Yet another study confirms YIMBYs are right about everything
Betrayed by misleading headlines
Lifting heavy things is a good way to build muscle, but working out once won’t make you much stronger. Giving poor families cash is an effective means of reducing poverty, but giving each household $1 isn’t going to change the poverty rate very much. Having more police officers on the street reduces crime, but adding one more Chicago police officer isn’t going to have a large impact. Putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere contributes to rising global temperatures, but burning a single gallon of gasoline has a minimal impact on climate change.
These are just different versions of something we all know: small changes generally have small impacts.
Many people claim that new construction raises housing prices, either because they are confused or because they believe the demand induced by new amenities swamps the impact of increased supply. This is false, empirically, and in fact, the opposite is true — new construction reduces nearby prices relative to baseline. But, as in the example…
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