The reason prices are so high in the area you live is that so few people want to leave, so the available housing is a tiny percentage of the total housing that is being bid on, compounded by the fact that you can rent out your house for 4x you’re mortgage, so why sell? Adding more housing alleviates that pressure significantly.

It’s been years and next to nothing has been built in the vast majority of the Bay Area - housing has decreased in some parts. It’s not a rapid development concern, it’s a no development concern.

I saw a recent figure that around half of residents want to leave. Where did you get the idea that few people want to leave?

The reason they want to leave is because they can’t afford to stay. The number of homes for sale is orders of magnitude lower than comparable areas.

> How is adding more supply going to fix this?

How could it not?

> How do you prevent over-supply from being built? How do you ensure that the housing is of suitable quality?

How do we prevent the over-supply of anything? How do we ensure the quality of anything in the market? Housing is not a unique good. This is a solved problem.

> a friend recently visited and used airbnb to lodge at one of those newish buildings on 9th street. The building looks great on the outside. But, inside, the units looked and felt like what I imagine Soviet block style buildings would be like.

And what's the vacancy rate on that building? Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's not serving a market niche.

Point by point:

> How is adding more supply going to fix this?

Adding supply helps because we now have a situation in California where there are many more jobs than homes for people to live. Conservatives keep saying people should work hard, right? Then they need to move where there are jobs. Liberals keep saying people should have access to dignity and a social safety net, right? Then they need to move where there is a friendly political climate and a robust economy to support that safety net. Being a “sanctuary state” is no good when refugees can’t afford to live here.

The big debate is over how to increase supply. The number of homes is increasing, but it is increasing much too slowly. That’s why even with visible construction, prices still increase. But even a slow increase of luxury homes helps, slightly, because every rich person buying a luxury home is a rich person not outbidding a middle-class family for a run-down hovel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQGQU0T6NBc

> 20 people want to buy in my neighborhood, how much supply would have to be built to even reduce prices?

It’s a region-wide market. But on a simple level, yes, you’d need 20 homes to stabilize prices. That seems more humane to me than forcing people to double-up or live in tents.

> How do you prevent over-supply from being built?

You don’t. You need like 10% vacancy, ± some amount, to have a healthy amount of wiggle room for people to move, in case they get a baby or need to fumigate the house or something.

In practice, developers have teams of economists working to make sure they don’t build too much. If the local government makes development excessively difficult and expensive, then they will develop only a limited supply of luxury apartments, unless they get some subsidy. If the local government makes development easy, then they will make profits building for the vast middle class. We should make developer profit margins align with what we need as a society.

> How do you ensure that the housing is of suitable quality?

Competition and building codes. That’s how we ensure suitable quality for everything else.

Note that building codes necessarily mean marginal housing is excluded, so they need to be balanced with our ability to subsidize. Otherwise, you end up with luxury housing in a sea of tents.

We should also be much more willing to destroy existing homes. This urge to preserve the exterior of every existing home is destroying the fabric of society. I call that, “The literal façade of neighborhood character destroying the neighborhood’s character.”

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/12/the-power-of-g...

> I’ve witnessed first hand developers destroying areas for quick profits.

So we need to make competition easier. Experience has shown that trying to control the process in a central government manner just tilts the playing field in favor of huge well-connected firms that can absorb the overhead of dealing with endless processes, and disenfranchises small local developers.

I strongly disagree with restricting the process to build slowly. We have had 50 years of building slowly when we should have been building quickly. Some places should build slowly, but when the economy is changing, then building quickly should be possible.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/upshot/what-happened-to-t...

First, thanks for the depth of your response. A little effort goes a long way. And, the links help, in particular.

I am still skeptical of some points (the NYC article, for example seems to make some large logical leaps), but at least I have paths for further research.

Minds can change. Often we just need more and better information (and some time to digest it all).

The only things I feel compelled to add (as Seattle is facing a similar condition to 'the bay area' now), are that at a mega-city, county, and state, maybe even federal level, there needs to be a 'resource recycling collector' that kicks in when the market fails; and that building codes should be much stricter about quality of life issues.

There are neighborhoods that simply need /vastly/ more density than currently exists, or which have predominantly older buildings and infrastructure. Those areas should be bought out en-mass by the people (government), and sale encouraged at some fixed ratio of existing market valuations consistent with values prior to market insanity.

The entire area can then be taken offline and upgraded from the base up with a full-refresh; ideally at a density target and with modern building codes and designs.

Those building codes should make apartment/condo living affordable, as well as requiring sufficient space, isolation, and quality of life for all involved. It should be less costly and higher quality of life to live in a city, not more costly and lower quality of life as it is now.

So you want the county/state/federal government to be able to use eminent domain to "buy" out entire neighborhoods?

And you expect them to uphold all of the quality standards from your last paragraph rather than taking the vastly easier and more profitable route of pocketing lobbying cash from the largest developers? This is a terrible idea.

> How do you prevent over-supply from being built? How do you ensure that the housing is of suitable quality?

The market ensures those things.