Urban economics studies the spatial distribution of activity. In most urban econ models, the reason that cities aren’t taller is that, per square meter of useable space, taller buildings cost more to physically make. (Supporting quotes below.) According to this usual theory, buildings only get taller when something else compensates for these costs, like a scarce ocean view, or higher status or land prices.
I find your use the word 'force' ironic... since you can still live in the suburbs if the city core is zoned for maximum development. While under the current restrictive zoning many are _forced_ into the suburbs since development in the city is forcibly limited.
I don't see the connection to Luddism. Industries with higher barriers to entry typically have higher profits (monopolies are the ur-example). An industry in which any damn fool can do the same thing as the established players at an affordable cost will typically have profits competed away. If a cost (typically a tax is what's analyzed, but zoning regulations are another thing to look at) the question of who bears it is called "incidence" and is not always obvious.
I am very much a fan of societies making more explicit what sorts of tradeoffs they want to make! That's one reason why I think Pigovian taxation is so much better than regulatory fiat in many situations (though the most obvious reason to prefer it is avoiding dead-weight loss). America, for example, stupidly chose to respond to auto-emissions with CAFE regulations, whereas Europe's reliance on taxes have worked out much better. In the theoretical ideal of perfect competition, marginal revenue equals marginal cost (leaving no profit). If governments were like that (if "seasteading" made the "governance industry" competitive), all taxes would be in accordance with costs rather than income.
"You cannot simply assume that any loss will come out of net profits, that's determined by whether there's enough ease of entry to make an industry competitive."
That almost sounds like Luddism. Some jobs would not exist, others would take their place. But you have a point if you competitiveness you meant international competitiveness, urbanization is a global phenomenon.
"You cannot simply assume that any loss will come out of net profits"
I'm not assuming that, incomes will go down a bit as well, but income and wealth are not the same thing so people could actually be better off. At least it would be nice if societies thought about the whole thing out loud: how far are we willing to go for a little bit more competitiveness and who pays for the crime, health effects of pollution and traffic congestion in megacities?
Good point about restaurants, and yes there are differences between America and other countries. But economies of scale exist worldwide. There would NOT be the same number of jobs if employers relocated to less dense areas. You cannot simply assume that any loss will come out of net profits, that's determined by whether there's enough ease of entry to make an industry competitive. And even if you looked at two different industries at some point in time and noticed one was more profitable than the other, what you'd expect to happen is that the more profitable industry will attract more investment (until the expected return on investment is equal), which would generally mean labor will also shift into that industry.
P.S. Some skyscraper-infested cities of millions of people should definitely exist: they add vital infrastructure, creativity and prestige to a country, and there are many people who want to live in such a place, but such cities should be the exception, populations shouldn't be forced into them while the rest of the country turns into ghost towns/underdeveloped wasteland.
There's a reason they're called something else: living wages only apply to certain types of contractors working for local government. They're not limited to large cities either.
"How many is "so many"? A very small percentage of full-time workers make minimum wage. And one of the few areas exempted is farm labor, which is going to be found outside of cities."
Farm labor AND restaurants, though those are American specifics, no such exemptions exist in most other countries.
There are approximately 325.000 people (not households) in NYC who work and make less than $8.25 per hour. A minority of the population for sure, but too many to sweep under the carpet.
"But you might be asking why do so many of the poor live in cities. The answer is that there's easier access to public transit & social services. Suburbs are more likely to be completely zoned so as to make it unaffordable for poor people to live there, and lack public housing as well."
Again, that seems to be an American specific, in Europe and parts of Asia there is plenty public transportation outside large cities, as well as public housing and social services. I definitely do oppose zoning that makes suburbs only accessible to wealthy people, in fact I don't like city zoning either (which might sound surprising given everything I've said here), I just think there are sometimes some overlooked advantages to certain types of zoning, even though the underlying problems could be tackled much better with more direct approaches.
"The people who currently make minimum wage in cities would not be likely to earn more outside cities."
I'm not saying they would, in fact they'd probably make less on average because many of them would be unemployed if they lived outside the city.
"Really, you should read some economists on this. It's not an issue with a left-right or freshwater-saltwater split, the wage premium for dense cities is quite well known."
I do believe there is a wage premium, it's huge for high incomes, low to non-existent the further down you go and on average certainly significant enough to notice. In advanced economies about half of young people finishes college (or some equivalent), there are few jobs for these people outside large cities, so they move there and the cities become more populated. If, somehow, a magical force moved a lot of employers to small cities and towns then all the same jobs would still exist but the average employee would have much more living space and cleaner air, of course corporate profits would go down a notch as well because of decreased efficiency, a fraction of those profits might otherwise have gone to higher wages for employees living in cities, so there is definitely a trade-off (at least on average, a starbuck's barista wouldn't lose any income, but a high level HR manager might lose a lot), the point is the (potential) employees never agreed to the trade-off collectively, like having a labor market in a country where unions are illegal. Some instances of urban zoning have the (probably unintended in most cases, but not all), of acting a bit like "spacing unions", transferring some of the externalized costs of urbanization back to employers.
Yglesias and Avent provide only one possible solution to urban problems: you can try to cram more people into the city where the employers are, but another solution would be to take some employers out of the city and put them in less densily populated areas.
Since the industrial revolution we're ingrained to believe large cities bring prosperity, and they do, just far less than we think (1 city of 1 million doesn't bring that much more than 5 cities of 200k people, there is certainly a small efficiency increase but people have the tendency to attribute the entire GDP of the 1 million people city to it being a large city, forgetting that probably 95% of that GDP would still exist if there were 5 200k cities instead) and with hidden costs (or not so hidden to people who move from a large home with a garden in a village to a shoebox in the city). We tend to think that during the industrial revolution factories in the cities offered much higher wages than employers in rural areas. In reality there was a population surplus in rural areas when agriculture (and other technologies) became more efficient, so rural wages collapsed/there were too few rural jobs available. The problem could just as well have been solved by building a factory in every village, instead of a lot of factory in one large city, but that would have meant less efficiency for the factories, thus lower profits for the factory owners, even if they had passed 100% of the cost of that to the workers the workers would only have lost a few percentage points of their income while still maintaining the premium of not having to live in city slums. It would have been another way to solve the problem that would have resulted in only a slightly smaller GDP, but probably more wealth for most citizens, unfortunately it's also something that's terribly difficult to coordinate (certainly impossible in the 19th century.) In any case I don't think it's a side of the story we should forget, even if it does seem like something that's hard to tackle.
Ahh my mistake. I was assuming that since I knew Baltimore had a higher required wage, that was the one. Trouble is the city level statutes are not called minimum wages, but living wages. NYC's for example is 10$ with benefits, 11.50$ without ""Existing legislation defines a living wage in New York City as a minimum of $10 per hour with benefits, or $11.50 per hour without benefits." from http://www.livingwagenyc.or...
Apparently some 149 municipalities have living wage rules, according to them. For Baltimore: The Living Wage Law currently requires the payment of the Living Wage of either $13.19 per hour, effective September 27, 2013 or $9.91 per hour effective September 27, 2013 depending upon the jurisdiction where the services are performed.
That link was about a campaign for a proposal to raise the minimum wage for the state of Maryland, the proposal didn't pass. The minimum wage is still $7.25 in Maryland, including Baltimore.
What you do with the available space is another issue, but it's a moot issue if you don't have the space to begin with because height restrictions have spread buildings all over rather than stacking them.
If real estate prices (as experienced by individual residents, if not developers) are increasing, that's a sign that there's not enough housing stock. How to increase it without taking up space for roads & parks? Taller apartment buildings! I should note, like Yglesias, that when I discuss height restrictions, it is also something of a stand-in for a variety of rules like minimum parking requirements and single-family detached home zoning with minimum yard space that reduce the amount of floor-space for any given unit of real estate. Making parking spaces mandatory leads to more car-ownership & driving, further congesting the roads.
That first link I posted, that was from two years ago when Baltimore raised their minimum wage, which sits at 9.25$ now. Baltimore definitely sets their own minimum wage.
"Then why do so many people in cities make minimum wage or less?"How many is "so many"? A very small percentage of full-time workers make minimum wage. And one of the few areas exempted is farm labor, which is going to be found outside of cities. If you mean "so many" in terms of absolute numbers rather than percentages, that would be easily explained by the fact that so many people live in cities, so even if a small percentage make minimum wage multiplying that by the large population still results in a sizable number. But you might be asking why do so many of the poor live in cities. The answer is that there's easier access to public transit & social services. Suburbs are more likely to be completely zoned so as to make it unaffordable for poor people to live there, and lack public housing as well. The people who currently make minimum wage in cities would not be likely to earn more outside cities. Really, you should read some economists on this. It's not an issue with a left-right or freshwater-saltwater split, the wage premium for dense cities is quite well known.
Yglesias thinks it is the poor in particular who are driven away by the high rents resulting from building restrictions. He views "gentrification" as being the result of increasingly desirable real estate being fought over, with rich people displacing poor people in old housing stock. He argues that if cities permitted more housing to be built, rich people would move into the new (generally higher quality) housing stock, while poor people could move into the place those rich people have vacated. Avent compares those restrictions in cities to those in "gated neighborhoods" commonly associated with suburbs which deliberately make themselves inaccessible to the poor.
"No, the opposite! You yourself said zoning forces a "spread out", that means taking up more (horizontal) space that could be used for parks, roads, etc!"
I think you misinterpreted what I meant by "spread out". The conversion of several office blocks into one skyscraper does indeed create more space for roads and parks but that's not the issue, the issue is that the extra space usually doesn't go towards roads or parks, it goes towards more offices and homes: the skyscraper allows the city to become more densily populated, with less roads, and that's what tends to happen. If you do keep the extra space open through regulations you'll see an increase in real estate priceswith more people being squeezed in the same homes. Building tall buildings in cities is like adding mass to a black hole: everything surrounding the tall buildings tends to get sucked in, the host nation minus the city may definitely see an increase in space (the area of the city may become smaller), but the people in the city are squeezed together and actually experience less living space.
"US Minimum Wage is set by whatever locality sees fit to set it."
It is, but NYC and Baltimore haven't made use of that power, neither have LA, Chicago, Houston and Miami.
"I was in the chemical, supply chain and consulting industries till recently. In the 1990's it was possible to get an unpaid internship, but now they are illegal outside of working for Congress etc. due to min. wage laws."
"It really does depend on the kind of industry you are looking at. Manufacturing is almost never in major cities here, generally on the outskirts. Usually you see smaller, more human capital oriented businesses located in cities as opposed to big capital intensive firms. Only the corporate offices of the latter might be in a city, as far as I can tell because the people like living there."
Manufacturing has been shrinking in favor of services for a long time now, still there are services businesses (such as small IT businesses) that are only in large cities because everyone else is, while they could be just as profitable, perhaps even more so, somewhere else, here's to hoping future policies will succeed to bring those businesses to smaller cities.
"Things might be different in the EU, but in the States people want to move to the cities, and hope to find a job there, not the other way around generally. I am not a fan of cities myself, but I am the strange one for it, not the other way around. Maybe the EU is just bad at cities?"
There will certainly be differences between the EU and US. What I know is that here in the EU many rural communities and smaller cities are shrinking (pensioners, unemployed people and the occasional skilled laborer stay behind) in favor of large cities and that many young people who have to move to a large city to find a job wish they didn't have to. European cities are generally overcrowded with sky high rents for ill maintained shoeboxes and about half of all households depending on subsidized housing to make ends meet in large cities. Still I know there are many Americans who prefer the suburbs or smaller cities, especially when they have children.
"IMASBA, Eric is correct about even entry level workers making more."
Then why do so many people in cities make minimum wage or less?
"That's one reason why writers like Yglesias & Avent bang the drum on helping making it easier for low-end workers to live & work in cities in books like "The Rent is Too Damn High" and "The Gated City"."
The first book is about city rents having become to expensive for pretty much everyone and wages not making up the difference. The second book is about a privileged group of middle class homeowners who can choose between jobs in different places, for them the wages in the city also aren't high enough to make up for the housing prices and it also does argue the cities help make the rich richer.
"so essentially you're asking people to give up space for more income"
No, the opposite! You yourself said zoning forces a "spread out", that means taking up more (horizontal) space that could be used for parks, roads, etc! If you want more space devoted to unstackable public areas, that necessitates that you shift developed infrastructure upward.
"Why can't it be failure of the proponents of skyscrapers to meet the demands of the local population?"Because then the demands would be in the form of something other than a restriction on height! It's an absolutely terrible tool to respond to the complaints you've brought up. Taxing the valuable real estate unlocked by allowing upward development would result in FAR less deadweight loss.
Zoning does the opposite of making housing affordable. Houston was mentioned above as having some of the least zoning, it's also much more affordable. That's the big reason the biggest net population flow across U.S states in recent years has been to Texas. The area Paul Krugman calls the "Zoned Zone" (typically around big cities on the coast) is the most expensive and had some of the biggest housing (really, real estate) run-ups.
You forgot local cost of land, which is a big one (and pretty much the only reason anyone would build a tall building besides status).
I find your use the word 'force' ironic... since you can still live in the suburbs if the city core is zoned for maximum development. While under the current restrictive zoning many are _forced_ into the suburbs since development in the city is forcibly limited.
I don't see the connection to Luddism. Industries with higher barriers to entry typically have higher profits (monopolies are the ur-example). An industry in which any damn fool can do the same thing as the established players at an affordable cost will typically have profits competed away. If a cost (typically a tax is what's analyzed, but zoning regulations are another thing to look at) the question of who bears it is called "incidence" and is not always obvious.
I am very much a fan of societies making more explicit what sorts of tradeoffs they want to make! That's one reason why I think Pigovian taxation is so much better than regulatory fiat in many situations (though the most obvious reason to prefer it is avoiding dead-weight loss). America, for example, stupidly chose to respond to auto-emissions with CAFE regulations, whereas Europe's reliance on taxes have worked out much better. In the theoretical ideal of perfect competition, marginal revenue equals marginal cost (leaving no profit). If governments were like that (if "seasteading" made the "governance industry" competitive), all taxes would be in accordance with costs rather than income.
"You cannot simply assume that any loss will come out of net profits, that's determined by whether there's enough ease of entry to make an industry competitive."
That almost sounds like Luddism. Some jobs would not exist, others would take their place. But you have a point if you competitiveness you meant international competitiveness, urbanization is a global phenomenon.
"You cannot simply assume that any loss will come out of net profits"
I'm not assuming that, incomes will go down a bit as well, but income and wealth are not the same thing so people could actually be better off. At least it would be nice if societies thought about the whole thing out loud: how far are we willing to go for a little bit more competitiveness and who pays for the crime, health effects of pollution and traffic congestion in megacities?
Good point about restaurants, and yes there are differences between America and other countries. But economies of scale exist worldwide. There would NOT be the same number of jobs if employers relocated to less dense areas. You cannot simply assume that any loss will come out of net profits, that's determined by whether there's enough ease of entry to make an industry competitive. And even if you looked at two different industries at some point in time and noticed one was more profitable than the other, what you'd expect to happen is that the more profitable industry will attract more investment (until the expected return on investment is equal), which would generally mean labor will also shift into that industry.
P.S. Some skyscraper-infested cities of millions of people should definitely exist: they add vital infrastructure, creativity and prestige to a country, and there are many people who want to live in such a place, but such cities should be the exception, populations shouldn't be forced into them while the rest of the country turns into ghost towns/underdeveloped wasteland.
There's a reason they're called something else: living wages only apply to certain types of contractors working for local government. They're not limited to large cities either.
"How many is "so many"? A very small percentage of full-time workers make minimum wage. And one of the few areas exempted is farm labor, which is going to be found outside of cities."
Farm labor AND restaurants, though those are American specifics, no such exemptions exist in most other countries.
There are approximately 325.000 people (not households) in NYC who work and make less than $8.25 per hour. A minority of the population for sure, but too many to sweep under the carpet.
"But you might be asking why do so many of the poor live in cities. The answer is that there's easier access to public transit & social services. Suburbs are more likely to be completely zoned so as to make it unaffordable for poor people to live there, and lack public housing as well."
Again, that seems to be an American specific, in Europe and parts of Asia there is plenty public transportation outside large cities, as well as public housing and social services. I definitely do oppose zoning that makes suburbs only accessible to wealthy people, in fact I don't like city zoning either (which might sound surprising given everything I've said here), I just think there are sometimes some overlooked advantages to certain types of zoning, even though the underlying problems could be tackled much better with more direct approaches.
"The people who currently make minimum wage in cities would not be likely to earn more outside cities."
I'm not saying they would, in fact they'd probably make less on average because many of them would be unemployed if they lived outside the city.
"Really, you should read some economists on this. It's not an issue with a left-right or freshwater-saltwater split, the wage premium for dense cities is quite well known."
I do believe there is a wage premium, it's huge for high incomes, low to non-existent the further down you go and on average certainly significant enough to notice. In advanced economies about half of young people finishes college (or some equivalent), there are few jobs for these people outside large cities, so they move there and the cities become more populated. If, somehow, a magical force moved a lot of employers to small cities and towns then all the same jobs would still exist but the average employee would have much more living space and cleaner air, of course corporate profits would go down a notch as well because of decreased efficiency, a fraction of those profits might otherwise have gone to higher wages for employees living in cities, so there is definitely a trade-off (at least on average, a starbuck's barista wouldn't lose any income, but a high level HR manager might lose a lot), the point is the (potential) employees never agreed to the trade-off collectively, like having a labor market in a country where unions are illegal. Some instances of urban zoning have the (probably unintended in most cases, but not all), of acting a bit like "spacing unions", transferring some of the externalized costs of urbanization back to employers.
Yglesias and Avent provide only one possible solution to urban problems: you can try to cram more people into the city where the employers are, but another solution would be to take some employers out of the city and put them in less densily populated areas.
Since the industrial revolution we're ingrained to believe large cities bring prosperity, and they do, just far less than we think (1 city of 1 million doesn't bring that much more than 5 cities of 200k people, there is certainly a small efficiency increase but people have the tendency to attribute the entire GDP of the 1 million people city to it being a large city, forgetting that probably 95% of that GDP would still exist if there were 5 200k cities instead) and with hidden costs (or not so hidden to people who move from a large home with a garden in a village to a shoebox in the city). We tend to think that during the industrial revolution factories in the cities offered much higher wages than employers in rural areas. In reality there was a population surplus in rural areas when agriculture (and other technologies) became more efficient, so rural wages collapsed/there were too few rural jobs available. The problem could just as well have been solved by building a factory in every village, instead of a lot of factory in one large city, but that would have meant less efficiency for the factories, thus lower profits for the factory owners, even if they had passed 100% of the cost of that to the workers the workers would only have lost a few percentage points of their income while still maintaining the premium of not having to live in city slums. It would have been another way to solve the problem that would have resulted in only a slightly smaller GDP, but probably more wealth for most citizens, unfortunately it's also something that's terribly difficult to coordinate (certainly impossible in the 19th century.) In any case I don't think it's a side of the story we should forget, even if it does seem like something that's hard to tackle.
Ahh my mistake. I was assuming that since I knew Baltimore had a higher required wage, that was the one. Trouble is the city level statutes are not called minimum wages, but living wages. NYC's for example is 10$ with benefits, 11.50$ without ""Existing legislation defines a living wage in New York City as a minimum of $10 per hour with benefits, or $11.50 per hour without benefits." from http://www.livingwagenyc.or...
Apparently some 149 municipalities have living wage rules, according to them. For Baltimore: The Living Wage Law currently requires the payment of the Living Wage of either $13.19 per hour, effective September 27, 2013 or $9.91 per hour effective September 27, 2013 depending upon the jurisdiction where the services are performed.
http://www.dllr.state.md.us...
That link was about a campaign for a proposal to raise the minimum wage for the state of Maryland, the proposal didn't pass. The minimum wage is still $7.25 in Maryland, including Baltimore.
What you do with the available space is another issue, but it's a moot issue if you don't have the space to begin with because height restrictions have spread buildings all over rather than stacking them.
If real estate prices (as experienced by individual residents, if not developers) are increasing, that's a sign that there's not enough housing stock. How to increase it without taking up space for roads & parks? Taller apartment buildings! I should note, like Yglesias, that when I discuss height restrictions, it is also something of a stand-in for a variety of rules like minimum parking requirements and single-family detached home zoning with minimum yard space that reduce the amount of floor-space for any given unit of real estate. Making parking spaces mandatory leads to more car-ownership & driving, further congesting the roads.
That first link I posted, that was from two years ago when Baltimore raised their minimum wage, which sits at 9.25$ now. Baltimore definitely sets their own minimum wage.
"Then why do so many people in cities make minimum wage or less?"How many is "so many"? A very small percentage of full-time workers make minimum wage. And one of the few areas exempted is farm labor, which is going to be found outside of cities. If you mean "so many" in terms of absolute numbers rather than percentages, that would be easily explained by the fact that so many people live in cities, so even if a small percentage make minimum wage multiplying that by the large population still results in a sizable number. But you might be asking why do so many of the poor live in cities. The answer is that there's easier access to public transit & social services. Suburbs are more likely to be completely zoned so as to make it unaffordable for poor people to live there, and lack public housing as well. The people who currently make minimum wage in cities would not be likely to earn more outside cities. Really, you should read some economists on this. It's not an issue with a left-right or freshwater-saltwater split, the wage premium for dense cities is quite well known.
Yglesias thinks it is the poor in particular who are driven away by the high rents resulting from building restrictions. He views "gentrification" as being the result of increasingly desirable real estate being fought over, with rich people displacing poor people in old housing stock. He argues that if cities permitted more housing to be built, rich people would move into the new (generally higher quality) housing stock, while poor people could move into the place those rich people have vacated. Avent compares those restrictions in cities to those in "gated neighborhoods" commonly associated with suburbs which deliberately make themselves inaccessible to the poor.
"No, the opposite! You yourself said zoning forces a "spread out", that means taking up more (horizontal) space that could be used for parks, roads, etc!"
I think you misinterpreted what I meant by "spread out". The conversion of several office blocks into one skyscraper does indeed create more space for roads and parks but that's not the issue, the issue is that the extra space usually doesn't go towards roads or parks, it goes towards more offices and homes: the skyscraper allows the city to become more densily populated, with less roads, and that's what tends to happen. If you do keep the extra space open through regulations you'll see an increase in real estate priceswith more people being squeezed in the same homes. Building tall buildings in cities is like adding mass to a black hole: everything surrounding the tall buildings tends to get sucked in, the host nation minus the city may definitely see an increase in space (the area of the city may become smaller), but the people in the city are squeezed together and actually experience less living space.
"US Minimum Wage is set by whatever locality sees fit to set it."
It is, but NYC and Baltimore haven't made use of that power, neither have LA, Chicago, Houston and Miami.
"I was in the chemical, supply chain and consulting industries till recently. In the 1990's it was possible to get an unpaid internship, but now they are illegal outside of working for Congress etc. due to min. wage laws."
It's illegal but the ban is not enforced: http://www.theatlantic.com/...
"It really does depend on the kind of industry you are looking at. Manufacturing is almost never in major cities here, generally on the outskirts. Usually you see smaller, more human capital oriented businesses located in cities as opposed to big capital intensive firms. Only the corporate offices of the latter might be in a city, as far as I can tell because the people like living there."
Manufacturing has been shrinking in favor of services for a long time now, still there are services businesses (such as small IT businesses) that are only in large cities because everyone else is, while they could be just as profitable, perhaps even more so, somewhere else, here's to hoping future policies will succeed to bring those businesses to smaller cities.
"Things might be different in the EU, but in the States people want to move to the cities, and hope to find a job there, not the other way around generally. I am not a fan of cities myself, but I am the strange one for it, not the other way around. Maybe the EU is just bad at cities?"
There will certainly be differences between the EU and US. What I know is that here in the EU many rural communities and smaller cities are shrinking (pensioners, unemployed people and the occasional skilled laborer stay behind) in favor of large cities and that many young people who have to move to a large city to find a job wish they didn't have to. European cities are generally overcrowded with sky high rents for ill maintained shoeboxes and about half of all households depending on subsidized housing to make ends meet in large cities. Still I know there are many Americans who prefer the suburbs or smaller cities, especially when they have children.
"IMASBA, Eric is correct about even entry level workers making more."
Then why do so many people in cities make minimum wage or less?
"That's one reason why writers like Yglesias & Avent bang the drum on helping making it easier for low-end workers to live & work in cities in books like "The Rent is Too Damn High" and "The Gated City"."
The first book is about city rents having become to expensive for pretty much everyone and wages not making up the difference. The second book is about a privileged group of middle class homeowners who can choose between jobs in different places, for them the wages in the city also aren't high enough to make up for the housing prices and it also does argue the cities help make the rich richer.
"so essentially you're asking people to give up space for more income"
No, the opposite! You yourself said zoning forces a "spread out", that means taking up more (horizontal) space that could be used for parks, roads, etc! If you want more space devoted to unstackable public areas, that necessitates that you shift developed infrastructure upward.
"Why can't it be failure of the proponents of skyscrapers to meet the demands of the local population?"Because then the demands would be in the form of something other than a restriction on height! It's an absolutely terrible tool to respond to the complaints you've brought up. Taxing the valuable real estate unlocked by allowing upward development would result in FAR less deadweight loss.
Zoning does the opposite of making housing affordable. Houston was mentioned above as having some of the least zoning, it's also much more affordable. That's the big reason the biggest net population flow across U.S states in recent years has been to Texas. The area Paul Krugman calls the "Zoned Zone" (typically around big cities on the coast) is the most expensive and had some of the biggest housing (really, real estate) run-ups.