But externalities and market-failures are always lurking, and sometimes they're dominant, and they can mess up the balance even in the long term.
In this case you might think that someone could buy some land+materials+labor in order to create-and-sell shelter. And that eventually the cost of shelter would be comparable to the cost of those inputs.
And that works in a lot of places where housing is relatively affordable.
But is that mechanism really setting the prices in San Francisco? And if not, what is causing the imbalance? How is the market being constrained and distorted? To whose benefit?
Aside from the obvious that a growing proportion of the population can't afford to not be homeless?
It's almost as if treating land as property to be bought and sold in a market rather than a basic human right to which every human is equally entitled might be in and of itself a plague on society.
Housing developers usually aren't the problem.
Also housing is not a free market in the slightest. It's heavily subsidized for the benefit of 'investors' in the form of unpaid for infrastructure and being far less taxed than labour among other things, and extremely distorted by euclidean zoning and nimbyism.
> Julkisen vallan tehtävänä on edistää jokaisen oikeutta asuntoon ja tukea asumisen omatoimista järjestämistä.