“Bringing this back to the United States: While we need to address our current housing crisis, the goal should not be to build, build, build anywhere at any cost.”
America needs more housing! This is no longer the mantra of only YIMBYs or cash-strapped Millennials. Suddenly, the most prominent figures in American politics have taken up the call to build, build, build. In her run for President of the United States, Vice President Kamala Harris takes every opportunity to acknowledge, “There’s a serious housing shortage.” Former President Barack Obama echoes this sentiment, even calling for a housing market revolution. Likewise, former President Donald Trump (and current GOP nominee) stated: “We desperately need housing for people who can’t afford what’s going on now.”
I fully support this cause. Until recently, I was paying comically high rent to live in San Francisco. When my daughter was born and daycare costs came into the picture, there was no question: We had to move to a more affordable city. We found ourselves in Sacramento, which is lovely, but the median home price is still over half a million dollars.
The politicians are right: American families should not have to live like this. The rent is too damn high. And as YIMBYs love to remind the world: “Housing supply up, rents down.”
There is, however, one major caveat to my enthusiasm for the call to build, build, build. It is the fact that, by all accounts, our population is on the brink of declining rapidly. The global population, currently at 8 billion, is projected to peak at 10 billion in 2085, and then it will collapse. Unless fertility rates somehow pick up globally, within a few centuries, the human population will slide back down to the numbers of the pre-industrial era. (See graph.)
In the United States, the population is projected to hit 370 million in 2080 before sliding down. This assumes relatively high rates of immigration. According to Census.gov: “The low-immigration scenario is projected to peak at around 346 million in 2043 and decline thereafter, dropping to 319 million in 2100.”
In the meantime, we already have a significant problem with—to use the technical term—“urban shrinkage.” Almost half of American cities are currently experiencing population decline. As a result, even in this time of an unprecedented housing crisis, the United States already has 15.1 million vacant homes. Looking to the near future, The Independent reports that 15,000 American cities—particularly those in the Northeast and Midwest—will have “emptied out by the end of the century.”
This is not a popular talking point among pro-housing advocates because it speaks to many complex issues that muddy the message. But urbanists are aware of the problem. For instance, Alexandros Washburn, the former Chief Urban Designer of New York City, recently appeared in a video for WIRED, where he was asked: “What are current and future challenges that affect urban planning?” He responded:
“It’s declining population. We’re not there yet, certainly not in America. Certain places are, like Bulgaria, for instance, where there are a million more apartments than there are people. The movement from the countryside to cities is starting to slow down. And we’ve been in this frenzy of city building, and we haven’t done a very good job with it. The biggest challenge for urban planning, looking into the 50-year future…is what are we going to do when population starts to plateau and decline? And then, all the pressure on building more and new and better is not there, and we have to deal with what we have.”
Earlier in this same interview, he was asked, “What airport is perfect?” He responded with “Singapore” because, “Anytime they need to figure out how much square feet they need for, say, security, they double it, triple it. They know that everything is growing, so they look ahead.”
In other words, Washburn encourages developers to build more than is necessary in the spirit of looking ahead—just not 50 years ahead.
Urban shrinkage is not a problem to take lightly. Those impacted by a shrinking urban population see direct impacts to their quality of life. As people leave, basic goods and services become more expensive, with fewer people to share the costs. With less tax revenue, local municipalities are unable to maintain roads, bridges, and schools. Abandoned buildings decay and attract crime. This triggers more people to leave, particularly those who are educated and can take their skills elsewhere. As the educated classes leave, it becomes much more difficult to attract new businesses to the region, continuing the downward spiral.
This is the story of Detroit. Coming soon to a city near you.
The silver lining is that there is still time for the United States to plan for the impending population collapse. We have the advantage of seeing how countries with worse demographic trends than ours are handling the issue. Japan’s population, for example, already peaked in 2008 at 128 million. With low birth rates and an aging population, the country is expecting to see its current population cut roughly in half by 2100. So far, Japan has primarily seen housing value deflation occurring in the suburbs. The goal at this point is to draw up the moats around cities. Any new developments should now be for the purpose of promoting “compact cities.”
In Europe, United Nations Economic Commission for Europe has laid out five ways to balance the need to build new housing while keeping population size in consideration:
- “Prevent oversupply of housing in a situation of population decline by discouraging local governments from trying to compete for population.”
- “Focus on quality as least as much as on quantity of housing.”
- “Stimulate local diversity of housing types and housing tenure (rental versus owner-occupied), and prevent the development of large areas of low-quality housing.”
- “Stimulate the supply of affordable and rental housing next to owner-occupied housing.”
- “Decrease the restrictions on moving, for example by decreasing transfer tax.”
Bringing this back to the United States: While we need to address our current housing crisis, the goal should not be to build, build, build anywhere at any cost. We must stop building unsustainable suburbs and focus on quality construction in the pursuit of compact cities. And, unless we all start having significantly more kids while also opening the floodgates to more immigrants, we must prepare for some cities to simply not survive into the next century.
Peter Clarke, a Merion West contributor, is a writer in San Francisco and the host of the podcast Team Futurism. He can be found on X @HeyPeterClarke
