Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Dan
If Chicago city proper wasn't building enough new housing to meet demand relative to NYC proper, why is real estate so much cheaper here?
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Real estate in Chicago is cheaper because of how the region responded to population growth pressure: growing the developed footprint of the region. New York chose to freeze the developed area and focus new housing on infill, which would obviously create land scarcity and drive up land values.
But consider this hypothetical: what if there were 3x the number of housing units built in the city of Chicago between 1950 and 2020 than had been built, which would have roughly matched NYC's proportion of new housing units created over the time period. Would Chicago's population likely be larger, smaller, or the same as it is today? I think we would both agree that it is least likely that Chicago's population would be even smaller, right? The most likely scenario is that Chicago's population would be the same as it is today or larger than it is today.