That part is the obvious part. I want to know how they got all the entrenched landowners to let new builds in their neighborhoods and drive down values. The NIMBYs are usually the problem.
Tons of San Diego houses have a ton of land thanks to the mid-20th century lawn fetish back when everyone was pretending that there was enough water so there are a lot of places where someone can turn some dead grass into as many as 5 ADUs.
Well, once you loosen up building codes to allow apartment buildings instead of single family homes then suddenly the developers will come with a lot of cash to buy those homes from NIMBYs. And cash is always convincing.
If you are an owner of rental houses, I would think that it's in your interest to be able to build ADUs on those properties. Even if everyone does it and prices go down a bit you're still making a lot more per property than you were before, assuming reasonable building costs (and if building costs are not reasonable then not many owners will be building ADUs and prices won't go down).
Unfortunately, it's not actually obvious. There are heaps of people, even and especially in the most expensive housing markets in the US, who will outright argue that supply and demand doesn't apply to housing.
The problem with roads is that cars are really really inefficient and drivers don't have to pay for the road, so a driver can extract government subsidies by driving more.
You run into the same problem with free or heavily subsidized public transit. The trains were crowded in Germany when the government instated a temporary 9€ ticket for all public transit (buses, subway, tram, regional trains, etc) in all cities.
It is more complicated than that, for sure. I definitely pay for the roads in my city. And I pay for the mass transit in my city despite almost never using it.
It does not seem controversial that if you raise the cost for something, less people will make that choice. That does not mean that the underlying demand actually did not exist to begin with. If you made the cost zero, you would find the real demand.
Yeah it seems like there is a widely held belief that people are freeloaders looking for any opportunity to take something they perceive to be free, so they go do things they would not otherwise do. A much simpler explanation is that when the cost is low they do what they wanted/needed to do, and when the cost pushes the ROI too low they do without something, or find a workaround. The demand is still there, just unmet.
Maybe renters were such a crazy high percent that despite the fact they were all wrapped up in their jobs and children vs retirees with nothing else to do in their $1M house than show up to meeting to influence the political apparatus they they still finally balanced out at the planning and zoning meetings.
California also passed a ton of laws that effectively upzoned the state in various ways. Minnesota did the same thing a few years back.
This seems like the only real path - you cannot beat out these skeezy local homeowners and landlords at the corrupt local politics game. You need statewide politicians who have political ambitions to build off of solving these problems.
plenty of renters ask for rent control instead of increasing supply. Often they make the mistake of seeing high prices for new apartments and mistakenly believe those high prices mean the rent is going up over all.
https://calmatters.org/housing/2023/11/adu-san-diego/
Tons of San Diego houses have a ton of land thanks to the mid-20th century lawn fetish back when everyone was pretending that there was enough water so there are a lot of places where someone can turn some dead grass into as many as 5 ADUs.