The Negative Relationship Between City Size and Trendiness

Scott Alexander writes, I started the post with the graph of about 50 cities, showing a positive correlation between density and price. Scott captions it, my attempt to place Austin and Houston on the original graph using Sumner's data plus a few other things available online. Why weren't they on there already? Maybe because the graph is metro areas and Sumner was talking about Austin and Houston as cities. But I'm not sure and agree this is confusing. It mixes up population change due to economic effects such as the benefits of agglomeration. With population changes due to regulatory effects such as less strict zoning. If you look at things this way, then the stylized facts work against