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.
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.
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?
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).
They’d like be building at 1.5 to 2 times what private does.
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.
And 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.
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.
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.
The zoning code in the location of your anecdote must be completely suffocating, or that developer would not have left so much money on the table by failing to add more units.
Where I live, a developer recently tore down the cheap, shitty house on the corner and built not one new "luxury" townhouse, but eight of them. Across the street, a larger building was recently demolished, and now they're putting in twenty-one new units. Two cheap homes lost: but a net of twenty-seven homes gained. That represents a whole lot of competitive pressure taken off the lower end of the market.
It's not traditional development lowering rates. Think about the math. You've replaced two cheap homes with twenty seven "luxury" homes. How would that lower the average price? You've weighted the average rate with an order of magnitude more samples on the top half of the range. The only way to see a drop is for there to be a precipitous drop in low-end rates, or a significant increase in low-end, non-traditional development. I think it's the latter, because California has uniquely supportive ADU policy, and implemented it on a timeline that tracks with the rate decreases.
EDIT: Also the end of ZIRP and refinancing finally coming around.
Oh, wouldn't it be funny if lower rates had nothing to do with building volume, and everything to do with landlords having to pull units out of warehousing because their interest rates increased recently?
When I see properties getting redeveloped it's usually a tiny house getting replaced with an apartment building. Often it's a strip mall or surface parking lot that wasn't housing anyone getting replaced.
I don't think I've ever seen a redevelopment that doesn't significantly increase the amount of living space.
DC. And when there are more units afterwards, they're luxury. Building more units doesn't magically lower rates; it has to drive landlords of older units to lower their rates. Did that actually happen? You'd have to prove it. Something else could have, like increased non-traditional competition or the end of ZIRP and refinancing horizons coming to bear.
Developments generally involve more units than what they are replacing.
[1] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/popest/i...
[2] https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/time-series/demo/popest...
In any case, gentrification, infamously kicked thousands of families out of projects, subsidized housing, and regular rentals, replacing them with... definitely not affordable housing. Rent has only gone up. And unless you're a builder, the goal is not building, it's only a means to the end of putting people in affordable homes. If building isn't doing that, it's a policy failure, and other avenues need to be pursued.
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.
That's the point, the "dumpy old apartment" was never going to be the thing stopping the rich person from moving in.
Due to overlap in preferences amongst a multitude of people, the rich person would free up the housing they like by buying it from whoever, who would then free up slightly-less-good housing in the area by kicking out someone else (with money, to be clear) and so on down the chain until you get to the "dumpy old apartment", whose rent now rises because there are more people interested in moving into it due to lack of other options.
New housing, even if it's new 'luxury' housing, breaks this chain of housing migrations in the area before it gets to buying people out of their dumpy old apartments.
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.
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.
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.
... And that's why nothing gets done.
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.
simply ask the people on the vested side: "why do you want rents to stay high?" and stand back
Over that 4 year period, immigration to Canada dropped dramatically.
It just recently sold for slightly lower than the asking price (but slightly more than what the owner had bought it for 4 years prior). It was sold to a new immigrant to Canada. At least the new owner is actually living in it.
Why would developers want to build so much supply that the price drops?
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.
And while every single reasonable but outdated justification for zoning has slowly disappeared, zoning has been thoroughly co-opted by greedy sociopaths and meddlesome wannabe HOA presidents who want to control their neighbors and police aesthetics and keep out undesirables and inflate the value of their investments.
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.
The subdivision rules are changeable only with a supermajority vote. I believe the city (Houston in my case) is prohibited by the state from unilaterally changing them.
(I wouldn’t mind more free property rights!!! I find TX “liberty” is often biased towards $$$)
I've actually encouraged NIMBYs to use those HOA-style restrictive covenants if they're so adamant on their "zoning" never changing, because a restrictive covenant is actually a volunatory restriction. A city cannot come in and remove them willy nilly (they do in special cases like red-lining, but it is a politically arduous process). Someone with a restrictive covenant by definition has more protection from their neighborhood changing than they would if they just relied on zoning.
The problem is, nobody likes restrictive covenants, and they don't like the HOA-like structures that govern them, and they really don't like the punchable-faced people that seek power in those kinds of organizations.
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).
Zoning is a restriction on your rights...when they are lifted, you are gaining more tangible rights, not losing them. If anything, the takings clause should have applied to properties where zoning was introduced...not where it was removed.
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.
Funny how when you hit the breaks on pupulation growth house prices also freeze.
Hospital wait times in Canada, Australia and the UK are _years_ for elective procedures. I had a health scare three years ago and got put on the public waiting list. I still get a message every 6 months to remind me that I'm on the waiting list.
I've still to advance far enough up the queue to get a date booked.
This is not normal.
It can always collapse more. Ask anyone who lived through an actual economic collapse. (As opposed to the kinds of minor corrections that the West has seen over the past few decades.)
Your imagination is very limited if you can't think of what the long-term consequence for a country with an average age of 41.6, a fertility rate of 1.25, and a huge political block of nativists who can't do basic arithmetic, are asking for something incredibly stupid, are getting exactly what they want, good and hard.
You solve a housing shortage by... Building more housing. Not by driving young people who want to do work out of your community.
>You solve a housing shortage by... Building more housing.
It's not housing. It's roads. Hospitals. Schools. Sewers. Power lines. Everything needs to be rebuilt. That means that the immigrants who are coming in must be engineers, doctors, teachers, tradies. Instead we get uber drivers and IT consultants. There aren't enough qualified people in the world to keep up with current immigration to the west. The only solution is to lower immigration until the ratio of qualified people coming in matches (or hopefully exceeds) the ratio of qualified people already here. Anything else lowers living standards and makes a right wing reaction inevitable.
Here's what happens when you build more housing: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-25/one-hour-delays-along...
Immigrants coming in today aren't 'destroying society'.
And it's not 'potentially'. It's certainly. Nativists have no answers to it, and if they actually presented the dilemma of 'We can keep Pablo out, and also anyone currently under the age of 40 will have to work until they are 75', not a single person would give their ideas a moment of thought.
> It's roads. Hospitals. Schools. Sewers. Power lines. Everything needs to be rebuilt.
Why does it need to be rebuilt on anything beyond a regular depreciation schedule in a steady-population situation?
And by the way - Canada needs to invite at least half a million people a year in order to maintain the population at a steady-state. That number is the table stakes.
In 2025 total deaths in Canada were 334,699, totals births were 368,928.
The table stakes is -30,000 immigrants last year.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=171000...
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=171000...
>Why does it need to be rebuilt on anything beyond a regular depreciation schedule in a steady-population situation?
Canada is not at steady state. It's been growing at over 1% since 2000:
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/population-and-demograp...
If you think that's not a problem, stop cherrypicking numbers, and look at Canada's population pyramid. And then tell me what will happen as the big fat middle, that starts at 25... ages out of work. Do you think that little sliver of 0-24s are going to be holding everyone else up?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Canada#/media/...
Those are the numbers you need to be looking at. Oh, and emigration isn't zero, but someone leaving the country isn't counted as a death on the census. 120,000 people emigrated in 2025.
Which means that we need stop importing low skill labor in the IT and services industry and move to high skill labor.
The developing world unfortunately doesn't produce enough for the current immigration levels in the west. Ergo we must lower immigration until the ratio of high skill migrants is equal or higher than that of the native population.
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.
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.
Paris is a good example, I think, of a city expensive by French standards. My point was that if your theory is you can build to affordable, there should be at least one example on the planet where that actually worked (even Tokyo is considered expensive by Japanese standards).
I really hope we don't have indefinite large amounts of US population growth. And if we mostly stabilize the population, then it only takes a few 16M cities to absorb all the demand and make the relief permanent.
> Paris is a good example, I think, of a city expensive by French standards. My point was that if your theory is you can build to affordable, there should be at least one example on the planet where that actually worked (even Tokyo is considered expensive by Japanese standards).
Then consider this particular argument not that you can build to a nebulously defined "affordable", but that you can build to "San Diego has between 100% and 1000% of its current population with rent 40% lower than it is right now".
You don't need indefinite growth. People generally want to live in a few cities; e.g. they don't really want to live in Toledo, they want to live in San Deigo. So you just have to let people live where they want to live, not where they have to lvie.
> Then consider this particular argument not that you can build to a nebulously defined "affordable", but that you can build to "San Diego has between 100% and 1000% of its current population with rent 40% lower than it is right now".
That has literally never happened before and I don't see how it will happen first in San Diego. Mega cities get more expensive, not cheaper, as they grow, since the concentration of human capital and jobs make it even more valuable to live there.
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.
It's obviously not just about more housing, but more housing per capita.
3% of the French population lives in Paris proper, and roughly 20% in the metropolitan area compared with 0.42% in San Diego and ~1% in San Diego MSA [1].
More hosing will help Paris along with San Diego to put downward pressure on prices.
[1] Wikipedia
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).
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/climate/san-diego-water-s...
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
We don't do that because of people's preferences, and more importantly their will to force their preferences on others. But, it is solved.
There's no right or wrong answer, and I take issue with the notion that however our culture is setup now is the correct way. Clearly, it's not, because many (most?) people are unhappy.
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.
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.
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.
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 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...
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.
From the Zumper report. 22% gain on SF 2B is just insane to me.
BS, there's ~400K housing units in SF, and only ~10k of those would be considered victorian. These units couldn't (And shouldn't!) be destroyed for new housing because they're protected, and that's not what NIMBY's or YIMBY's are arguing about anyway since almost everyone loves victorian homes.
More than half of the city's housing was built after 1940, mostly on the west side, and it's where NIMBYism is at its worst. There's little reason someone or even a developer shouldn't be able to build up there.
Build around Golden Gate Park just like NYC’s Central Park! Great idea.
https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/rappers-poets-activists...
as does 'the City'.
SF was founded by a joint effort between Cisco and Salesforce, that's why it's called Cisco and SF, right?
And we could probably do it comfortably with what we've spent on AI datacenters.
https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/national-rent-report
Many interesting comparisons to be made, especially places where rents fell YoY despite population growth.
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.
SF rents have gone up, that didn't decrease demand. Why did SD rents drop, not because people left because it was too expensive, that doesn't make sense.
https://www.costar.com/article/1297403833/san-diego-apartmen...
This suggests that San Diego has been getting more desirable over time (denser, more jobs, more culture, etc). The people who'd been around for some time that could hack the old SD rents couldn't deal with those rising costs and had been spilling over to Temecula, Phoenix, etc.
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.
Meaning population increase slowed down relative to new housing builds. OP didn't say this, but it's what I assume.
San Diego County includes La Jolla and points further north, as well as El Cajon and Jamul and all sorts of suburbs. It's a huge area with many disparate neighborhoods (and even 4 microclimates.)
The City of San Diego includes very undesirable neighborhoods such as most of Downtown. There are a lot of places where normal people would have a terrible time, despite still being expensive. But there are also many different parts of the County which are "bad neighborhoods" and upscale places and ethnic enclaves, etc.
Honestly, I was a little surprised that these articles are specifically referring to only the City in terms of housing supply. The vast majority of San Diegans don't even live in the city. I mean, it's not as pathological as Los Angeles and its county, but it's an important distinction that's often lost on out-of-towners.
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.
You run into the same problem with free or heavily subsidized public transit. The trains were crowded in Germany when the government instated a temporary 9€ ticket for all public transit (buses, subway, tram, regional trains, etc) in all cities.
It is more complicated than that, for sure. I definitely pay for the roads in my city. And I pay for the mass transit in my city despite almost never using it.
It does not seem controversial that if you raise the cost for something, less people will make that choice. That does not mean that the underlying demand actually did not exist to begin with. If you made the cost zero, you would find the real demand.
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.
> 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...
They are progressive (Statistically)... it's just that they are human too. Meaning they can have progressive ideology and vote for weed, pronouns, but when you touch the wallet, not so much.
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.
According to google results there's around 10k airbnb listings in san diego, around 1% of households or maybe "less than 2%" by one article.
Even if 30% of new houses ended up causing a bad use like airbnb, all the rest would be still be significantly improving the situation. And you would not be able to balloon the airbnb supply for long until the price drops and a lot of those houses switch to normal rental.
And that's still playing into the "nobody sells a house" situation. Many people would sell houses.
> Unused short-term rentals offer significant tax writeoffs.
Losing money sucks even if you don't pay taxes on it. But what kind of writeoffs in particular?
> The owners don't need demand, they just need the plot's assessed value to continue increasing.
Which it would not be doing in a situation with significant building. A self-reinforcing supply constriction going to airbnb can't absorb that many houses. I don't think it would survive a doubling in the number of airbnb listings.
And even if the value keeps rising, not having renters loses you a lot of money. Many of those empty houses are going to turn into long-term housing.
> It's surreal that orange site seriously thinks rich people would ever liquidate the most inflationary asset in the West.
There's a lot of people in 5 million (or 4,3,2,1 million) dollar houses that cannot afford a second one.
More supply generally will help, but it's not a silver bullet.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/article/oakland-rent-...
But SSD manufacturers and oil producers have been feeling really greedy this year.
Does that mean the "surge in supply" is really a surge in permits?
https://x.com/HotAisle/status/2046792071521157600 (taken tonight)
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.
Bringing more units online won't matter much if people can't afford them. Zoning (which is what I take abundance to refer to) can only do so much—we will need to attack housing as a commodity (or an asset, depending on who you listen to) in order to make a dent on the housing issues outside the upper middle class.
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"
People don’t give two shits about politically determined rent caps if rents are dropping through supply increases. I’ve lived in those places you describe and that mechanism creates market distortions that paradoxically drive rent way above the market clearing price for new entrants. In any case, none of those places place restrictions on lowering rent due to competitive pressure.
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.
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.
If I could lobby my government to restrict other people’s use of their property in a way that would give me enough money to create a generational wealth in exchange for moving somewhere with cheaper houses, I would be very tempted to be that asshole.
Policy makers are experts at completely ignoring objective facts, why would this be different?
