[davidw]

I think that if you're going to argue that supply and demand are not real for housing, you'd need to supply some good evidence of your own.

There are a lot of ways to build more supply:

https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...

I find the 'Montreal' example the most compelling in that it's fairly "human scale", but tastes vary.

[jariel]

While I don't doubt that building more homes brings prices down, the real reason housing is cheap in Montreal is because Montreal is poor, has lower immigration, little in the way of industry to attract migrants, language barriers, and it doesn't have a basis of Chinese ex-pats to anchor a lot of foreign buying which is a huge driver of prices in Toronto and Vancouver.

Edit: I should add, I live here and am very intimate with the issue.

[Spooky23]

Rental housing has price floor that distorts the market. Once a property diverges from the requirements of housing subsidy programs, it usually gets abandoned.

In most places new supply is high end and is making more housing available for people who don’t lack access.

[davidw]

> In most places new supply is high end and is making more housing available for people who don’t lack access.

In most places, new cars are more expensive than used ones, but if you stopped providing new cars, the price of the used ones would shoot up as everyone started competing for a dwindling supply of cars.

Same goes for housing.

Also, it's a longer term process with housing, but 'filtering' is a real thing: https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2016/05/25/housing-does-f...

[Spooky23]

Take a stroll in a prosperous city like NYC and tell me why the market hasn’t filled the empty storefronts.

The reason is that there are implicit price floors through tax policy. It’s cheaper to “lose” money on property to offset taxes on winning properties.

[exterrestrial]

You can’t compare cars to real estate and property.

For one, most property and real estate appreciates in market value on it’s own. This makes spec construction viable, and why most new apartment buildings in expensive cities are ”luxury” units and rented for very high rates. The owners are happy to let them sit empty and starve the market to max out demand when they know there is enough jobs in the area that people are competing heavily to move there.

In addition, the markets are tiny compared with cars, which are easy to move to cars to other markets (cities).

[allovernow]

>In most places, new cars are more expensive than used ones, but if you stopped providing new cars, the price of the used ones would shoot up as everyone started competing for a dwindling supply of cars

An unspoken consequence of cash for clunkers. Practically overnight 100k miles was considered "low mileage", which was ridiculous before people started needlessly trashing perfectly good used cars.

[smogcutter]

Eh, I’ve heard that before as well but I don’t know if it’s true. By the time the program ended in 2009, cash for clunkers had taken ~700k cars off the market. The same year, about 35 million used cars were sold in the US[1]. Cash for clunkers was a rounding error.

[1] Had a hard time finding statistics for 2009, but it’s in here: https://www.niada.com/PDFs/Publications/2010IndustryReport.p...

[Spooky23]

The 100k mile thing came with the enhanced emission controls in the late 90s.

[BurningFrog]

New supply in housing shortage area is expensive, for the same reason old housing is expensive there: THERE IS A HOUSING SHORTAGE!

Therefore, if you say it's bad to build new housing if it will end up being expensive, you're really saying there should be no new housing built during a housing shortage...

I find it's often better to think it terms of number of homes and housed people than in prices. If 100 new apartments are built, it's hard to say what will happen to prices exactly. But it's undeniable that there will be 100 more homes, and 200-300 more people can live indoors in that city, than without the project.

[mlyle]

> In most places new supply is high end and is making more housing available for people who don’t lack access.

vs. the article:

> ... how expensive new housing today would become affordable old housing tomorrow ...

[Spooky23]

With 1-2 family houses, that’s how it works. Not for high density.

For complexes, everything is based on depreciation cycles. Apartments typically get shittier over a relatively short timeframe.

[mlyle]

> In most places new supply is high end and is making more housing available for people who don’t lack access.

People are outraged when you put apartments and condos in their multi-single-family cities because "lower class" people will move in. Don't those "lower class" people currently lack access to live these places?