This is a very thoughtful and well-reasoned piece, with the money line right at the end: > My worry, and I hope I’m wrong here, is that on average, adding more

This is a very thoughtful and well-reasoned piece, with the money line right at the end: > My worry, and I hope I’m wrong here, is that on average, adding more housing units just makes this cycle spin faster. (Unless you could add SO MANY housing units that you could actually break through the wedge, that is. But that seems to me like it’d be hard to do! That would also be quite unpopular locally, as it would undermine an awful lot of locally built up wealth, and any move to do that is usually unviable politically.) I’m strongly in the pro-building camp, but I agree that it won’t be enough unless you could build enough housing to break through the pent-up demand, and doing so would be challenging in the superstar cities. Living in San Francisco, I suspect that if you could magically add a million new housing units this year, they’d sell. (I do think that would be enough to make a dent in prices, but with the entire state of California so deficient in housing I don’t know how big the dent would be.) The more important point that he makes is about the self-reinforcing positive feedback loop that drives homes as a financialized investment vehicle. There’s an easy, but politically unviable, fix for this, in the form of high taxes. The taxes strictly reduce the rate of return on your house, while conveniently paying for public services, and building in a self-interested reason to oppose ever-increasing home prices. It’s no surprise that the housing crisis is less acute in Texas where the property tax is high, and most acute in CA where the rate is very low AND assessment are effectively static. I think that serious discussions of how we address the housing crisis must include not only increasing supply but also breaking the positive feedback loop on housing as a high-return investment in the hot economic centers.