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It takes a long time for housing to get built, or rather upzoned, bought out by a private developer, deconstructed and then rebuilt. It would have looked absolu
by adt2bt 8y ago
It takes a long time for housing to get built, or rather upzoned, bought out by a private developer, deconstructed and then rebuilt. It would have looked absolutely foolish 10 years ago to start the process of upzoning and building as much housing as we'd have needed to keep housing prices flat over the last decade.
Like I said in my original comment, if we had known how much was coming down the pike, we'd have started the process of building more housing immediately. We did not (and could not) know, so we're doing the next best thing and building as much as possible right now.
Your argument about individual cities is a red herring. Show me a city that went through a similar level of high wage worker growth in such a short amount of time and somehow managed to build enough housing to keep housing prices flat.
- manfredo 8y agoSure it may be difficult to accommodate the demand quickly. But at this point you've agreed on the point I'm making: the lack of supply - not the demand - of housing is what causes rents to rise. There are cities with orders of magnitude greater demand for housing that have low rents because the supply exists. A rapid spike in demand will probably be accompanied with a temporary increase in cost as supply catches up, but it will not result in long-term cost increases unless the supply is constrained. Seattle, San Francisco, Portland, etc. are not dense cities by any means. If apartment buildings are taking 10 years to get built then there is massive mismanagement or onerous regulation going on.