> The sooner we collectively decide that housing shouldn't be a market, the better Housing is already barely a market. An actual market would be much better.

> The sooner we collectively decide that housing shouldn't be a market, the better Housing is already barely a market. An actual market would be much better. We artificially restrict the construction of new housing supply by policy and then act all surprised when demand exceeds supply and prices skyrocket. The same thing is happening in medicine: we artificially constrain the training of new MDs and then act all surprised when demand exceeds supply and prices skyrocket. Then people come out of the woodwork with "oh look markets aren't working!" -- but in fact the markets are working exactly as designed: those with control over the supply are acting to constrain the supply, in the process enriching themselves at the expense of all others. But instead of recognizing this fact, we look for other reasons. Sure, there are other reasons and interactions, too, but the primary drivers are supply constraints! Imagine if we explicitly forbade the construction of new grocery stores, forced farms not to use modern agricultural techniques, causing reduced yield, and then bought up a bunch of farmland just to take it out of commission. What would happen? Food prices would, obviously, skyrocket! That's exactly what we're doing with housing. Your proposed solutions probably won't hurt, but aside from making it easier to build housing, they're noise. In particular: > upzone neighborhoods This is the only one that matters -- and it needs to come with other changes too, including construction "by right", that is, without needing to go through a 3-year process of fighting with neighbors who will try whatever they can to prevent new construction because they've been convinced it will destroy their neighborhood and/or property values. > changing tax incentives so developers are incentivized to build more housing and less luxury housing We don't need to change tax incentives to get developers to build more housing, we just need to stop preventing them from building more housing. Developers are not sitting around waiting for incentives, they're actively being denied the ability to build. Let's fix that.