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Comment by tnt128 | Hacker News Reader

This might be an unpopular opinion here. It seems a general sentiment here in HN is that building more houses will result in a lower home price.

I'm not so sure if that's always going to be the case. Increased supply could very well turn San Francisco into cities like Hong Kong or New York - More houses but just as expensive.

If you think the current San Francisco as a small bucket full of water, will increase the size of the bucket stop the water from being full? well, that will depend on out how much water out there that wants to flow in right? If there are more water wants to come in than the size increase, you will just end up with a bigger bucket full of water.

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I don't understand. Are you asserting that the set people who are willing to move to San Francisco and pay $X/mo grows and shrinks with San Francisco's housing supply? By what mechanism?

Certainly the set of people who are willing to move to SF and pay $Y < $X is larger, but then SF is not "just as expensive" anymore if it achieves rent $Y. If rents start to rise up towards $X again, then the pool of people willing to move here shrinks accordingly.

I thought about this some more... maybe the price dips slightly in the short term, which lets a few more engineers in. These incremental engineers take the tech industry over an inflection point, meaning it’s now ravenous for engineers and paying them enough for rent $Z > $X. Is this what people mean when they say they’re concerned that more housing would not lower the price?

They thought that in Vancouver too. They didn't bank on wealthy foreigners who would gladly keep condos vacant.

You will see the same thing happen in the Bay Area...there is no law that requires new construction to be allocated to "locals". The YIMBY crowd will still be locked out.

Vacancy tax that's aggressive enough to convince absentee owners to take on renters will need to be part of any solution to the housing crisis, and may even be a solution by itself. (San Francisco has more vacant units, which could be returned to the market overnight, than it could build in years).

Hongkong has truckloads of free space to develop on. High density com/res zones only occupy ~15% of HK SAR territory.

HK has more nimbers than US, the biggest of whom is the Hongkong government.

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