Rents dropping significantly across the Seattle area after new construction

You might be more successful by just arguing that value shouldn't be tied to wages (which is what your quote is really pushing.)

1) things change over time, policies that at one time protected people move on to be things that increase inequality or worsen outcomes.

2) Politics has a long history of excluding less powerful voices. Right now in cities, there is a movement to “re-enfranchise” the people whom have often been ignored, minorities and renters. Often times the will of the people changes because those who were locked out of the decision making process 10/20/30 years ago now hold much more political power and able to influence outcomes.

3) if your bias is “current policy is best policy” then you are biased to favor the voices of the moderately wealthy white home owners who created modern urban land use policy over the past 50 years at the expense of renters and minorities.

Few systems are direct democracies. Isn't it more likely the people decided the rule maker should be who the rule maker is (or makers are) and the rule maker(s) then decided what the law should be. And that is just some of the political systems you can model.

Think of like how congress like a <25% approval rating but most of them keep getting voted back in.

- People often want to limit housing in their particular city/neighborhood, but

- They agree that there should be more housing built somewhere, just not near them

It's like being for pollution regulations, except that you demand that you yourself (and your buddies) be exempt. Normally that wouldn't work in a democracy, but imagine that only the polluters get to vote: that's how land use regulations get decided (because the beneficiaries of lower housing costs would be largely potential residents, and you have to live there to vote).

In practice, the solution is to have zoning decisions made at a higher level; at the metro area level is probably the best one, since they tend to function as economic units, and that mimics how people tend to choose housing.

The franchise isn't restricted to homeowners; renters too can vote.

I think this is one reason why smallish homeowners are not comfortable with developers bringing in lots of high density housing (at whatever price). They feel pretty well aligned with their neighbors and don't want the balance of power to shift. Maybe a proportional representation system at the council level could help defuse tensions in some markets.

I've developer a few simplistic economic simulations in the past for fun, some of which included land ownership, but I never considered adding each agent having the ability to modify the law of land ownership as part of the simulation. The comment made me think of what would the impact of adding it be, and if there is less validity of models which don't include it.

I grant you that 2008 was exceptional, as recessions go...but it's not rare to see projects abandoned. I saw it in Seattle in 2001 as well. It just depends on the state of the projects when the recession hits -- you might not get "holes in the ground" unless the decline hits quite suddenly (as in 2008), but you definitely see projects abandoned. That's universal.

To rent out your Ferrari you'd have to run an agency and couldn't use it as you wanted to. Which kind of defeats the purpose of a luxury good.

(It's hard to find data on how prevalent this is... From one article, it looks like a Palo Alto realtor estimated in 2015 that about 20% of home sales were to Chinese investors, with about half of these leaving the house unoccupied: http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/04/28/realtors-printin... )

Induced housing demand is common in the majority of cities across the US. The act of creating urban housing makes an area in higher demand than the housing just built could actually supply. The action of creating 100 units of supply simultaneously generates ~120+ units of demand.

Most people refer to this as "gentrification", even if that label isn't totally accurate. It obviously doesn't last forever, you can't generate more demand indefinitely. But it absolutely does happen -- we see the results all the time.

And to be clear that's not an argument against new housing -- we obviously need to build more housing. But it's a common observation that new 'market-rate' urban housing does not lower prices, but raises them in short and medium length timeframes (yes even in non-coastal cities, yes even in small towns, etc).

We see this in Seattle too. Seattle rents are 4.5% higher than last year, or 50% higher than they were 5 years ago, according to the articles own data. They'll be even higher next year, and Seattle Times will write an article about the winter slowdown in leasing, and rents will rise even higher again a year later. Until the bubble pops, the cycle will continue.

Anybody who doesn't think this is a problem just needs to take a look at one Hyde park. Nearly empty. Prime location. You could demolish that and build high rise flats for a thousand people there, maybe more. The problem isn't just how many prime location empty apartments there are but how big they are too.

Raising property taxes would definitely solve the problems but the political forces arrayed against that are very powerful.

So, yeah, "easy" to solve if the market is structured right. It often isn't.

Property taxes are part of the problem in many cases. When property taxes are low that doesn't really happen, but when they're high nobody wants to build new housing. Because the net present value of the future property tax comes out of what someone will pay for a new building, making it less profitable to construct one.

Why not use "units started" or "units finished" instead?