Also, if income is lowered in Tulsa, housing prices must drop, because you have fewer dollars chasing the same amount of housing.
Perhaps your argument is that, with lots of new housing built in NYC, prices drop in NYC and Tulsa, but consumers of housing are not necessarily better off because (for instance) they might be “forced” to move from Tulsa to NYC, making them less happy than they would have been otherwise, despite the lower housing prices in both cities.
But that’s a completely different argument.
I may have erected a straw man here. But to that argument I would respond by noting that any kind of change makes some people worse off and some people better off, but market-based change almost always (in theory) results in more positives than negatives. The drop in price of word processors means that Adam may lose his job at the typewriter factory, but economic theory says that in the absence of anything unusual, the change is a benefit to the world as a whole.
This is especially true when changes are an increase in the abundance of a beneficial consumer good, like housing space.
Perhaps your argument is that, with lots of new housing built in NYC, prices drop in NYC and Tulsa, but consumers of housing are not necessarily better off because (for instance) they might be “forced” to move from Tulsa to NYC, making them less happy than they would have been otherwise, despite the lower housing prices in both cities.
But that’s a completely different argument.
That is my argument. That’s the whole point! I just also don’t think that it means prices necessarily go down in Tulsa (because people leaving for NYC shows up mainly as less construction, and prices in Tulsa are pinned to construction costs there) or necessarily go down significantly in NYC (because the price changes involved may be very small, or maybe there’s just reduced friction for companies moving because of new construction rather than an actual price decrease).
Also, if income is lowered in Tulsa, housing prices must drop, because you have fewer dollars chasing the same amount of housing.
Perhaps your argument is that, with lots of new housing built in NYC, prices drop in NYC and Tulsa, but consumers of housing are not necessarily better off because (for instance) they might be “forced” to move from Tulsa to NYC, making them less happy than they would have been otherwise, despite the lower housing prices in both cities.
But that’s a completely different argument.
I may have erected a straw man here. But to that argument I would respond by noting that any kind of change makes some people worse off and some people better off, but market-based change almost always (in theory) results in more positives than negatives. The drop in price of word processors means that Adam may lose his job at the typewriter factory, but economic theory says that in the absence of anything unusual, the change is a benefit to the world as a whole.
This is especially true when changes are an increase in the abundance of a beneficial consumer good, like housing space.
That is my argument. That’s the whole point! I just also don’t think that it means prices necessarily go down in Tulsa (because people leaving for NYC shows up mainly as less construction, and prices in Tulsa are pinned to construction costs there) or necessarily go down significantly in NYC (because the price changes involved may be very small, or maybe there’s just reduced friction for companies moving because of new construction rather than an actual price decrease).