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A comment on Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell developers they can build homes. Parent comment

Re:Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell develope... by amanaplanacanal on Monday December 02, 2019 @11:18AM (#21683788)
If you keep building, eventually you will meet the pent up demand. Your scenario might match the first batch of new housing, but it can't continue indefinitely. Eventually you have more houses than people.

There is a ton of pent-up demand in the bay area, because this has been going on for a long time. People who own houses there are going to fight you the whole way.

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Re:Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell develope... by slg on Monday December 02, 2019 @11:59AM (#21684228)
You are of course right in theory. There is some point in which things will stablize and demand is fully satisfied. However that is where your second paragraph comes into play too. It isn't just people who own the homes that are disincentivized from allowing that to happen, real estate developers also don't want housing to get to that point either. And who is the one deciding what gets built with a market approach to the problem? Developers. In a market approach, developers inherently want built up demand and therefore they will never build to a point in which demand is saturated. Once again, you need government intervention.
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Re:Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell develope... by sagarm on Monday December 02, 2019 @01:42PM (#21685374)
AFAIK developers have not formed a cabal that is trying to manipulate local real estate pricing.

Developers will build as long as it seems profitable to do so. Presumably this means that when the prices do go down, a few projects will end up in the red when they're done.

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