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Comment by top256 | Hacker News Reader

Why is that surprising? This is eco 101 no?

Every time you talk about building more housing in a desirable place, there's always someone who brings up the argument "But if you build more housing then even MORE people will want to move here". Nothing wrong with some empirical evidence.

Actually the usual argument, as per the article, is more like "only rich people can afford to live in new housing, therefore building new housing doesn't help poor people", which is of course false.

Edit: Unsurprisingly, the top post on this very page is now a form of this argument.

Or more importantly making traffic worse, especially if the traffic is already bad.

Build near mass transit and in walkable neighborhoods and restrict the number of parking spaces. Make streets safer to walk and bike. Adding more housing units doesn't need to mean a linear increase in cars as well.

That works if you have the land to do that. The Virginia side of the DC area has lots of high rise apartments and skyscrapers built around the metro station and it definitely works to keep cars off the road but I don't know of the same thing can be done in the bay.

> I don't know of the same thing can be done in the bay.

Walk by any of the BART stations in the East Bay (even Downtown Oakland), and you'll see vacant fields and mostly empty parking lots. The area near MacArthur BART could be densified to a crazy degree without displacing a soul.

Balboa park station is surrounded by single family homes. Colma is inhabited by people who no longer need transportation.

They're not wrong. There will be more people moving there if prices are lowered, and over the long run unless Portland can absorb the entire movable population whatever it is, it will be helping to lower rent everywhere in the country. So thanks!

What I think you're saying is, prices drop in Portland, so people move there from city X, which drops demand in X, so prices drop in X.

One problem, though, is "stickiness". I wouldn't move to a different city for $1/month. I probably wouldn't move even for $100/month. Why not? Well, I'm not single, and I have kids. It's not just that I'd upset everyone's routine - I'd also have to move all this stuff. I'd also have to sell my place and buy (or rent) a new one. Total cost to me: Probably in the $20,000 range. I'm going to do that for $100/month? No way. Even for $1000/month, it would take 20 months to pay back, not counting the time and aggravation.

So cities are "sticky". I'm stuck here; it takes a seriously better situation to break me loose.

Many people have lower thresholds than I do; but for most people, the threshold is some way above zero. (Exceptions do exist; if the current situation is socially or emotionally difficult, they may move to something even if it's economically worse.)

- "But if you build more housing then even MORE people will want to move here"

Isn't this actually true?

I would love to pay less rent, and don't mind having higher density. But I can also see why someone doesn't want those.

No, the number of people who want to move there will probably not increase,. There will be more people actually moving there, which is a different thing. Wanting to move there is what raises the prices.

It's called induced demand. Luckily though, it lags market supply by a bit.

Yes, but a lot of people, for various reasons, either believe that econ 101 arguments don't apply in this situation or that even if they do, the effects of building market rate housing are still undesirable.

Their actual stated arguments tend to be delivered in unconvincing ways, but Julia Galef (who I gather does believe in the econ 101 take) took a stab at steelmanning that side in https://juliagalef.com/2017/07/13/should-we-build-lots-more-..., and it's definitely worth a read.

What I'd add to her points is a fourth, that while some people believe that either overall affordability or total number of below market rate units are the right metrics to measure success by, some people care more about the percentage of affordable units than the number. An extreme version of the argument says that having 100 affordable units out of 200 total is better than having 200 affordable units out of 1000 total, because the second scenario will mean a strong demographic shift in the neighborhood (a "whitening"), not to mention an increase in density that will change the feel of the area. This is not an economic argument, but one about values, so it's not going to be resolved by numbers.

There are a lot of “…but first, the revolution” socialists who oppose private housing on the grounds that it won’t create a more affordable city (described by Sonja Trauss https://medium.com/@LocalPolitics/but-first-the-revolution-e...). For example, the “progressive” blogger Tim Redmond argues that “outside forces” create a demand that can never be met by private construction (http://48hills.org/2016/01/04/the-nimbys-and-the-housing-cri...) and that private capital will never invest enough in construction to reduce the rent (http://48hills.org/2017/07/12/listen-yimby/). There is a large echo chamber of tenant advocates who let the perfect be the enemy of the good and counterproductively oppose private development (http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/40509-yimbys-the-alt-righ..., https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/yimbys-housing-affordabil..., https://twitter.com/TenantsUnionSF/status/889152770460090368, https://www.facebook.com/Vanishingsf/posts/700805940111215).

This is especially the case in San Francisco where programs such as rent control, inclusionary zoning, and other programs split renters into non-market partitions who mostly would not directly benefit from added supply (see Kim-Mai Cutler’s article for details on this https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/).

> The housing crisis prompted the City to adopt an ill-advised inclusionary zoning ordinance, and led the state to flirt with authorizing rent control.

Politicians and their supporters routinely believe they can repeal the laws of supply and demand.

Edit: And just today in the news:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/new-zealand-foreigners-buy...

I suspect, Alot of SF residents would be extremely surprised by this article if they actually read it, even with their highest degrees per capita population.

Housing economics is not a first level econ course. It's much deeper than supply and demand curves.

It isn't surprising. I don't believe anyone claimed it was.

I think they were just wondering why this is the #1 ranked link on HN right now because it's so obvious. Honestly, I was wondering the same thing when I saw the headline of the article.

Induced demand is also a thing. It's not exactly econ 101.

Look into some of the convoluted bizarre arguments made by NIMBYs against this.

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