[esoterica]

> If you only look at home rentals, yes corporations make up less than 10% of ownership. But even the small percentage of ownerships really affect things, in Chicago we can see it has repeatedly taken just a few new luxury high rises to blow up cost of living in entire neighborhoods - it has a follow-on gentrifying effect where stores rush in to serve the new monied residents and the people living there can no longer afford to participate in their local micro-economy.

You are confusing cause and effect. The luxury high rises are the result of rising demand and rising prices, not the cause. If you could magically cause prices to increase by building luxury apartments, you would see luxury apartments sprouting up all over the impoverished parts of the South side. But you don't, because the demand is not there. If you stop luxury apartments from being built in desirable neighborhoods and desirable cities, people will just bid up the prices of crappy older housing stock and drive poorer people out anyway (see: San Francisco).

Building new housing decreases the price of existing housing by expanding supply. It does not increase it. People who have a vested interest in seeing housing costs go up (landlords, existing homeowners) understand that fact, which is why NIMBYs keep voting against development. Unfortunately many people who do not want housing costs to go up do not understand the basic economic fundamentals and are motivated by reflexive hate of wealthy developers, so they sabotage their own interests by voting against new housing to the delight of their landlords.

[skrtskrt]

I think it's a bit more complex than this. No, you can't magically create a yuppie utopia in the middle of the Southside, but you can start on the northwest side and expand it just a couple blocks west, then a few more blocks west. It's a coordinated effort from the large-scale developers and the city - look at Lincoln Yards for the most large-scale and egregious example.

Housing supply absolutely needs increased, but we must require developers to build mixed-income housing. The wealthy developers can afford to leave many units empty to maintain the luxury cache of the building or area. The relationship between supply and price in housing is not that sweet sweet smooth curve - it's lumpier than that in reality.

Additionally while the increase in supply can hurt your local landlords, it can also raise the average income of the clientele of an area, which then benefits them. In practice these landlords have not been staunch opponents of all the new luxury buildings.

[esoterica]

> but you can start on the northwest side and expand it just a couple blocks west, then a few more blocks west.

Again, you are confusing cause and effect. The luxury apartments are popping up because of rising demand and rising prices; they are not the cause the rising prices. San Francisco refuses to build new housing stock and rents are still soaring there because people just bid up the prices of crack shacks.

> The wealthy developers can afford to leave many units empty to maintain the luxury cache of the building or area.

That is completely false. Real estate developers don't intentionally leave a large fraction their buildings empty to project an image of luxury. No renter is going to pay 2x as much rent because they see that the building is half empty and they think that makes it more exclusive. If they wanted an excuse to pay 2x the rent they would just get a larger apartment or move to a more expensive zip code. Deliberately leaving part of a building empty would be an extraordinarily financially dumb move. If a building is substantially empty then the developers screwed up their market research and are losing money on the project.

> Housing supply absolutely needs increased, but we must require developers to build mixed-income housing.

Building luxury housing frees up existing cheaper housing stock for lower income households. You don't have to build cheap housing to make more cheap housing available. Blocking the construction of luxury housing is counter-productive because it just means people will bid up worse housing stock.