but a useful idiot.
Now I've said something nice about you.
edit: but I am curious, what do you think I've said about Covid?
Paris is 8th on the list, and all they do is complain.
It’s good to have a hobby.
Apparently competition for Most Complaining is between Parisians and all Germans.
Sure looks pretty expensive to me, and there are notably high prices in American cities that aren't even all that large when compared to those on the list that are abroad.
It's telling that Tokyo, a freaking megacity with a metro area larger (by population) than NYC which is the only thing that comes close in the US (LA is more of an amalgamation of several cities than one large city) - and the price per square foot is cheaper than DC, which is a fraction of the size. And DC isn't even the most expensive American city.
Zurich, Geneva, and Tel-Aviv don't belong on this list. Seoul is the only one that stands out as possible support of your point.
However, it's important to note that the component costs of housing (financing, taxes, fees, upkeep, etc.) may be wildly different between these places - it's going to be about what you pay for what you get. You pay more and get less in American cities than in these others.
But hey I get it - you've got this narrative to push that housing isn't that bad (or that we can't do anything about it anyway even if it is bad) because it's how you alleviate cognitive dissonance on this issue.
ETA: the "freedom of construction" thing is, at a certain point, a meme repeated by those who claim that by god, they really wish they could build more housing, but they're just not allowed to. To some (or even a great) degree that's true, but it's not *entirely* true.
Why would Zurich, Geneva and Tel Aviv be excluded? Zurich (my hometown) specifically does not have any feature that other cities also have. Geneva has a lot of United Nation related offices, i.e. a high percentage of diplomats who drive up rents. But so does New York or DC.
came here to ask the same question. Those two Swiss cities are notoriously pricey.
Because they are all (1) extremely small compared to the other cities on the list, and (2) have special circumstances (i.e., geographical limitations on space) that would better explain their high cost of housing.
Pretty obvious factors that justify exclusion from comparisons.
Apples, oranges.
I’d like to see an average sq ft breakdown by city. AFAIK American living spaces tend to be bigger on average than other countries; price/area is probably misleading, because the exact size of the studio that you get isn’t very relevant to the affordability of your apartment.
Price per sqft is a perfectly fine data point for comparison.
I'd like to see a before and after Airbnb chart on those cities.
+1
Some cities have caught on and banned certain types of AirBnB for multiple reasons. Of course enforcement may be lacking and the laws too weak.
If a city has a 1% vacancy rate in theory it doesn't take too many temp rentals making apartments function as hotels to raise everyone's rent. Plus impacts on other tenants and entire neighborhoods.
I'd go draconian on them if I was in charge.
The "urbanists" I pay attention to on YouTube talk not about expense most of the time but rather about how hard it is to get around if the city design is based on the car.
Paris is as expensive as San Francisco? A fair amount of rounding up and down is necessary to make that happen. And are you suggesting they are in any way equal? I love San Francisco but Paris is on another level altogether. BTW apartments in Paris probably have not much more than half the area of San Francisco homes, making actual rent quite a bit cheaper in Paris.
Supposedly that chart is by cost per square foot, but I agree these comparisons are always difficult since many other factors enter in: ease of access, noise, parking, etc.
Yeah, plus it kind of averages things, too. In Manhattan (which is what I'm assuming they're defining as "center city" of NYC, a house in SoHo or the West Village is going to set you back around $5k a sq/ft, but up in Harlem or Hamilton Heights, it's like $500-$600.
>Paris is as expensive as San Francisco?<
I think some of Kevin’s conclusions here are unsupported (as I’ve mention below), and I question some of these Numbeo figures. But the SF-Paris comparison does not strike me as implausible. There’s a Youtuber I follow who purchased an apartment in Paris recently, I think he paid a little over 1 million USD, all in, including renovations. An apartment in San Francisco of equivalent size and quality would easily be that much, and probably a third more. And apartment *leases* in SF are higher (I know this for a fact because I’ve been considering a move to France and have been doing research on this topic).
I think I'd rather buy an apartment in Paris than in San Francisco if the cost is equal. More bang for the buck.
That doesn't make them any cheaper than US cities with lousy transit systems.
It (clearly) doesn't necessarily make the rent any cheaper, but the presence of good public transit means a lessened necessity to spend money on private transportation, which results in lower total expenditures. I live in a small town in Germany so don't have the wealth of transit options that a large city would have, but even here, the regular train and bus connections have probably made it manageable for my family to get by with at least one less car than would be required in the US.
This has been today's chapter of "That Thing You're Worried About (extreme housing costs in the biggest cities in the U.S.)? It's Not a Big Deal to Kevin Drum."
That's what Kevin does - takes a look at all those rumors and worries and things that "everybody knows" and then looks at the actual data, which often tell a different story. I like having a dose of reality, which is why I read Kevin regularly. If you don't, I'd suggest going elsewhere.
Yup, and when any reader disagrees they can have lots of fun complaining and arguing about it. It's what blogs with comments are for.
Or in this case more just discussing it.
Anyway, since I live in a Big City in the US this is pretty interesting.
You missed the point - the data often don't say what Kevin says they do, usually because Kevin doesn't put in the time or effort to come to enough of an understanding of the issue at hand to understand why the data don't say what he thinks they say.
Hence the "that thing you're worried about? not a big deal" comments.
Numbeo?
i can't speak for buildings and rent, but their numbers for crime are often viewed as unreliable and misleading
The main issue with American car-centric development is not that it is expensive to get housing, but that you have to add in the expense of owning and maintaining a car on top of it.
The AAA estimates car costs at about $10,000 a year. That's a lot to add onto rent or mortgage.
The real issue overall is the continuation of urbanization. We are building one or two mega cities per nation instead of a dozen big cities or dozens of moderate cities. The US is so large we need a few mega cities, but the regional impact is the same. Housing would be cheaper if we could figure out how to disperse urban growth more broadly.
Don't worry, Donald is gonna build six or seven brand new shiny cities someplace - like they do in Jynah. He may have forgotten that by now though, and of course his promises mean exactly nothing. And he better not win.
Unlike China, the US can't really dictate that jobs appear for the potential inhabitants though. However the federal government does have some major facilities (not just NASA in Houston) located in cities like Denver and other places. Plus VA hospitals and military bases, and the military bases hire a lot of civilians too.
I doubt very much that restrictive building rules are much more restrictive in the U.S, than they are in most of those other cities, especially the ones in Europe. London, for example, I believe has very strict requirements in place for certain areas of the city for historical and other reasons. I'd expect Paris and many others to be the same.
London also has a green belt, unlike NYC for example. Portland has one too.
Meanwhile a lot depends on geography, transit, and exactly what constitutes a central city. And whether the central city is desirable or not (applicable more to some US cities than others, probably). Etc.
And who wants to absolutely bake for five months of the year, like in Phoenix? I hear it's not getting any better.
But still interesting. The linked article has a lot more cities. Square meters though.
If you exclude San Francisco, you can see why pop music is so expensive.
I was curious as where Taiwan is, so I click through the link...
WTF! Taipei's more expensive than San Diego in city center?!
Yeah no, that's way off. That figure for Portland must be including the entire metro area, not just downtown. In the downtown area, maybe the bottom is $338/SF, but you're not going to find a place in downtown for less than $450/SF and the median is north of $500/SF with the range going all the way up to $800/SF.
Was thinking the same thing. In no universe I'm aware of is Portland (whether Oregon or Maine!) cheaper than San Antonio. Numbeo is a useful site, but you have to know how to parse their data.
This is one reason I'm so skeptical of urbanist arguments about American cities being uniquely expensive due to restrictive building rules and a car-centric culture.
This is a complete strawman on Kevin's part. All credible urbanists acknowledge housing affordability is an increasingly pernicious issue in a growing number of locales globally. Nobody I'm aware of holds that this is a phenomenon unique to the US.
Also, as others have noted here, you get a highly incomplete picture when you're focusing on convenient, amenity-rich city centers as opposed to metro areas as a whole.
Finally, rents provide a much cleaner statistic than home sale prices in terms of providing insight into general housing costs, because the investment component is stripped out.
But no, American cities are not unusually expensive. Pretty much everyone is aware Geneva and London and Vancouver and Stockholm and Sydney and Hong Kong and Toronto and Paris are also terribly pricey!
As an urbanist, I don't think that's a strawman. I do make favorable comparisons to international cities, though certainly not London which also has restrictive policies.
I think there is a real difference in number of units that's missed by square feet. Even the median America does quite well by global standards, so it's unsurprising that our housing is larger. However, cramped apartments, let alone duplexes and missing middle housing, *near jobs* are dramatically better than people living on the street.
Square foot comparisons are a valid metic, but certainly an incomplete one and incomplete in a way that urbanist arguments indicate.
I do make favorable comparisons to international cities, though certainly not London which also has restrictive policies.
I'm also an urbanist, but Kevin explicitly asserts we claim that foreign cities are more expensive than US cities when he writes:
This is not an accurate description of US urbanists in general. We're well aware that housing has become very expensive in a growing number of metros throughout the developed world.
However, cramped apartments, let alone duplexes and missing middle housing, *near jobs* are dramatically better than people living on the street.
Yes. Cramped apartments are better than living on the street. Thanks for clearing this up! Lol.
Im not sure the chart even supports Kevins strawman narrative. American cities sure do look expensive.
Kevin chose this data but it still seems to to indicate that American cities are fairly expensive compared to the rest of the world. Note how many US cities are on the list and i suspect that the 'per sq foot' conversion is distorting the graph a bit, making US cities look cheaper than they actually are.
Seattle has built tens of thousands of new apartments over the last decade or so. A lot of this was in South Lake Union, a low rent car dealer and light manufacturing district adjacent to downtown and the lake. It is now Amazonia, full of high tech office buildings, medical research centers, restaurants and apartment buildings, lots of apartment buildings.
Rents in Seattle rose, probably because of all those office and research buildings attracting highly paid workers, but they may have risen less thanks to new construction. It's hard to do a controlled experiment.
Longtime reader here, now based in Los Angeles. Kevin I think your basic point is right: prices are so high that if they could be driven down just a little in one city, say Los Angeles, somewhat fewer people would leave Los Angeles for Austin, prices would stabilize, and you'd find a new equilibrium.
The problem with this analysis in my view is that ALL the cities on this chart have housing prices that are way too high. What we need is not for one city to find a way to build more housing. It's for changes that allow more stuff to be built in MANY cities. That would be the way to actually increase supply relative to demand. People can't as easily pick up and move from Zurich to the U.S., so I think you can make these changes within a single country and see the benefits. But just doing it in one city won't work.