| 3. Land owners and construction companies want to make as much money as possible. Everyone does. Greed is only greed when it's someone else. Developers in cities with permissive land-use and zoning laws aren't better people than developers in cities like San Francisco or Vancouver. It's just that there are enough of them and there's enough development that they need to compete with each other. Unless you can override these three groups, or get them to agree, it is a social issue and building more will make things worse. Look at the record from essentially every city that has been building Stop. Just stop. Seriously. This trope needs to die now. This is exactly what anti-housing advocates in Vancouver are claiming right now - that the city has been building and building and building, and prices just keep going up. So why give those awful developers what they want, right? What they don't mention is that the metro area population is growing by more than 2% per year and compared to the number of homes being built each year, we're hopelessly behind. The reason prices keep going up is because we're not building enough, such is the incredible demand to live and work here. And I suspect this is the case with most cities with crazy-low rental vacancy rates and crazy high prices. Berlin (and Vancouver, and San Francisco) will do anything to reduce housing costs except build more housing. |