If you can avoid population loss, it's still going to work out, because a great approach to increasing housing supply is more density. Grab 3 adjacent houses, d

If you can avoid population loss, it's still going to work out, because a great approach to increasing housing supply is more density. Grab 3 adjacent houses, demolish, turn them into 24 condos that are only a little bit cheaper, and once you account for the costs of construction, it still works out for everyone. So what happened to the owners of those three houses? Well, their land, which before could only had 3 dwellings, has 24. So while the value of the built houses they had dropped to zero, the value of the land they were built on went up spectacularly, so their investment paid off anyway. Barring the craziest of regulatory situations, no house is ever a good investment. They degrade and get worse! But most homeowners end up ahead, because they own the land, and it appreciated faster than the house depreciated. And as a city gets bigger and more prosperous all land near it gets more valuable. So all in all, in cities that aren't shinking, it's likely most homeowners end up way ahead, and the closer to downtown, the more they gain. It's only when a city shrinks that the homeowner really loses money.