Housing Supply Debate

Not necessarily. The housing market is very complex, and there is such a thing as induced demand - for example building lots more apartments in SF would make it even more attractive for e.g. tech companies to locate, and so they would quickly be filled, without moving the price.

We would have to calculate the rate of influx vs construction. There are places where there is a lot of construction but the new construction still isn't enough to keep up with demand so instead of reducing prices it just slows down the increase. In your example I would guess if that high-end housing hadn't been built the increases would have been steeper and the new arrivals would be displacing the people in lower cost housing

Rent has to match supply/demand. If demand goes up, prices go up, some existing tenants are priced out. The only sinister thing in US housing is communities making it difficult to build more. In my corner of NYC one could build housing for thousands of people.

> Housing again follows supply and demand. It doesn't matter the size or luxury of a house, if there's nobody willing to buy it, prices will drop.But it doesn't necessarily follow it in a straightforward manner in any particular location.If you knock over a building of 5 crappy old apartments in a dense area to build a bigger building with 10 new, bigger, luxury units, it's easy to imagine scenarios where the net effect is more supply but also an even larger increase

This is an instance of Jevon's paradox. The more housing you build to meet housing need of people then even more people will come in creating even larger demand for housing.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Yes. When it comes to economics, people seems to stop analyzing after the first iteration. The whole system is continuously adjusting to changes in supply, demand, technology, taste, etc. The rich people aren't going to keep buying due to some sort of spite. They only do so as long as it's profitable, and it's only profitable as long as there is still unmet demand waiting to rent.This is why it can be as simple as "build more houses". Don't get bogged down in the

Increasing the supply of housing should lower prices, yes. In nearly every neighborhood, single family, detached homes are the most expensive form of housing.There is an effect where improving the consumption benefits of the city may draw new migration from other parts of the country, but it is generally accepted that this effect is much smaller than the effect of increased competition between landlords and developers.If you think that housing somehow operates differently from a normal mar

More housing doesn't create demand, the city's economy creates demand. This is exactly why people have kept pouring into NYC and SF over the last few decades while the rate of new construction has slowed down to a crawl and nothing is affordable.

This generally doesn't happen for two primary reasons.First cities are not closed systems. Places like LA and the Bay Area have a built up demand that exceeds housing. The new housing would have to be added at an extremely high right to keep up with that demand otherwise the city just grows rather than becomes cheaper. When a city simply grows, the cheaper units never flow down to the bottom of the market as someone else will move in who lives outside the city and was previously price

This, a thousand times. Housing advocates often call for building “affordable housing” but the problem of high prices is solved by building any housing. As you suggested, if new luxury housing comes on the market, then some older apartments can’t charge luxury prices anymore. The same effect works all the way down to the lowest priced units. Also people don’t increase their consumption when prices go down (housing is an inelastic market). So, new supply at the top of the market pushes dow