>If you doubt this, watch how much this comment is downvoted. There are few more efficient ways to make it sound like you're not arguing in good faith than to

>If you doubt this, watch how much this comment is downvoted. There are few more efficient ways to make it sound like you're not arguing in good faith than to preemptively claim that all who downvote you are being unreasonable. >Portland estimated a million new residents by 2025. Growth in that period: 105,000, in large part due to annexation This is self-fulfilling. If you build no new housing, there will be no realized population growth. >Private developers do the work, for profit, most often for investment groups. Most people do most work for profit. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Developers will, of course, only build when they can turn a profit. That's what capitalism means. But we should be able to arrange things such that the community benefits. If you remove artificial costs (e.g. bad-faith environmental reviews, meaningless red tape for code- and zoning-compliant projects), then the cost of development goes down, and so prices should settle lower. And when the top of your demand curve moves into those new, expensive housing units, they move out of somewhere cheaper. Any supply removes pressure from the market - you want rich people moving into expensive housing, because it means they're moving out of less-desirable housing, which will then necessarily have lower prices.