Please sit down and talk with somebody like professor Evan Mast. You're embarrassing yourself here. Yes, building more housing lowers the cost of housing. This is, as Senator Warren put it, plain old econ 101.
And the reason that you can't compare induced demand for freeways, to how that works with housing, is that once the freeways are built, we give away access to them for free. Nobody gives away access to apartments.
If you build a bunch of shiny new apartments in downtown San Francisco, yes, the people who live in those apartments will tend to be the high bidders. But that means that those high bidders _won't_ bid up the price of nearby older buildings, which means less displacement.
Also, your title -- “Build, baby, build” doesn’t seem to be helping. -- like, we're NOT building. Still. Production of units is somewhat up, but it _still_ hasn't recovered to the level of new-units per-capita per-year that it was at before the financial crisis. The construction industry was devastated in 2008 and nobody seems to have cared.
and things _have_ improved a bit since then. But the idea that we're in a "build baby build" phase is ignorant. We have had various incremental reforms in various parts of the country, but we have absolutely _not_ had the kind of root and branch reform to zoning that would let people build housing on any land they own, without interference from nosy "Neighborhood Defender" neighbors (to use Katherine Levine Einstein's term).
Disappointing framing on this article. The evidence, both domestically and internationally, is unequivocal that building housing brings down rents. Matthew Desmond himself says that more supply is a necessary part of the solution. That is not mutually exclusive with tenant protections and welfare policies, and framing them in opposition with each other is deeply mistaken and counterproductive.
Please sit down and talk with somebody like professor Evan Mast. You're embarrassing yourself here. Yes, building more housing lowers the cost of housing. This is, as Senator Warren put it, plain old econ 101.
https://twitter.com/ewarren/status/1740469761543442685
And the reason that you can't compare induced demand for freeways, to how that works with housing, is that once the freeways are built, we give away access to them for free. Nobody gives away access to apartments.
If you build a bunch of shiny new apartments in downtown San Francisco, yes, the people who live in those apartments will tend to be the high bidders. But that means that those high bidders _won't_ bid up the price of nearby older buildings, which means less displacement.
https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/understand-citys-pace-gentrification-look-its-housing-supply
Also, your title -- “Build, baby, build” doesn’t seem to be helping. -- like, we're NOT building. Still. Production of units is somewhat up, but it _still_ hasn't recovered to the level of new-units per-capita per-year that it was at before the financial crisis. The construction industry was devastated in 2008 and nobody seems to have cared.
This from StrongTowns is a few years old
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/4/21/the-housing-market-never-recovered-from-the-great-recession
and things _have_ improved a bit since then. But the idea that we're in a "build baby build" phase is ignorant. We have had various incremental reforms in various parts of the country, but we have absolutely _not_ had the kind of root and branch reform to zoning that would let people build housing on any land they own, without interference from nosy "Neighborhood Defender" neighbors (to use Katherine Levine Einstein's term).
Disappointing framing on this article. The evidence, both domestically and internationally, is unequivocal that building housing brings down rents. Matthew Desmond himself says that more supply is a necessary part of the solution. That is not mutually exclusive with tenant protections and welfare policies, and framing them in opposition with each other is deeply mistaken and counterproductive.