[Detrytus]

Well, building luxury housing still helps, to some degree: the richest residents of the area would buy it, and they would sell their old house to someone slightly less rich, who in turn would sell their old house… At the end of this chain you get affordable housing.

[ecshafer]

Affordable housing has always been old housing. Housing is essentially a pigeon hole problem, where some pigeon holes are nice and fancy and some are older. The pigeons simply bid their way in, and the more extra holes the cheaper they are.

[nemomarx]

I think the steelman argument is that maybe you induce demand and it's a wash on housing costs as rich people move into the city or etc to use the new condos

But you do at least get more property taxes?

[ivewonyoung]

Well, that would mean the rich people moving in aren't hogging or bidding up existing housing stock in the city, and the cities they moved out of will have the same price lowering effect that the GP mentioned.

[theluketaylor]

There is at least some truth to induced demand with new housing driving an influx of new residents, especially in cities with economic opportunity.

Just like transportation induced demand, the solution is different style of infrastructure. High capacity metros, bus lanes, and regional rail to get people out of cars and use limited transportation corridors more efficiently than single occupancy vehicles. One more lane bro doesn’t work, but adding new forms of more efficient transportation does.

New, denser housing with mid rise and high rise buildings and a mixture of unit sizes in walkable neighbourhoods with good transit access absorbs new residents and drives down housing costs for everyone. Single family sprawl doesn’t work, but density can.

We have under-built for decades, so it’s easy to misunderstand the signals. More housing gets built and prices still go up, and many people are concluding more housing just increases prices, leading to people with good intentions decrying “luxury housing”. There are plenty of nimby actors in the mix too, tossing in all sorts of misinformation and bad faith arguments, muddying the water.

The reality is areas with strong economic growth are all failing to add enough new housing and demand continues to outstrip supply, leading to higher prices. Many studies have shown even new high end housing helps manage prices, as someone rich enough upgrades, leaving their unit empty for someone else to upgrade into. That chain continues all the way down into the lower cost units, each time freeing up space someone else can afford. Large migration into a region can mess with how much prices can be affected, but studies still show even high priced new units do slow down growth in prices. Supply and demand does apply, we have just massively underestimated how far behind supply is for the demand and need to add so much more housing.

[tptacek]

How does the induced demand argument not apply to AMI-median affordable housing as well? Demand is demand.

[throw-undefined]

> and they would sell their old house

lol

in reality they just keep their "investment" and, in some cases, decide to convert their old house to an airbnb for extra passive income

[Dylan16807]

There's only so much demand for airbnb, and most of those kept houses would be rented out which still improves supply.

[throw-undefined]

> there's only so much demand

Yet SoCal suburbs are full of them. And it doesn't necessarily add supply, since most people seek leases longer than the maximum 90 days set by Airbnb. Unused short-term rentals offer significant tax writeoffs. The owners don't need demand, they just need the plot's assessed value to continue increasing.

It's surreal that orange site seriously thinks rich people would ever liquidate the most inflationary asset in the West.

[Dylan16807]

> Yet SoCal suburbs are full of them.

According to google results there's around 10k airbnb listings in san diego, around 1% of households or maybe "less than 2%" by one article.

Even if 30% of new houses ended up causing a bad use like airbnb, all the rest would be still be significantly improving the situation. And you would not be able to balloon the airbnb supply for long until the price drops and a lot of those houses switch to normal rental.

And that's still playing into the "nobody sells a house" situation. Many people would sell houses.

> Unused short-term rentals offer significant tax writeoffs.

Losing money sucks even if you don't pay taxes on it. But what kind of writeoffs in particular?

> The owners don't need demand, they just need the plot's assessed value to continue increasing.

Which it would not be doing in a situation with significant building. A self-reinforcing supply constriction going to airbnb can't absorb that many houses. I don't think it would survive a doubling in the number of airbnb listings.

And even if the value keeps rising, not having renters loses you a lot of money. Many of those empty houses are going to turn into long-term housing.

> It's surreal that orange site seriously thinks rich people would ever liquidate the most inflationary asset in the West.

There's a lot of people in 5 million (or 4,3,2,1 million) dollar houses that cannot afford a second one.