Airbnb changes the demand curve by letting residential zoned property be commercial short term rentals. It also doubles down by undermining actual hotels.
So you can react by saying just more houses. And I can react by saying “don’t do Airbnb, which is often illegal anyway.” We’re both right.
Capital shouldn’t have higher preference over citizens.
Most cities would like to keep their growth in check somehow so they have the appropriate infrastructure ready for it. Things that distort that (AirBNB, Chinese speculators, etc...) throw all of that off.
It sounds like you are claiming that it is impossible to out build housing demand. This cannot be true. There is a finite population of people that want to live in any one place.
With housing, the induced demand is mediated by housing prices. More housing lowers prices, which attracts more demand, which raises prices. But it's not going to raise prices above where they would have been had no new housing been built. (If prices were higher in the more housing scenario, what's stopping the person who moved to the city at those higher prices from moving in the less housing scenario?)
Also there are cities where housing prices have stayed in check, and generally they have done it by building more supply. Here is a ink to a graph that show the difference between Dallas and Atlanta and San Francisco ( https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=oe8E ). For reference Atlata had over twice as many new units constructed per year as San Francisco with half the population. This is why I say denying the supply side fix is dishonest. There is no reasonable measure where what you claim about supply attracting demand is true.
House prices are not growth, and they generate the tax revenue that you say helps get the infrastructure ready.
It won't:
> Building enough housing to roll back prices to the "good old days" is probably not realistic, because the necessary construction rates were never achieved even when planning and zoning were considerably less restrictive than they are now. Building enough to compensate for the growing economy is a somewhat more realistic goal and would keep things from getting worse.
https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employme...
Unless we do something dramatic and Bucky Fuller-istic like...
https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/08/02/prefab-housing-compl...
> If the (first) model is correct, it would take a 53% increase in the housing supply (200,000 new units) ... to cut prices by two thirds
There is no reason you couldn't build that many new units over a ten year period. In fact if San Francisco increased its construction to match D.C. it would have that many new units in less then a decade
edit: Just to clarify, the only limitation is political. People don't want to allow the construction required and would rather pass protectionist laws that effectively lead to the Housing and Homeless crisis you see in SF and LA. In so much that you can convince Rich San Franciscans that those poor people they keep saying they care about should be able to have a reasonable path to getting housing you could fix it in less then a decade
Sure, but how big is that change? The article references 31,000 homes in a country of 37 million people. If you assume the average of 3 people per home that's only "displacing" ~0.2% of the population.
