[jesusthatsgreat]

How do you increase supply in densely populated cities with extremely strict planning laws & regulations?

The solution is to ban short term leasing in cities, increase taxes on sales of property within a certain timeframe and increase taxes on owners who have a property with nobody registered to live in it.

Basically you don't want people buying property to flip it quickly, to hoard it or to have a holiday home. You only want buyers who'll live in the property and/or rent it long term.

[fennecfoxen]

I am routinely amazed by the the hoops people are willing jump through to avoid the simple answer of "building more apartments."

High end estimates of AirBnB apartments are about 4% of units in the most popular neighborhoods -- Times Square, the East Village, Williamsburg. Drift out to Park Slope and you can see 2%, maybe.

House hoarding? Very few people pay a mortgage for empty space when they can get a tenant to pay the mortgage instead. The real house hoarding is the high end luxury market with $20 million penthouses, where renters were never in the picture.

We don't need to free up 4-5% more units in the most popular neighborhoods. It'll help a little, yes? It's just that it's such pathetically small thinking.

Why don't we have a plan to build 50% more units citywide, and make housing actually affordable? Hell, it's New York. Build us 100% more apartments. Put real price reductions on the table. Do what it takes to chop rental prices in half.

[jeffbee]

This is the utilization theory of dwellings, which I think is bunk. Actual utilization is over 90% in California cities, so fiddling with vacant and underused properties can only make a small difference while being rather difficult to achieve. 10% vacancy is actually desirable because it makes the marketplace work.

Land, on the other hand, is severely underused. Zoning changes could easily triple the housing supply in American cities. That's a lot better than 5-10%.

[dunkelheit]

When I visited Dublin last year (as a tourist, exacerbating the problem, hehe; although I stayed in a hotel), the housing problems were obvious - lots of homeless in the streets, they also were in the process of banning short-term rentals. But to my outside view the root of the problem was simple - the Irish are too attached to their lovely small homes and don't believe in building anything even moderately high. Of course a few high-rises would look ugly and create other problems but maybe this is the way to give everyone a place to live, not tightening regulations some more.

[MrPatan]

Or you could change those extemely strict planning laws and regulations.