4/22/2026 at 1:56:18 AM
Incredible. So what you're saying is... we should just build more housing? Who would have thought that was the answer?by exabrial
4/22/2026 at 3:01:53 AM
I've been told repeatedly by people who have a vested interest in maintaining high housing prices that supply and demand don't work at all, ever, for any reason, and high prices are no reason to build more housing. How do I reconcile these facts?!?by darksaints
4/22/2026 at 11:27:20 AM
you're not the one with stuff to reconcilesimply ask the people on the vested side: "why do you want rents to stay high?" and stand back
by jareklupinski
4/22/2026 at 3:32:14 AM
Easily.Many of those people have a correct observation in that new construction is just luxury housing, which is obviously unaffordable for people struggling with rent.
What they fail to miss is that for every luxury unit that's built and is occupied, some well-off person moved into it... And out of a shitty, cheap unit that's now on the market.
by vkou
4/22/2026 at 3:56:03 AM
Almost all new construction is luxury housing; it's what pencils out. The mechanism by which it reduces prices is by reducing demand pressure on older housing stock, which would otherwise be bought up and rehabbed by the same people moving into the "luxury" housing. The constraint that makes this work is increased density: so long as you're adding net units to the market, new construction at any price level will reduce prices in the market.by tptacek
4/22/2026 at 8:01:27 AM
As someone who grew up in San Diego and now lives in Dubai, I point towards how much of the construction companies in Dubai are partly government owned and were at once fully owned before the government sold shares in their IPOs.I really don’t understand why the California government doesn’t just build luxury condos at a large scale for profit. The state will get revenue and lower housing costs overall.
by EduardoBautista
4/22/2026 at 10:28:58 AM
Not a bad idea, should have started with a 2 family house before trying to build a high speed train.by wallst07
4/22/2026 at 10:46:35 AM
Private companies are good at removing inefficiencies. As long as there is competition, private companies will offer better service at lower price. State-owned companies work better in cases where maintaining healthy competition is not possible, or where inefficiencies are not a concern.In particular, Gulf states have virtually unlimited money, which means that it doesn't matter whether a new construction costs $400k or $800k or what.
It's very rare to find state-owned companies which main goal is to provide service to the citizens and they turn a profit without some form of government subsidies along the way. Let me ask - if you think there is huge market for new construction and it's easy to make profit, why don't you start a construction company?
by anal_reactor
4/22/2026 at 12:32:27 PM
Except Medicare disproves this as a universal case. Government can run efficiently.by gcanyon
4/22/2026 at 10:55:05 AM
It's 'easy' if you have inside connections with the planning and zoning committees and utility companies. I recently developed a property worth about $250k for about $100k. The building process itself is relatively cheap (land + cost construction way cheaper than value of a finished property) and straightforward, everything else is not.The only reason why I was able to get it done as a random person was because I used a non-commercial loophole to not have to get the inspections that are used as hostile clamp on disfavored competition, and the utility companies that could have charged me a gazillion dollars saw that I was just a guy with a family and took pity on my situation (they are used to dealing with large commercial developers) and gave me the easiest out at every opportunity.
If you are a favored developer you can get things done as easily and almost as cheaply as I did and make vast profits. If not you are fucked and you barely break even because either government workers, or government franchised utility monopolies fuck you at every turn. I lost count of how many times I basically saved $20k-$30k because someone decided not to fuck me that day over some inane detail that in the end doesn't actually make any meaningful difference (the only time I got unlucky -- a utility worker made me redo a survey which cost thousands and then LOLed later that I never needed it, eventually it turned out this person was literally just making shit up which is an astonishingly common tactic when some asshole just wants to delay dealing with you. I was only able to fire this utility company because I was on the border between two monopoly lines which created an unusual point of actual competition, and the next one used a ton of creativity to get the same thing done for relatively next to nothing).
by mothballed
4/22/2026 at 12:39:45 PM
I am begging you to write a detailed overview of how all of this played out.by underlipton
4/22/2026 at 10:12:39 AM
Why? The level of graft would be breathtaking. No doubt some major builders would get preference for cost plus budgets on inflated numbers. Politicians would steer money to their supporters.They’d like be building at 1.5 to 2 times what private does.
by refurb
4/22/2026 at 10:20:04 AM
Because government bureaucrats need to be let in on the take to make it worth their time. Graft is how that gets done. Otherwise they usually just stonewall housing.Paying $1 to government shills and corrupt capitalists for every $1 spent on actual housing is still a hell of a deal compared to not being able to build anything, which is the status quo in many locked up parcels. A moral standoff and resting on your principles of not funding graft sounds nice, but doesn't accomplish anything.
by mothballed
4/22/2026 at 10:30:20 AM
>Paying $1 to government shills and corrupt capitalists for every $1And then some forensic accounting happens and a paper is published citing that government built homes cost twice as much as privately built, and the program stops.
by wallst07
4/22/2026 at 10:37:08 AM
It doesn't seem to stop all the other graft-ridden wasteful parts of government.Personally I despise the idea of public housing, but once something is there, it becomes easier to develop. There has to be some way of enticing all the factions stopping housing with productive greed rather than anti-productive greed. If public built housing gets something where there was nothing until the first paper gets published or whatever, maybe it's worth doing a deal with the devil.
by mothballed
4/22/2026 at 8:34:18 AM
Because that's communismby omnimus
4/22/2026 at 12:34:20 PM
This is the common refrain, however, consider:There were two shitty, cheap units. The people in the first were forced to move out when a developer bought it, tore it down, and built the luxury unit. They have been homeless/going into debt renting a third slightly-less-shitty third unit. Without the first shitty, cheap unit, the second's competition was that third slightly-less-shitty unit; they raised their prices commensurately.
The well-off person moved into their nice new unit. The poor person's choice is staying in the unit they can't afford, or spending thousands on moving costs to go to a shittier unit that they also can't afford. Oh, and the city "motivated" the luxury unit's development with tax incentives. A larger percentage of the poor person's check is now going toward paying that back.
This is the reality once you get past simple narratives and reconcile with the fact that building tons of luxury units hasn't actually moved the needle.
by underlipton
4/22/2026 at 10:45:39 AM
luxury housing? I see miles and miles of $650k townhouses that look like government housing. It would be much easier to cut demand.by afpx
4/22/2026 at 3:51:03 AM
The question is whether the well-off person moved in from the same market, or from elsewhere. (Also, whether they vacate their previous unit or, e.g., keep it as a vacation home.)by BrenBarn
4/22/2026 at 3:56:30 AM
None of those are really pertinent because it doesn't change the fact that the well-off person is going to occupy an additional housing unit in this scenario no matter what.The question is whether it's going to be new construction that they occupy or existing construction. If you're not well-off you'd want that decision to end up with "new construction" so you can move into "existing construction" at a lower rent/mortgage than if new construction didn't exist.
by mpyne
4/22/2026 at 4:03:26 AM
I don't think that is necessarily true. I believe there are, for instance, many reasonably wealthy people who live somewhere outside California and would not move into a dumpy old apartment in LA or SF but might move into a fancy new one. In other words, they will not occupy an additional housing unit (in a given market) unless it is "nice" enough.I am in favor of building new housing, but I'm even more in favor of reducing wealth inequality. I think we can do both, but we need to be deliberate about it.
by BrenBarn
4/22/2026 at 10:31:43 AM
>I am in favor of building new housing, but I'm even more in favor of reducing wealth inequality. I think we can do both, but we need to be deliberate about it.... And that's why nothing gets done.
by wallst07
4/22/2026 at 5:07:41 AM
Taken to extremes you'll have all wealthy people living in California, and the rest of the country available to us plebs.The greatest tool we have to reduce wealth inequality is make it so people can buy homes - and the biggest levers we seem to have there are making supply available in general, and making jobs available where there's already supply.
by bombcar
4/22/2026 at 7:05:07 AM
> Taken to extremes you'll have all wealthy people living in California, and the rest of the country available to us plebs.Which is exactly what people are afraid of happening, and what they mean by the crisis of housing affordability.
You can go and buy or rent a cheap house today in probably 90% of the localities of the USA. Of course, if you already live in those places, you probably don't have the money, because good work is very hard to find.
The problem of housing is that regular people want to live in NYC, and Chicago, and LA, and all of these places, and relatively near to where their jobs are, and they're seeing the rich own more and more of the space that could have allowed them to do so.
by tsimionescu
4/22/2026 at 10:34:22 AM
"The problem of housing is that regular people want to live in NYC, and Chicago, and LA, and all of these places, and relatively near to where their jobs are"It's not clear in your phrasing, but it sounds like this is a casual correlation. It's not... Many people only want to live in these cities because it's the ONLY way to get work, given a choice they would quickly move out.
by wallst07
4/22/2026 at 11:38:56 AM
It is a cycle that always leads to increased population density, and has done so since the dawn of agriculture. People tend to go where there are more people, and then work and entertainment happens where most people are, which attracts more people, and so on. This was as true in Ur as it is in NYC.by tsimionescu
4/22/2026 at 11:04:33 AM
Or, maybe the jobs are there because people companies want to hire want to live there. We have a way of testing this now given that remote work is a thing. We can see if people would rather work remotely from a cheap house in rural Kansas and have nothing to do in the evenings or live in an expensive apartment in an exciting city where their job is.by jhbadger
4/22/2026 at 6:58:39 AM
> What they fail to miss is that for every luxury unit that's built and is occupied, some well-off person moved into it... And out of a shitty, cheap unit that's now on the market.Ah yes, good old trickle down economics, applied to housing. It's obviously always true that the people moving into a new luxury home are coming from existing lower-luxury homes in the same part of the same city, and will immediately sell or rent those homes off at prices no larger than what they themselves had paid for them and no more.
And we're basing all of this on a tiny decrease in the prices of new rent offers in one of the most expensive in the USA, which built a tiny amount of extra homes recently, not even clear of what type. Clear causation well established.
by tsimionescu
4/22/2026 at 3:09:14 AM
If demand for cars skyrockets then you (eventually) get more cars at the same price coz the manufacturer can just make more.If everybody wants to buy up land because "god isnt making it any more" you get less land at an even higher price which makes it even more attractive as a store in value.
So no, supply and demand doesnt really work for land the way it works for everything else.
Land needs to be taxed a lot to create enough supply and in California prop 13 quite deliberately did the precise opposite of that.
by pydry
4/22/2026 at 3:14:03 AM
Zoning that reduces buildable footprint and/or height artificially increases demand for land. If the only way to build a home is to buy a 9000 sqft lot, then my demand for land is 9000 sqft. If you can build 18 homes on that same lot, my demand for land is 450 sqft.Land definitely needs to be taxed, but not without the zoning changes first to allow more to be built on less.
by darksaints
4/22/2026 at 3:19:46 AM
Zoning is the hobby horse of property developers. They're endlessly frustrated by the way zoning prevents them from building the most profitable construction - no matter whether there is a good or a bad reason for it (sometimes it's good sometimes it's not).This inspires a lobbying and public outreach effort to try and convince people that relaxing zoning rules will fix everything.
As with many corporate lobbied for campaigns, it may be a good idea in general (e.g. net neutrality) or it may not be but it's definitely never the panacea it's sold as by the well funded PR campaign.
by pydry
4/22/2026 at 4:31:25 AM
This is empirically not supported. Relaxing zoning rules works extremely well.Look at Japan, look at any metropolitan U.S. city that has actually leaned into it. Europe has had mixed use zones for effectively centuries and is not the dystopia that NIMBYs proclaim will appear in the absence of zoning.
It is unpopular because we subsidize the lives and assets of people who “have things” through zoning policy that they make.
by nostrebored
4/22/2026 at 10:22:16 AM
Up to a point. Yes, it is nice to mix housing and retail and the like, and some zoning laws prevent this. But you have to look back into the 19th century before zoning laws existed and you had things like slaughterhouses opening in residential neighborhoods. Zoning has good reasons to exist.by jhbadger
4/22/2026 at 11:38:48 AM
Taxing land works better. Look at Japan where property taxes encourage development.by pydry
4/22/2026 at 3:33:17 AM
TFA shows that it was zoning changes that allowed the influx of housing and lower prices. You can find similar articles across the country everywhere that has had significant relaxation of zoning restrictions, like in Minneapolis, Austin, and Seattle (just off the top of my head). This includes places where building code and permitting processes have gotten more arduous while the zoning was relaxed.I don't care if it is a panacea or not...If you want to convince me that restrictive zoning is not the most significant cause of our housing affordability crisis, you'd have to find some better proof than "developers like upzoning and developers are bad people".
by darksaints
4/22/2026 at 4:41:58 AM
> SeattleSource for Seattle? I know there was a state law a couple years ago allowing for more housing, but I haven't seen reports of its effects.
by Izikiel43
4/22/2026 at 3:34:30 AM
"It won't fix everything" doesn't seem like much of an argument against it, though?by skybrian
4/22/2026 at 5:05:24 AM
It's like the starfish tale - https://www.thestarfishchange.org/starfish-taleAdding a dwelling unit won't solve the problem for everyone - but it will solve the problem for someone!
(Now there's perhaps an offset argument - if you can afford to build or buy, should you build so as to increase the supply?)
by bombcar
4/22/2026 at 4:56:14 AM
>If everybody wants to buy up land because "god isnt making it any more" you get less land at an even higher price which makes it even more attractive as a store in value.Yes but people aren't trying to buy land, they are trying to buy housing, which yes, has a foundation on land but also can increase vertically without significantly increasing the land usage.
by bryanrasmussen
4/22/2026 at 3:28:50 AM
Land != Housing.by BobbyJo
4/22/2026 at 3:06:17 AM
If the alleged people actually said this, and they wanted to "maintain high prices", then why would they oppose more building? If they believed "supply and demand don't work at all", then more supply wouldn't hurt their goal of maintaining high prices.by WillPostForFood
4/22/2026 at 3:17:06 AM
A former trustee in the inner-ring suburb in which I live owns and manages rental housing throughout the municipality and is a vocal opponent of building new housing, and of the argument that supply and demand functions in the housing market. I could screenshot him for you, but you have no idea who he is, so: just take my word for it, these aren't "alleged" people. They're a major force in local politics around the country, which is where this fight is primarily being fought.by tptacek
4/22/2026 at 5:08:49 AM
Leveraged investors in real estate become incredibly "conservative" really fast - not politically but in the "don't ever change anything holy shit I'm on a knife edge" even if the changes would be a net benefit for them.by bombcar
4/22/2026 at 3:09:34 AM
For the same reason that NIMBYs care so much about urban trees or spotted owls. They don't actually give a shit about them, they just are willing to say or do anything to sabotage the process of increasing housing supply.by darksaints
4/22/2026 at 3:33:16 AM
I'm as big a YIMBY as you'll find, and urban trees are really important to making a city a nice place to live. There's no contradiction to those positions - just, you know, build more housing and plant more trees. (Spotted owls, of course, have nothing to do with urbanism, so I don't know how they got dragged in here.)by eszed
4/22/2026 at 3:13:13 AM
Being a NIMBY I want to live in the neighbourhood I bought a house in, not the one someone who can leave with a months notice feels like turning it into.by noosphr
4/22/2026 at 4:43:30 AM
I think this us a fair feeling. One chooses a house based in part on the area as the specifics of the house itself. Wanting the neighborhood to remain unchanged is a reasonable desire.Unfortunately, as much as you desire it, it's not something you can control. Neighborhoods change all the time. That good school you moved to be close to can decline, people with the wrong politics can move in next door, the convenient mall may close.
Yes, local politics gives you a vote. But of course we all get the same vote, homeowners and wannabe homeowners.
So, I think your want is valid, alas though you have no rights to your neighborhood and so your want is just what you want.
Of course you should stand up for your wants. But wants are not rights. So it's equal to everyone else's wants.
I'm upvoting you because your desire is not invalid. However, and I don't mean this perjorativly, your wants don't legally count for much. Just as much as any other person.
by bruce511
4/22/2026 at 5:10:33 AM
Part of the problem (or the solution depending on what side you stand on) is that only residents get a say, and often you find that the renters become just as nimby as the owners, especially if rent controls or other advantages are in place.And those outside have a very hard time voting where they want to live but don't.
(The old solution was to make a new city that was like you wanted, with blackjack and hookers, hell forget the city we'll just build the strip!)
by bombcar
4/22/2026 at 3:15:17 AM
Being a homeowner, you get a title to your lot, not your entire neighborhood. You have no legal claim on your neighbor's home. If you want a legal claim on your neighbor's home, join an HOA. Or just buy it.by darksaints
4/22/2026 at 3:21:25 AM
You do. It's called zoning.by noosphr
4/22/2026 at 3:57:51 AM
Zoning belongs to all the voters in the municipality, not just the homeowners.by mpyne
4/22/2026 at 3:34:30 AM
I'd be willing to bet you every last dollar on the planet that if you read your deed, you will find zero claims to any particular zoning. Zoning is not a transferable property right. It can be changed for any reason at any time.by darksaints
4/22/2026 at 10:38:43 AM
So can the US constitution through amendments, but it's not easy.by wallst07
4/22/2026 at 10:08:32 AM
... with a vote. And subject to the takings clause.The government can also just take your deed and property, again subject to the takings clause, so long as they pay you back. Or claim someone was slinging crack there or something and not pay you back.
If you're including things subject to the democratic process all the above is on the table.
Also plenty of things written into the deed don't mean shit. It's quite common to read a deed that says something like, in more fluffed terms "no black people allowed." This got baked into lots of deeds back in the day and never got changed because removing covenants to a deed is usually next to impossible. It doesn't mean dick because again the government can simply add or subtract by fiat what your deed actually means.
What your deed is and isn't is a lot closer to how zoning works than you think. Ranchers found this out when their transferrable private property grazing rights tracing back to the very founding era of the USA got usurped by the government and ultimately the BLM who turned around and actually said they're public federal property (which resulted in things like, the Bundy standoff).
by mothballed
4/22/2026 at 3:33:54 AM
It's a beautiful state of affairs when owners of property can collude for their interests with almost no restrictions, but worker unions are almost entirely defanged.by vkou
4/22/2026 at 3:41:08 AM
With good reason: https://www.cfmeuinquiry.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0...I have paid between $3,000 and $6,000 personally to organized crime so a bunch of bogans can buy American suvs to kill cyclists more efficiently.
by noosphr
4/22/2026 at 5:36:08 AM
Meanwhile, nobody bats an eye when housing prices inflate $300,000 because existing homeowners are doing their fucking hardest to make sure that no new homes get built.by vkou
4/22/2026 at 9:54:20 AM
Yes, home owners: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/12/canada-migrati...Funny how when you hit the breaks on pupulation growth house prices also freeze.
by noosphr
4/22/2026 at 4:43:52 AM
I have a bridge to sell youby Izikiel43
4/22/2026 at 3:05:29 AM
If demand picks up because supply increases, you will reach the previous equilibrium even with more supply. It isn’t rocket science, there is a price people are willing to pay to live in SD, and the market will keep gravitating to that price unless demand is somehow limited. The price people are willing to pay can even increase as density makes brings in things (eg culture, job opportunities) that make the city more desirable (eg see Hong Kong).by seanmcdirmid
4/22/2026 at 3:20:01 AM
At the levels of density seen in Paris, San Diego could house 16 million people. That's city proper. The metro area could house 226 million people.You're gonna have to do a lot better job convincing me that 16 million people would move to San Diego if they just built more housing. Let alone 226 million.
by darksaints
4/22/2026 at 4:27:55 AM
Twist do you think happens to every city that has reached 16 million people? Did they become more popular or less? Given that I’ve lived in a city of that size, my answer will differ from yours (they become more expensive, not less).I’m confused on why you think paris is affordable and San Diego metro could somehow have enough water to grow to 220 million. The nearest comparison I can think of is south China Bay Area population (87 million), and if you think that those cities are affordable…I’m guessing we really have to agree to disagree.
by seanmcdirmid
4/22/2026 at 8:28:09 AM
> Twist do you think happens to every city that has reached 16 million people?It's not about the exact number, it's that one city is not going to 10x in population from getting the price of housing down to "still a city but not skyrocketing".
> I’m confused on why you think paris is affordable
Compared to San Diego, it does seem to be significantly more affordable, and mainly because of rent.
> and San Diego metro could somehow have enough water
The most expensive source of water, desalination, should be under $1 per day per person. And there's probably better options.
> to grow to 220 million.
That number is a silly number to explain density, not a proposal.
> and if you think that those cities are affordable…
No, the only comparison point was Paris, and the density of Paris.
by Dylan16807
4/22/2026 at 5:43:36 AM
San Diego would be a very popular city at lower prices, but simply put there isn't enough population in the US to even think that demand could grow anywhere close to those levels. It would take a 50 year long gold rush, draining of other American cities, etc. The fastest growing city in modern history, Shenzen, grew 6000% in 30 years, and it could only do so because China simultaneously had the highest population growth in the world and the highest urbanization rate in the world.At some point, demand is saturated, and it takes an extremely delusional belief that demand can perpetually grow so that prices never drop. We have proof in the article that prices can drop with even moderately fast construction rates. Keep going.
by darksaints
4/22/2026 at 4:34:13 AM
Yet the rent in Paris is still too high for an average French resident; and while rent is lower than in San Diego, the price of an apartment is higher. And, of course, median salary in San Diego is far higher than in Paris.by LudwigNagasena
4/22/2026 at 3:18:55 AM
There a lot of desirable areas in a country and a fixed amount of people.The equilibrium between demand and supply has the supply curve impacted by a whole host of policy choices.
Eg housing is impacted by cost of permitting, regulations, cost of materials and labor etc.
All of these things can be improved by policy.
There's a strong argument that especially infrastructure but housing should be built with people on work visas.
by someperson
4/22/2026 at 5:18:33 AM
Water is the primary limiter on city population sizes in the west. I wouldn’t be surprised if San Diego wasn’t at its limit already with respect to water resources, but I haven’t looked into it. Desalination could improve that.If we could have Chinese work crews come in and build housing, especially 30 story concrete towers that are popular in Asia, we could build fairly cheaply, that isn’t really the limitation (it’s easier to solve than getting water to those new units for expanded population).
by seanmcdirmid
4/22/2026 at 12:30:05 PM
San Diego in fact has a surfeit that it's looking at selling offhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/climate/san-diego-water-s...
by littlexsparkee
4/22/2026 at 10:12:24 AM
They thought Vegas was at it's limit years ago, but no they found efficiency upon efficiency.by someperson
4/22/2026 at 3:21:29 AM
No, this is a false belief known as supply skepticism: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=supp...by verteu
4/22/2026 at 4:38:24 AM
Weird title for a paper that argues that "Government intervention is critical to ensure that supply is added at prices affordable to a range of incomes". I would personally classify that position as "supply skepticism".by LudwigNagasena
4/22/2026 at 3:17:51 AM
Supply increased, rents declined.by tptacek
4/22/2026 at 4:28:34 AM
Short term. Long term the market will change to equilibrium. If you are buying, just lock in lower housing prices now. If you are renting without rent control, you get one or two years of reasonable rates and then it will go nuts again.by seanmcdirmid
4/22/2026 at 4:43:58 AM
This is an obviously farcical belief.If everywhere built more housing do you think the price of housing would go up? Where are these people bringing up housing prices coming from?
by nostrebored
4/22/2026 at 5:21:39 AM
Buffalo has 50% as much housing now as it did at its peak, since demand dropped and housing was just razed rather than maintained. There are lots and lots of cities in the USA that aren’t San Diego, LA, SF, Portland, Seattle, NYC, Boston, … and they have plenty of supply that there is no demand for. You can buy a house for cheap in Toledo. For some reason, people would rather pay $3000/month to live in San Diego than $700/month to live in Buffalo or Toledo. It shouldn’t be a mystery why.I lived in Beijing for 9 years so I get a different perspective. But ya, the market for people who want to live in Beijing rather than Chengde or Langfang is surprisingly vast, and Beijing has a resident system to prevent at will migrations.
by seanmcdirmid
4/22/2026 at 5:14:11 AM
Housing prices always go up (they seem to believe this)Houses can be built (this seems obvious)
Ergo, we can remove the national debt by building between 59 million and 121 million houses (depending on if you count the value of the land there).
by bombcar
4/22/2026 at 6:43:24 AM
Yes, after all there are countless examples where doing just that lowered rent long term. Simple as that, a shame that dummies don’t get it.In fact we should force current owners to sell in order build more densely on their land! And keep doing that until their housing valuation decimates.
by kubb
4/22/2026 at 6:21:06 AM
God most of the "discussion" around housing is such copium by obviously-biased people trying to convince everyone that we shouldn't have access to high quality housing. Yes, in the year 2026, despite all of humanity's achievements, it's of course IMPOSSIBLE to configure any type of society such that housing is decent and fair for all. IMPOSSIBLE, did you hear? Nope, it just won't work. Whatever your reason, you're wrong, society is perfect already and we cannot improve.And the reasons people try to give... Just hilarious to evaluate from a high level. Oh, no we can't have good housing because supply and demand has determined what we have is optimal. Oh actually even if you did adjust supply and demand, it wouldn't fix the issue anyway, so don't try anything. Ah no you can't have more houses because then how will people commute?! Unsolvable! There aren't enough houses in a reasonable distance from urban centres? God well how about you just build a house in the outback where the supermarket is 200km away then! No we can't have more houses because then it will attract <demographic I don't like>. But think of the children - how will they survive without a 10 acre backyard to play in??
It's so disgustingly painfully obvious to any reasonable person that we have no reason to have a housing crisis other than certain people collecting those fat stacks of cash, sweet cash.
by mcdeltat
4/22/2026 at 10:46:31 AM
You say this like it is such a obvious problem to solve, and from a naive point of view, maybe so.But each of the reasons why things the way they are isn't just stupidity. It's backed by people's preferences for living. EVERYONE is extremely opinionated on housing because it affects us the most (air/food/water/shelter...) . We all have something to say about where we live or have lived and the pros/cons.
by wallst07
4/22/2026 at 12:25:37 PM
I see the "supply and demand" straw man is propped up well and often in this thread. Let's talk about the actual dynamics in play:1) Rent-Fixing: This is widespread across the country and the actual reason why inventory increases often (commonly) do not lower prices. There are multiple tactics landlords have used to ratchet up rates without ever letting them drop. These include lease concessions that don't affect the base rent in lieu of rate drops in step with lowered demand, warehousing that artificially limits accessible supply even when new, physical units are hitting the market, and algorithmic price-fixing had allowed landlords within a region to stay in lock step without breaking rank lower. When landlords are able to use such tactics with impunity, they absolutely do warp supply-demand dynamics and allow rent rates to stay high even in the face of expanding actual inventory. For rents to decline, you have to break large landlords' ability to set their price.
2) Builder Subsidies: "Just build more and prices will drop," ignores that the incentive structures municipalities use to draw developers are an additional burden on residents. These for-profit corporations then seek to make a profit on their investment, leading to no direct meaningful inventory increase in the affordable unit range. Worse, developers often target existing affordable units for their redevelopment, destroying the very units that the new inventory is supposed to ultimately reduce demand for. In order for "build more" to drive down rents, it can't be done the way it has been, which mostly ends up being a giveaway to developers at the expense of the tax base and displaced renters.
San Diego is a special case where it seems that the expanding inventory has been driven not by corporate developers, but by the construction of ADUs, which are built by homeowners out-of-pocket, are not tax-subsidized and, in fact, increase the taxable value of property. In this way, they work almost counter to traditional development, and these factors combine with their being created and operated outside of the control of corporate landlords means that they represent new and meaningful competition to those landlords. Thus, efficiencies are sought and prices drop.
Encourage ADUs. Avoid subsidizing large developers and corporate landlords. If there is the political will, get the government directly involved in constructing subsidized owner-occupied, human-scale housing, as in Singapore and the pre-Thatcher UK. Relax zoning and build out public transit and car-free infrastructure in order to reduce the accessibility premium, as in Japan. That is how "build more" actually can work to lower rates.
by underlipton
4/22/2026 at 2:06:13 AM
Building the house is the easiest part of building a house.by mothballed
4/22/2026 at 4:07:41 AM
Some: Not in my backyard.A lot of people have vested interest in keeping the housing pricing high. That’s also pretty much why zoning and other regulations never get updated to match the demand.
by itopaloglu83
4/22/2026 at 2:57:51 AM
I'm not sure half the country would agree!by rockskon
4/22/2026 at 10:47:51 AM
Texas... lots of cheap land to build and some of the least expensive new home prices in the country.by wallst07
4/22/2026 at 3:04:39 AM
The trick is in creating new supply when faced with:* Existing land/property owners who dont particularly want to give up their land.
* Property developers who would rather flog one ultra luxury unit to a foreign buyer than 3 to somebody on a median income.
* NIMBYs with multimillion dollar mortgages terrified that denser housing will push them into negative equity.
by pydry
4/22/2026 at 4:42:31 AM
Well, that will work in a 1M people city, but in larger ones you also have to fix transit.Another impossible problem, that nobody has ever been able to discover the solution is to build mass transit. Maybe one day people will manage to solve it.
by marcosdumay
4/22/2026 at 12:27:33 PM
Can't tell if serious... like The Onion article suggesting that "there's no solution to reducing gun violence, says nation with unique access to guns".by IAmBroom
4/22/2026 at 4:21:26 AM
There is abundance of housing. It's just that people want to live in big metro areas that have extreme concentration of economic opportunity and amenities.I don't understand how transforming every urban area into Kowloon Walled City will solve that unless your plan is to make it so dense that people will finally find it undesirable to live there?
by LudwigNagasena
4/22/2026 at 4:40:00 AM
At the density of Kowloon Walled City, the entire population of India could fit within the city limits of San Diego. Nobody is asking for that, silly.We could 1.5x the density of San Diego and still have the livability of Copenhagen. We could 3x the density of San Diego and still have the livability of Vienna. We could 5x the density and still have the livability of Paris. 8x and still have the livability of Tokyo. We have a ridiculously low bar to pass, all we have to do is allow it.
by darksaints
4/22/2026 at 10:49:16 AM
That's the issue. Most Americans don't want the entire population of India to be in San Diego. To some of us, San Diego is one of the best areas in the country. Why destroy it?by afpx
4/22/2026 at 12:49:58 PM
Did you only read the first sentence???Second sentence, repeated here for clarity: “Nobody is asking for that, silly.”
Perhaps it’s too much to ask you to read the entire comment you’re responding to, but at least read the second sentence, please.
by iamnothere
4/22/2026 at 5:02:07 AM
Paris [1] and Copenhagen [2] have similar housing issues. Both are some of the most expensive cities in Europe [3]. Vienna has a large municipally owned and non-profit housing stock [4]. The situation in Tokyo was okay while it was growing its stock like crazy, it is facing an intensifying affordability crisis right now [5]. If there is a bliss point at which the housing crisis is solved with density before Kowloon Walled City levels, it surely not at Tokyo levels. What do you think that bliss point is? Why do you think it is a better solution to grow city densities to those levels rather than trying to make it easier to live and work in compact, mid-rise 15-minute cities that people generally seem to prefer? [6][1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/04/20/french-h...
[2] https://www.politico.eu/article/copenhagen-denmark-mette-fre...
[3] https://www.vanguardngr.com/2026/01/top-10-most-expensive-ci...
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/10/housin...
[5] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2025/09/29/japan/society/r...
[6] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02697459.2026.2...
by LudwigNagasena
4/22/2026 at 5:17:35 AM
Housing price is a function of supply and demand and your argument had nothing to do with price of housing, you were only talking about density and its effect on livability. And it's very clear that people value living in cities that are much denser than San Diego. If people genuinely do not want a denser San Diego, there wouldn't be any point to restricting that growth.I personally would love to live in a city like Tokyo. People have different preferences. Don't force your preferences on me. If people "generally prefer" midrise cities, they will move there. There's a reason why so many people live in Tokyo when there are plenty of less dense cities in Japan. The great thing about allowing density is that people will stop moving in when they don't like it anymore.
by darksaints
4/22/2026 at 5:51:39 AM
> Housing price is a function of supply and demandYes, a function of supply and demand of everything. [1]
> your argument had nothing to do with price of housing, you were only talking about density and its effect on livability
My argument is that there is no reason to assume that increasing supply by blanket deregulation is a simple and effective solution to the housing crisis that has no downsides.
> If people "generally prefer" midrise cities, they will move there.
Many people don't want to move there because there are not enough economic opportunities, not because they dislike good traffic or green spaces.
> The great thing about allowing density is that people will stop moving in when they don't like it anymore.
If you solve all possible tragedies of the commons of that approach, sure.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnenschein–Mantel–Debreu_the...
by LudwigNagasena