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> If the people need more housing, the solution is, shockingly enough, to build more housing. I know this is a popular opinion, but is there empirical evidence
by bildung 8y ago
> If the people need more housing, the solution is, shockingly enough, to build more housing.
I know this is a popular opinion, but is there empirical evidence for this? Isn't this solution based on the assumption that there was a one-time surge of people, leading to a one-time rise in demand for housing?
- geezerjay 8y agoEven if if there was a surge in demand, that doesn't mean that increasing available housing does not contribute to deflate housing prices. It makes no sense to pretend that supply has no impact on housing availability, and that the only factor worth vilifying is a secondary factor affecting demand.
- TulliusCicero 8y agoSure, take a read here: http://cityobservatory.org/urban-myth-busting-high-income2/ http://cityobservatory.org/urban-myth-busting-high-income2/
- bildung 8y agoThanks for the link. That article only links to a single correlation study, and that study only shows what we know: if high income earners rent much of the given supply, rents for low income families increases, too. That doesn't help with the question of more housing lowering rent prices. My point was: If more housing gets built, what does high income earners prevent from moving to town and renting that, too? The article makes a fundamental error with that car market analogy, BTW. Cars are consumables that get bought to be driven by the buyer. Houses in cities are investments that are built to be rented out. Completely different market dynamics. That the author makes a grave error like this while blogging about urban planning is a bit scary. What I meant are real longitudinal studies that track rent price development and increasing supply over time, preferably in Europe, where the rent market works quite a bit differently than in the US. The vast majority of housing in Berlin is for rent.