FR version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
62% Positive
Analyzed from 4510 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#housing#more#supply#rent#prices#demand#build#building#don#land
Discussion (118 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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.
Land definitely needs to be taxed, but not without the zoning changes first to allow more to be built on less.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Does that mean the "surge in supply" is really a surge in permits?
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
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.
https://x.com/HotAisle/status/2046792071521157600 (taken tonight)
More housing is always a good thing though
But SSD manufacturers and oil producers have been feeling really greedy this year.
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?
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
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'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.
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?