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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Land definitely needs to be taxed, but not without the zoning changes first to allow more to be built on less.
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.
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.
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".
Source 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.
Adding 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?)
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
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?
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.
[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...
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.
Yes, 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 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...
From the Zumper report. 22% gain on SF 2B is just insane to me.
https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/national-rent-report
Many interesting comparisons to be made, especially places where rents fell YoY despite population growth.
San Diego has a ton of contractors dependent upon the federal government. I imagine the shenanigans of the current administration caused a bunch of them to pack it in and leave town.
Edit: I think we should build several million more units of housing in the US. I'm salty because all the new housing I've seen is ugly shitboxes owned by national property firms that make everywhere feel like nowhere.
Also, I could not find the "active listings" data in Zumper's report[1]. And then I noticed the chart with the active listing data says it was made by Brenden Tuccinardi/KPBS, so this was done by a reporter, not a Zumper data analyst. It's a bit fishy.
[1] https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/national-rent-report
TJ and SD are really two parts of the same metropolis - any investigation has to see how population ebbs and flows across that border, and what the housing prices did on both sides.
Does that mean the "surge in supply" is really a surge in permits?
https://calmatters.org/housing/2023/11/adu-san-diego/
Tons of San Diego houses have a ton of land thanks to the mid-20th century lawn fetish back when everyone was pretending that there was enough water so there are a lot of places where someone can turn some dead grass into as many as 5 ADUs.
This seems like the only real path - you cannot beat out these skeezy local homeowners and landlords at the corrupt local politics game. You need statewide politicians who have political ambitions to build off of solving these problems.
More supply generally will help, but it's not a silver bullet.
> One well-worn refrain of progressive urban politics is that new, “luxury” housing will not help solve the housing shortage. A 2024 study of U.S. voters found that 30 to 40 percent believed more housing would, instead, increase prices, and another 30 percent believed it would have no effect
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/housing-crisis-ric...
But you do at least get more property taxes?
Just like transportation induced demand, the solution is different style of infrastructure. High capacity metros, bus lanes, and regional rail to get people out of cars and use limited transportation corridors more efficiently than single occupancy vehicles. One more lane bro doesn’t work, but adding new forms of more efficient transportation does.
New, denser housing with mid rise and high rise buildings and a mixture of unit sizes in walkable neighbourhoods with good transit access absorbs new residents and drives down housing costs for everyone. Single family sprawl doesn’t work, but density can.
We have under-built for decades, so it’s easy to misunderstand the signals. More housing gets built and prices still go up, and many people are concluding more housing just increases prices, leading to people with good intentions decrying “luxury housing”. There are plenty of nimby actors in the mix too, tossing in all sorts of misinformation and bad faith arguments, muddying the water.
The reality is areas with strong economic growth are all failing to add enough new housing and demand continues to outstrip supply, leading to higher prices. Many studies have shown even new high end housing helps manage prices, as someone rich enough upgrades, leaving their unit empty for someone else to upgrade into. That chain continues all the way down into the lower cost units, each time freeing up space someone else can afford. Large migration into a region can mess with how much prices can be affected, but studies still show even high priced new units do slow down growth in prices. Supply and demand does apply, we have just massively underestimated how far behind supply is for the demand and need to add so much more housing.
lol
in reality they just keep their "investment" and, in some cases, decide to convert their old house to an airbnb for extra passive income
Yet SoCal suburbs are full of them. And it doesn't necessarily add supply, since most people seek leases longer than the maximum 90 days set by Airbnb. Unused short-term rentals offer significant tax writeoffs. The owners don't need demand, they just need the plot's assessed value to continue increasing.
It's surreal that orange site seriously thinks rich people would ever liquidate the most inflationary asset in the West.
https://x.com/HotAisle/status/2046792071521157600 (taken tonight)
But SSD manufacturers and oil producers have been feeling really greedy this year.
More housing is always a good thing though
I'm not sure where the "19 of 20" comes from because I grabbed the data from the report into a Google Sheet and sorted and it's not #19 by 1br Y/Y, 2br Y/Y or average rent. What it shows is 1br -5.6% and 2br -7.5% Y/Y. LA was -3.6%/-2.5%.
It's hard to find a comparable city to this because there aren't actually a lot of coastal cities in the US that aren't mega-cities (eg Boston, New York, Miami, Houston).
It seems like San Diego built ~4000 new housing units in 2025 with a population of ~1.4M. For comparison, Miami seems to have added ~18,000 but it's population also exceeds 6M so is that a fair comparison?
My point here is that the direct evidence linking building new housing units to changes in rent is weak.
Not that I'm opposed to building by any means but simply blindly building more units is by itself not an answer. It depends on what you build, where you build it and whether you allow effective or actual cartels to monopolize that supply.
Take Manhattan as an extreme example. There has been a ton of building along so-called Billionaire's Row and also some pockets in the Financial District, West Chelsea, the UES and so on. A lot of this stock is the so-called ultra-luxury market. Prices for some of these new units are now exceeding $7000/sq ft.
That is going to help absolutely nobody. Ultra-wealthy non-residents will park money there and that's it. This blind assumption that it will eventually become prole housing is ludicrous.
Housing should primarily be for shelter, not a speculative asset or investment vehicle to get wealthy by denying someone else shelter.
[1]: https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/national-rent-report
[2]: https://www.zumper.com/blog/our-methodology-empowering-the-r...
For some examples, go https://constructioncoverage.com/research/cities-investing-m... , look at metros that authorized many new units in 2023, and then look at inflation-adjusted home price change from 2023-2025.
Like magic, you will find that post-inflation home value growth was low in the metros that built the most: Austin , Raleigh-Cary, Nashville, Jacksonville, Houston.
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.
I've been supporting an advocacy group looking to build social housing and at least half the pushback is from anti-housing "tenant advocates" that work for non-profits funded by extremely foundations with boards that are all very wealthy with multiple homes, and don't see the need for more housing. The "tenant advocates" seem to view housing similarly and only support public housing to the extent that it doesn't actually get built.
Unless you are only talking about housing for a certain type of people, and that you'll only approve housing for that type of people, otherwise no housing? That's a very common position that I disagree with strongly.
Soak the rich, let them pay for the high cost of new housing, and it benefits everyone.
For public housing, it should be for all incomes so that those with high incomes subsidize those with lower incomes, so that the public housing has support throughout all levels of society when it comes to vote for maintenance every year, so that when there's a budget cut it's all of society fighting to ensure that the public housing is maintained.
We need to break out of the idea that only some people deserve to get housing, and that we should build just for that narrow band of people. New housing is expensive, we need a lot of it, and those with money are the ones who should pay for it.
A subtler reason is that public housing is drastically more expensive to build than private housing. There's multifarious reasons for this, and the underlying problem is absolutely worth solving (it's one of the three big prescriptions in Abundance), but it's a bigger problem than housing. Right now, people are focused on whatever's going to bring the most units online fastest.
People in the year 1500 could pretty reliably tell you that a rock would fall down if you released it from a height. People would also tell you that if you threw it up and away, it would go up in an arc and fall down.
The innovation that Newtown and friends brought about was they made quantitative predictions about the rate at which the rock would fall down, or the arc it would follow - both to pretty high level of accuracy.
The point is that, of course, building more houses has a tendency to reduce rents. The question is whether reduction is -0.1% or -10% or there is an increase of +5% because some other factor was more dominant. It would be very hard for policy makers to argue against building more housing, if there was a quantitative model that predicted exact numbers for how much rent fell down given all relevant factors, and this model had been validated over and over again by prediction (not retrodiction). Rather than "rock fall down if you drop it" model that everyone keeps quoting.
Zoning and homeowners are holding on to the rock with a death grip, all while saying "the rock won't fall if we let go, that's fake science, it's far more nuanced you see" as they lie through their teeth to make big profits and immiserate those who don't own land.
But in reality, the political choice of "let's build A, or B, or C" doesn't exist to maximize the effect of housing. People overly focus on highly regulating to a specific type of housing to prevent anything from getting built.
Let people decide for their own what type of housing they want, and all of a sudden we'd have enough of it. That's the biggest fear of landlords and homeowners.
They are mostly interested in "rent go down", or at least "rent not go up".
That said, there are people who have studied this. You don't need Newtonian level math to calculate elasticity. Hell, we can look at how rents rise in a constrained market and make a pretty good guess what would happen if supply increases.
There are dozens of papers that have these numbers when you search the academic databases for "rent elasticity"
It's harder than you think to argue for a house price decrease when it's the singular asset that most older adults have most of their wealth tied up in.
But that's not the reason most San Franciscans oppose development. The primary reasons are 1) they're convinced more development will raise prices, 2) they believe affordability must be mandated through price controls or subsidies (e.g. developers dedicating X% of units for below market prices), 3) they insist on bike shedding every development proposal to death, 4) they're convinced private development is inherently inequitable (only "luxury" housing is built).
Pretty much the only group of people in the city worried about housing stock increases reducing prices are developers trying to sell-off new units. But developers are repeat players, and they're generally not the ones lending support to development hurdles. Though, there is (was?) at least one long-time developer who specializes in building "affordable" housing--mostly at public expense, of course--who did aggressively lobby for development hurdles, but carefully crafted so he and only he could easily get around them.
The only thing they can exchange it for is another house or an alternate form of housing. Because you have to live somewhere.
But what I have seen is worries about social class and sharing space with new neighbors who act like they're from the next rung down on the ladder. Which isn't all that different from the usual objection to short-term rentals.
In a city I used to live, the city decided to revitalize a section of downtown by bringing down some old small buildings and replacing them with high rises. The resultant effect was a bloom in shops and restaurants in the area. That meant that 1km^2 area became a lot more attractive, landlords jacked up rents, and existing tenants in the other buildings in the area had to move out for people who were willing to pay 2x the rent. Of course rents probably went down elsewhere in the city to compensate.
You will never get this sort of prediction from simply supply and demand. You need to build quantitative and holistic models that make predictions based on a range of factors. Then use those to make policy.
Policy makers are experts at completely ignoring objective facts, why would this be different?