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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

Supply and demand. If you increase supply, prices overall will go down.

“Affordable” or other non-market schemes simply raise the prices for everyone else — including the non rich that don’t win the “affordable” lottery.

More market housing everywhere solves the affordability crisis.

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Yes, more housing of any type will help! But, it seems like developers are only building high end housing, which means only units priced at the very top of the market are added. It would be great if developers built normal apartments that do not include every single possible amenity. Not every renter wants to pay a premium for granite countertops, a fancy gym, a pool, bathrooms for every bedroom, etc. I just want a well-built apartment that is within a mile of a caltrain stop, not a $5,000 2 bedroom luxury apartment...

Look at the price differential between apartments in similar geography that do and don’t have these things. I have not found “luxury” to command a significant premium, particularly since “luxury” buildings are sometimes the only ones offering small units where the older stock is all large. The crappiest old buildings are still exorbitant. The amenities and countertops are practically free next to the cost of the fixed costs of a “well built” building of any kind.

That's still a supply problem. So long as there is an artificially limited supply forced by NIMBYs they'll continue to build higher margin housing.

If you open it up to allow 10x or even 100x more housing units you'll get ones in every price range.

If you passed a law that car manufacturers could only sell 1000 cars per year, you can bet those would be some really fancy, expensive cars. Just let them sell cars and they start doing market segmentation and producing budget cars all on their own. Same with homes.

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