By making more supply (housing units) available in greater variety, at lower cost, and more quickly we can drive down their price and make it possible to satisfy more demand.

Unfortunately a lot of folks think that housing doesn't follow the same simple economic rules that we've observed for all other physical goods. So they don't allow supply and we continue to spiral deeper and deeper into a housing crisis.

If housing were abundant, we wouldn't be reading articles about the rise of living in cars.

The problem with a lot of these places like Seattle is that adding to the supply is really hard. It's not like there are a million acres of land just waiting to have houses put on them. Sure, you can build a skyrise, but first you need to get permission of the 20 families whose homes you're going to raze.

This is nonsense. American cities (especially west coast) make it extremely difficult to build anything anywhere, even on parking lots and crumbling warehouses. There are vacant lots all over SF, in some of the most expensive neighborhoods on earth. Nobody has "raze homes". The hard part is getting permission from 20 retirees who show up at planning meetings and oppose everything on the grounds of fear of change and who think that seeing the sight of a 5 story building is an environmental catastrophe.

I’m not sure; every time we allow people to build more unconstrained, what gets built is luxury housing and upscale office buildings. This is obvious; given a choice, this is what nets the most profit.

In a functional market where demand signal drives production the value of a thing declines as it ages. Japan has this figured out. Tokyo is relatively affordable because it is possible to build just about any form of housing anywhere.

Further, there isn't unlimited demand at every price point. When you constrain supply to the point that high-end demand can consume more than total possibly supply, of course builders only build to the high end of the market.

Finally, we've made the high end of the market the only thing which can possibly pencil out by driving up costs. Planners demand low floor area ratios, high parking rates, articulated facades, parks dedications, high impact fees - that money ultimately comes from the buyer or the renter. So by making those demands you price out increasingly large portions of the population.