[wpietri]

Supply increase difficulty has not changed recently. Demand increase has. So if we're going to blame it on one factor, it makes sense to pick the one that has changed and is easier to control.

Less friction in increasing supply is also not an unalloyed good. You can look at the commercial office market, which is much less restricted and has huge boom/bust cycles. And that's before we get to the externalities of rapid housing growth.

I'm actually for increased supply, but I'd rather we stuck with better arguments for it than helping Airbnb get off the hook for the reasonably forseeable consequences of their actions.

[BurningFrog]

> Supply increase difficulty has not changed recently

Sure, but supply keeps increasing less than demand is increasing, accumulating the housing shortage each year. This is a decades old trend, from long before AirBnb.

I think that supply increase is vastly dominated by regular old population increase in cities that refuse to build housing. I'd need a lot of convincing to believe AirBnb is more than a minor factor.

[wpietri]

Yes, and I said, I'm for supply increase for exactly that reason. But it's a complicated problem, and AirBnB's unarguable supply decrease can only make it worse.

[amadeuspagel]

> You can look at the commercial office market, which is much less restricted and has huge boom/bust cycles.

This is a problem only for investors. Dealing with that is their job. Protecting them from it is not a good reason to restrict housing supply.

[wpietri]

It's not just a problem for investors. It's also a problem for cities, as boom-bust cycles can drastically misallocate resources.