[7e]

There are better, valid reasons to oppose building more housing. Put simply, building more housing solves housing affordability just like building more roads solves traffic. It doesn't!

Cheaper housing = more kids = just-as-expensive housing within a generation, in a vicious cycle. If people relocate from another area, rather than breed, you get expensive housing even more quickly.

After each round of the cycle, there is less nature, less beauty, more traffic congestion, less parking, more noise, more pollution, more crowded parks, more mouths to feed, and more hassle. Look at what happened to California as an example.

The planet, this human ant farm that we live in, frankly, is full. The world population has almost tripled since 1960. The Earth can't take more housing and more greenhouse gas emissions.

The sustainable solution is human habitat control: keep housing supply at population replacement levels only. Don't build infinitely just to allow the human population to reach 20 billion (which is not a net benefit to anybody). 8 billion people is plenty. Be happy with that number.

[rcpt]

> building more housing solves housing affordability just like building more roads solves traffic. It doesn't!

The difference is that using a road is free but having a house very much is not.

[AnthonyMouse]

That's not really a difference. Using a road isn't free even when there is no toll; you still have to pay for fuel and vehicle maintenance. It costs less when there is less congestion, like housing costs less when there is more supply, which puts you at a different point on the demand curve because of the lower price or higher convenience.

The fallacy is the assumption that the resulting increase in demand can never be met by any increase in supply. You need more supply to meet the demand at the lower cost than the demand at the current cost; that doesn't imply that the demand at the lower cost is infinite and can never be met.

The real question is, what's the best way to do it? But that's context-specific. If you could satisfy road congestion by building a single new subway line because all the traffic is really going between two points, maybe that's better than adding eight more lanes to the highway, even though that would also work. Whereas if you would only need to add one lane to the highway, but the traffic then branches off in every direction so the alternative would require eight new subway lines, maybe the extra lane is what you want.

[rcpt]

When there's no toll I can drive right onto as many roads as I want and never pay a dime. Sure, my car isn't free, but that's a sunk cost. One could even argue that the more I drive the better deal I get.

Housing? Doesn't matter if it's San Francisco or Iowa, if I want a place to rest for a night I need to pay.

[AnthonyMouse]

> When there's no toll I can drive right onto as many roads as I want and never pay a dime. Sure, my car isn't free, but that's a sunk cost.

Do you somehow have access to free fuel or electricity?

> Housing? Doesn't matter if it's San Francisco or Iowa, if I want a place to rest for a night I need to pay.

You want to ignore the fixed cost of owning a car but not the fixed cost of owning a home?

[AnthonyMouse]

> Put simply, building more housing solves housing affordability just like building more roads solves traffic. It doesn't!

It does, in both cases. Induced demand is a garbage theory. It's basically the idea that if you increase supply by 50%, and then lower prices increase demand by 20%, you would then have to increase supply by another 20%. Which would increase demand by 5%. But that just means you should increase supply by 80% to begin with so you have enough for both the existing and additional demand. The latter is finite.

> Cheaper housing = more kids = just-as-expensive housing within a generation, in a vicious cycle.

More kids are good, actually? It prevents economic collapse as a result of an ageing population. The US fertility rate is already below the population replacement rate -- in significant part as a result of high housing costs.

> The planet, this human ant farm that we live in, frankly, is full.

You need to build more housing even for a given level of population because demand shifts around, e.g. Detroit has negative population growth so existing housing in Detroit doesn't satisfy demand in San Francisco.

> The Earth can't take more housing and more greenhouse gas emissions.

Greenhouse gas emissions are solvable independent of housing. You can heat a house using electric heat pumps and power heat pumps from renewable or nuclear energy without CO2 emissions. If you want to solve CO2 you use a carbon tax, not zoning laws.

If anything restricting the number of kids does the opposite because you get more childless retirees with little incentive to vote for preserving the future because they were deprived of the opportunity to have a family to care about the future of.