[AnthonyMouse]

> If you were a developer, wouldn't you try to maximize profit for your investors?

Selling 1000 units at $2000 is more profitable than selling 500 units at $2500. Moreover, collusion is a) illegal, allowing us to smite them with the Hammer of Antitrust Enforcement, and b) assumes there are few enough developers that they can actually do that without anybody defecting, which seems unlikely.

> In a realistic scenario, de-regulated zoning around San Francisco would benefit developers and lenders while worsening the financial burden of the middle class.

Your proposed alternative to increasing supply once to reduce prices is to keep supply constrained and subsidize rents forever.

There is no way out of the fact that increasing the housing supply is the only real solution, and that requires zoning regulations to be relaxed so that it can actually be increased. If you then have other problems with increasing the housing supply, you fix them, because one way or another there needs to be a lot more housing.

[makomk]

Selling 1000 units at $2000 is only more profitable than selling 500 units at $2500 if those units cost nothing to build. That's very far from being the case.