Refuses to build? If there is demand and nobody builds the market sounds broken.
"To build housing in San Francisco, developers must first receive planning approval, known as entitlement, to ensure the city supports the type, size and design of housing proposed for a site. This part of the process took an average of 450 days over the last 18 months, according to recent data from the state."
Housing in the SF bay area is broken, largely due to the efforts of entrenched interests (developers and people who bought 50 years ago for an inflation-adjusted tiny fraction of current prices).
To put this into perspective, this adds 5% to the cost of a project in financing alone [1]. That’s $70,000 for a median home [2], about half of the city median household income [3]. Half of a household’s production in an entire year, just in delays.
[1] https://home.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/...
[2] https://www.redfin.com/city/17151/CA/San-Francisco/housing-m...
[3] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocit...
At the far end of that you have a market for what is there. It's nearly impossible to buy a well designed, well built house in many places because there aren't any. But the invisible hand of the market largely just skyrockets prices for limited, poor buildings because it doesn't have much real effect on the rest.
Parking minimums, setback requirements, "euclidean" single family zoning.
The market didnt break itself, the local governments collectively did.
The proper retort to this is to point to all the homeless and ask: if there were a famine, would the slogan be "stop greedy farmers?"
[1] https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/market-rate-development-...
It turns out that refusing to build housing to meet demand has serious consequences: homelessness, street crime and filth due to homelessness, inability to hire for any but the highest paid jobs, families leaving because you can’t raise kids, and being passed over for other areas by new talent among others.
I saw a national map recently of places likely to lose congressional representation over the next 5-10 years vs places that will gain. It was almost perfectly a map of places where you can’t build housing vs places where you can.