Yes, you can. Tokyo and Houston are perfect counterexamples.

Obviously government is required for the planning and zoning reform aspects but the idea that any solution to housing price issues isn't building more is non-sensical. Singapore's solution is just building HBDs!

Houston is definitely a great example of how you can’t just build blindly and not expect your traffic and quality of life to suck. But to its credit, Houston creates an equilibrium of being just pleasant and unpleasant enough to not be great but not horrible place to live.

Tokyo housing is expensive for its size. You can just get small apartments there that are affordable. Also, Japanese housing depreciates, which takes away a lot of speculative pressure.

Dublinben: "How do you lower the cost of housing in desirable places?"

You: "You don’t, you can’t build your way out of these kinds of problems"

Me: "Yes, you can. Tokyo and Houston are perfect counterexamples."

You: Does a combination of moving the goal posts on Houston to being about Houston's lack of livability and not prices as well as decides that somehow Tokyo's housing prices declining is a counterargument to building being a solution to high prices?

Tokyo is quite affordable in terms of rent and prices haven't been increasing anywhere as dramatically in other similarly classed world cities. If this source is to be believed, it's 48% cheaper than SF: https://www.dbresearch.com/PROD/RPS_EN-PROD/PROD000000000049...

I'll again point here, but there are plenty of other resources that will Tokyo's success at combating high housing prices: https://marketurbanismreport.com/blog/tokyos-affordable-hous...

Or here: https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3...