You can make $100-200k in 'easy' profit where I live by dropping the cheapest manufactured home on a plot. If you live in a place that allows it, I don't understand why people don't do it. I literally got a ~270k house for under $100k by being willing to be the guy the develops the plot. The actual house was laughably cheap, like 60k, there is a burnt out house dressed up in new paint selling next to me for like $300,000 and someone will snatch it up shortly.

Well, building luxury housing still helps, to some degree: the richest residents of the area would buy it, and they would sell their old house to someone slightly less rich, who in turn would sell their old house… At the end of this chain you get affordable housing.

That's because "progressive" urban politics is generally not progressive at all and dominated by the upper middle those that benefit or think they benefits from squeezing the working class out of their neighborhoods.

Those people aren’t progressives: they’re NIMBYs who learned that certain language can make it easier to get the policies they want. We have a ton of them here in DC, and you can tell by seeing what else they support: they’ll talk about affordability to block luxury apartments, flip to pretending to be staunch environmentalists to block an affordable housing project, talk about traffic or “the poor” when protesting a bike lane before pivoting to block transit projects, etc. It seems incoherent until you look at it through the lens of whether something would add competition to their future home sale or cause the city to subsidize them driving every everywhere less.

Well, once you loosen up building codes to allow apartment buildings instead of single family homes then suddenly the developers will come with a lot of cash to buy those homes from NIMBYs. And cash is always convincing.

Maybe renters were such a crazy high percent that despite the fact they were all wrapped up in their jobs and children vs retirees with nothing else to do in their $1M house than show up to meeting to influence the political apparatus they they still finally balanced out at the planning and zoning meetings.

Unfortunately, it's not actually obvious. There are heaps of people, even and especially in the most expensive housing markets in the US, who will outright argue that supply and demand doesn't apply to housing.

California passed a number of laws protecting landowners’ ability to build ADUs, and the San Diego council super-charged those:

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.

I'm not sure half the country would agree!

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).

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.

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.

Well obviously fuck those guys, but we need to build housing people are going to actually live in

That says more about affordability than desirability since rents have gone up over the decade but there's been a steady trickle out to cheaper locales

Housing is a unique market, because every single product in it is unique, and prices and rents can vary quite a bit.

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.

The quantitative model will tell you whether building housing of type A of quantity B results in more of a decrease in rent than building housing of type C of quantity D. Then you choose the policy that results in the desired decrease in rent. Otherwise, you risk wasting time in pursuing a policy that only results in a 0.1% decrease.

In a city like San Francisco, relative to the status quo ante easier development is more likely to result in slower growth in home prices, not a reduction in home prices.

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 (i.e. only "luxury" housing is built).

> 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.

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.

Lots of places in the world have legally mandated percentage by which rent can increase for a unit per year. It might be 2% or 3%, but it is a fixed number that is fought over politically before being decided. That is the function that you are claiming rent payers don't care about. But they do, as evidenced by elected officials enforcing the number they think will get them the most votes.