[49531]

Which is what I hear from the YIMBY crowd a lot, that if you're not pro de-regulate home builders and landlords then you're automatically a NIMBY. I think building more is good but I am not convinced pure market supply/demand economics is the main way to get people into affordable and safe housing. The way you describe it sounds like it will solve for a very specific group of people: folks who are _almost_ able to buy homes but priced out by market forces. Maybe my concern is outside the YIMBY / NIMBY dichotomy if it's just a fight for middle-class folks.

[zbrozek]

I bet a lot of how applicable you feel the labeling is will depend on where you are. SF Bay Area and NYC are probably the US epicenters of this problem and will see a bit more polarization on that front. California in particular is estimated to represent the lion's share of the ~4M housing unit shortage, so it's very acute there. With remote work the shortage is increasingly being felt across the rest of the country, and most folks want to blame anybody but themselves for the problem. It's developers! It's foreign speculators! It's institutional investors! But the data never supports those accusations.

I'm in the SF Bay Area. Very few people under 35-40 can afford a home even if they're well-paid tech workers, and the age of affordability seems to creep up almost in real-time. It's a huge problem and we need millions of homes built to fix it. Small patches like subsidies for the very poor work fine if you only need to deploy them on a small minority of cases but fall apart miserably when a 90th-percentile earner still needs your help. Overturning Euclid v. Ambler, a constitutional amendment to create some basic right to build housing on your own land, or something similarly drastic is needed to turn this tide.

I'm one of the luckiest ones. A combination of good professional fortune and generational wealth have led me to own a home in a highly exclusive community. And now I'm hoping to open that community up to more people. Maybe my less-fortunate tech-worker friends will be able to stay nearby rather than be forced to move elsewhere.

[Panzer04]

Consider that as house supply increases, house prices should keep dropping, towards the cost of construction - right now supply is so constructed prices are limited by buyer ability to pay rather than sellers cost of construction.

So supply will allow much more than just the few people on the edge of ability to buy - it will also help everyone else at lower price points.

[Ma8ee]

It's rarely the cost of the house that is the problem. It's the cost of the property. And property within a certain distance from any attractive city center is limited, by its very nature.

[zbrozek]

To a point, anyway. https://www.builderonline.com/land/local-markets/californias...