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> We don't do this because that really makes existing stakeholders scared for their current property values As far as I can tell, opposition that comes from co

> We don't do this because that really makes existing stakeholders scared for their current property values As far as I can tell, opposition that comes from concern for housing values tends to be hyperlocal rather than systemic -- most people don't oppose building substantial volumes of housing somewhere, it's mostly when it's not somewhere else. But the other thing is that the market doesn't like building housing above certain volumes either. Developers have limited capital and capacity and for any given outlay they'd like the highest return possible. Overproduce and you get diminishing marginal returns or maybe even unpurchased/unleased housing stock. Lagging demand some amount is probably the easiest way to optimize this.

scoofy 3y ago
>Lagging demand some amount is probably the easiest way to optimize this. I actually agree with this to some extent. The point is that we aren't lagging demand from $300K/unit to $400K/unit in dense areas. We've been lagging urban demand for literally 40 years (hell, "developers" were literally a popular villain archetype in media in the 80s-90s), so that we're at $1.5M/unit in some areas with $300K in construction cost and labor. Because of this, at this point, the profit incentive is so high, that we have local governments trying to extract significant amounts of these profits. This means instead of providing the financial resources to ramp up production capacity, we're actually just disincentivizing production in general.