I'm not objecting to causing pain for property owners, I'm saying that doubling the number of bedrooms in a city is nonsensical (if you double the amount of residential area in a city, where will it go?), and also that you're underestimating the impact on the market of a relatively small increase in supply.
> if you double the amount of residential area in a city, where will it go?
You don't need to double the area, you just need to double the density, which is easily done by eliminating exclusionary zoning. The scarcity is artificial.
> you just need to double the density, which is easily done by eliminating exclusionary zoning
I think you should double-check the numbers on this before you assert something is easily done. I live in NYC--are you saying we should live in half the space that we currently live in? A 400sf 1BR apartment should now be a 2BR apartment? Please draw a functional layout for this apartment.
And to what end? The population of NYC is ~8 million. You think the population should double? Where are all of the new people moving from, and what should we do with the houses they are currently living in? You don't need to double the total supply of housing to dramatically affect the housing cost--you just need to increase the supply of housing for the people who are looking right now, which is a much smaller number than the total number who live in the city.
New York is a real outlier among American cities and I'm sure its needs are different. Here in Seattle, three quarters of the land available for residential use within the city limits is zoned exclusively for single-family housing. This is absurd. Yes, the population of the city should double: the alternative is that all those people will be pushed out into ever-further reaches of suburban sprawl.
Density doesn't mean making spaces smaller, it just means making more of them. Usually this is accomplished with more floors. If you look at NYC, a huge portion of it is buildings are <= 12 stories. NYC is unique in its density and is certainly a model for other cities in the US, but in terms of fulfilling its own livability needs.. it will have to become denser through height. Even NYC must address its demand with additional supply within Manhattan -- up is the only way to go.
Instead what we see today in NYC is the same as what we're seeing around North America. NIMBYism, heritage protections, gatekeeping, lawsuits, FUD, political grandstanding, etc.
There aren't enough people in most major cities to come anywhere occupying that many bedrooms. Are there enough people in rural areas, suburbs, and minor cities that want to move to major cities to supply renters for them?
> There aren't enough people in most major cities to come anywhere occupying that many bedrooms.
Right now.
But that's because it's too expensive to live there, so people move to outlying areas. But if the cost of housing starts to drop, people will start moving in, which will stymie the cost declines.
I'll admit that I'm not intimately familiar with all of the large cities in the US, but Seattle would be a slam dunk. The suburbs are way more populace than the city itself.
Same with San Francisco, although that city has more problems than just a shortage of housing.
I'm not sure to classify New York City, but Manhattan could easily double its bedrooms with no shortage of demand.
You ain't gonna make it cheap, exactly, in those places. Look at Manhattan compared to Seattle - there's ALREADY far more dense housing in NYC than Seattle, yet prices stay high. People will be willing to pay more for those places with more amenities. That will continue.
But you're gonna make it a lot more livable and arrest the rate of inflation.
It may never be cheap, but it should be possible to drive down the cost of housing to the cost of construction. A big part of getting lots of building done is to take a chainsaw to existing regulation.
* No minimum lot size
* No parking space requirements
* No single family zoning in the city - minimum is multi-family, 15 stories.
* No requirement to match the character of the neighborhood
* No height based additional setbacks
* No rent control
* Get rid of the anti-dorm laws[1]
* No historical preservation without the city buying the property in question
* No building plan for the city - replace it with a "shall issue" policy where the city has to have some affirmative reason to block the permit or it gets issued by default.
There's probably a bunch more that should probably be done away with; those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
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1. It's very common in cities to ban dwellings that house more than x (typically 4) un-related adults.