"building new housing doesn't really drive the prices down" there is a lot of empirical evidence against this claim, and almost no evidence for it. Rising costs in cities are due to a few factors: (1) lack of new housing, (2) changing economic conditions in which high paying jobs are moving from the suburbs to the cities (to be fair, there is a small factor in very few cities of super rich people buying housing and not living in it, but that is largely confined to Manhattan, London, and suburban Vancouver, but is not broadly an issue in housing affordability) From after WWII through the 80s, American cities were largely in this strange largely racism induced recession (white flight to the suburbs) which caused a historical aberration of cheap housing and commercial space in cities. That trend was a very short counter trend blip in the 5000 year history of real estate in cities. The way forward is to build a lot more housing in cities, as its eminently clear that lots of people want to live in them, that living in cities is better for the environment than the alternative, and that our economy would be doing much better if the desired urbanization was actually allowed.