California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

Re:California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to b... by pjscott on Friday February 14, 2020 @01:48PM (#22329082)

Induced demand is where more of some good is supplied, which drives down its price, which increases the amount consumed, which means the price isn't driven down as much as it would have been if there had been no change in amount consumed. (A common example is widening a congested highway: more capacity reduces congestion somewhat, which means that the inconvenience of driving on that highway goes down, so more people drive, so the congestion doesn't go down as much as you'd naively predict.)

What I'm not seeing here is a way for increased housing supply to make the prices go up, as opposed to down, but not as much. Network effects, maybe: increased density of a city could make being in that city more valuable, thus making more people want to live there at any given price, which means that prices would rise.

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Re:California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to b... by caconym_ on Friday February 14, 2020 @02:45PM (#22329645)

Yes, that's what induced demand is.

In a vacuum, no, I don't think simply adding housing can meaningfully drive up prices. But (as you say) obviously it feeds into organic urban growth, which does increase demand, so you have to keep building housing. It seems that the problem we have in our big tech hub cities is that we let that growth happen for a while and then decided that there would be no more housing.

I can imagine an induced demand effect as whole new classes of people realize that they can actually now live close to where they work, and come flooding back into the city. But like I said, that's an artifact of artificially constrained supply.

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