[mplanchard]

Does that hold up per capita? Units per area isn’t super meaningful when comparing housing costs without a sense for the size of the population competing for them.

Where I live has ~21k units for ~45k residents (47%), and a median home price of $440k or so. NYC has about 3.6 M housing units for ~8.5 M people (42%), and a median home price of $870k. For NYC to make up that 5% they would need around 425k housing units.

Obviously these numbers can’t tell the whole story, but it does seem like the supply is fundamentally more constrained in NYC than here, and here is already pretty tight, with very low vacancy rates, high rental prices, and expensive homes.

Anyway NYC plans to build 200k units over the coming decade, increasing the supply in order to reduce the cost. Of course that’s not the only item in the plan to reduce costs, but it’s a major component.