Seriously. If only there were some technology that let us put a larger number of housing units on a given amount of land! https://www.vox.com/cards/affordable-housing-explained/densi... . We could solve all of our affordability problems. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-14/californi....

Building skyscrapers is simply not an option for many places, such as many European city centres.

Building more luxury condos doesn't really help anyone if they're just bought up by foreign investors as speculative investments and safe havens.

building more luxury condos means that the rich foreign investors who are looking for speculative investments can stay out of mid-market housing meant for mid-income homeowners, and mid-income homeowners can stay out of low-income housing meant for low-income homeowners.

A concept that really is lost on a lot of people. It doesnt make any economic sense to build and sell something of low value when you could do it at higher value. In a place like SF that is being squeezed by an influx of high income earners, new luxury housing just makes the old luxury housing less luxurious in comparison. If the market is screaming "we will pay absurd high prices for nice space!" Then by all means, meet that demand and everyone wins. Don't waste precious time energy and land building deliberately crappy subsidized apartments. That's lost profit for the builders, architects, and potential tax revenue too.

I'm not arguing for libertarian planning-- Let's leverage these high prices to build some amazing neighborhoods that can be enjoyed for generations: walkable, mixed-use, sustainable, transit oriented.

I usually use the trusty car comparison here. There's no point in starting a factory that builds 20-year old shitty Saturns. It's more reasonable to build great cars, and trust that the second-hand markets provide the necessary supply of extremely cheap beaters.

In the not-too-distant past, condos used to deprecate. Now their value goes up with each additional year of wear and tear!

>Then by all means, meet that demand and everyone wins. That's lost profit for the builders, architects, and potential tax revenue too.

Yeah, "lost profit", the cardinal evil. Sure, everybody wins, except the poor devils that make less than 100k and can't afford housing anymore. But who cares about them? Profit profit profit!

The truth is public policies should seek to maximise social gain. It's not their fucking job to enter into considerations about some people's profits.

PS: it doesn't make economic sense to waste money doing proper waste management when you can just dump your poison in the river, nevertheless we legislate that businesses must do the former.

Yes they do, look at any economic report.

Agree. Another solution is to encourage employers to relocate away from expensive cities. We need more tech companies going to Oklahoma or texas where land is cheap.

Or if companies were more receptive to remote working and other flexible working policies, so that people could live where they wanted to.

Land is cheap, network is not.

No one is going to move, because cheap land is not yet cheap enough to offset the opportunity (or perceived opportunity) cost of being in a keystone ecosystem.

More or better? I think more apartments (condos that you own,not rent) would solve a lot of housing problems. Everyone just has to have a large single family house.

Not even that. City governments so fetishize large, detached, widely-spaced two-story single-family houses that if you try to build anything else on 99.9% of streets, they handcuff you and haul you off to jail.

It's more or less the opposite in Dublin; you generally may not build detached houses in remotely urban areas these days.

Spoiler: There's still a massive housing crisis. Housing is _hard_.

Hah,that's one extreme reaction.

Alternatively, if you had less people.