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Amazon is forced to compete on price because electronics supply is flexible. People can find other retailers. Even if every regulation was struck from the book
by joe-collins 4y ago
Amazon is forced to compete on price because electronics supply is flexible. People can find other retailers.
Even if every regulation was struck from the books tomorrow, housing supply doesn't have anywhere close to the same flexibility. It's limited by the availability of undeveloped (or redevelopable) land, and just as importantly, by the location of that land. You can't just create more land next to the metropolis of your preference. There are practical and physical limits.
- astrange 4y agoYou can create more houses on the same land with technology called "taller buildings", mass timber construction, single stair apartment reforms, upzoning, &c. The above comment saying corporate investors lobby for reducing supply isn't true though. It's individual old NIMBYs and small time developers who lobby for that. Big companies like BlackRock are passively investing because it's so easy when the local government already wants to help them by restricting supply, but they don't individually show up to city council meetings and lobby for this stuff. You really can defeat them by showing up. No California YIMBY policy has lost someone an election yet.
- joe-collins 4y agoYou're quite right! If only so much of the viable, desirable land wasn't already occupied.
- astrange 4y agoMany of the people currently occupying it would be happy to sell it to you so you could do infill development and they could move to Hawaii! It's just illegal to do it now. (Or they could stay in place - California requires this to be possible through "right of return" laws.)