As opposed to building more and denser housing.

Sometimes, you cannot build more housing, or denser housing, so you use rent control so tenants who do live there don't spend all of their income on housing, and some people don't get to live there (because of housing limits). If you turned San Francisco into Manhattan, and still had unquenched demand for housing while still maximizing every square meter of three dimensional space within desired geo bounds, what then?

"Build baby build" is not a silver bullet.

> Sometimes, you cannot build more housing, or denser housing ... If you turned San Francisco into Manhattan, and still had unquenched demand for housing while still maximizing every square meter of three dimensional space within desired geo bounds, what then?

Using Manhattan as your example of maximum possible density is... odd. Kowloon City [1] had much higher density and had the disadvantage of poverty.

I'm not saying that we should turn all residential areas into facsimiles of Kowloon City, but there is a ton of space between what currently exists - even in Manhattan - and that. I'm deeply skeptical that any place in the US or Europe has reached the limits of building more housing and is forced to look at other options.

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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

"Build baby build" is a pretty good silver bullet - assuming the city is willing to keep up with infrastructure spending to support the denser housing (absolutely possible economically, but politically difficult) _and_ assuming the local populace doesn't throw whoever advocates for it out of office. Too often new construction is killed by NIMBYism (though, it seems just as often new construction blames NIMBYism for legitimate complaints about land compensation)... if you live in a city and treasure your quiet off the beaten path neighborhood... too bad.

>Sometimes, you cannot build more housing, or denser housing

A hypothetical possibility that doesn't hold true for any city that has enacted rent controls.

"Build baby build" is a silver bullet.

In New York City the subway is running at capacity. Building housing isn't enough, you also need infrastructure.

Brooklyn resident here. Plenty of room on the subway during my morning commute. Wish they would build more condos here so I could enter the market.

Manhattan uws has lower rents than comparable places in SF in my experience.

Transparent pricing and uniform unit metrics would work wonders

Market fragmentation and opaqueness helps keep prices higher

This can work in conjunction with building more and give more ways to curb excess

> That worked wonders about a decade ago.

What a curious anti capitalist sentiment.

First, I think most capitalists agree that regulation in some form is required, as totally free markets are inherently unstable. Second, this ignores the governments role beforehand in encouraging subprime loans and afterwards during the bailout. Third, it ignores the fact that by most measures, capitalism has increased the global standard is living too literally unheard of levels. In almost every part of the world, now is better than any other time in history to be alive. Not to imply that some things arent seriously wrong and require fixing, but let's give credit where credit is due and not throw the baby out with the bath water