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Comment by anonymous5133 | Hacker News Reader

Only people to blame for ballooning housing prices are the politicians who have purposefully implemented restrictive building codes to make sure housing goes as sky high as possible. The reason it is like that is because we are under the impression that if housing keeps increasing then home owners will be able to spend more.

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This. Look at how many millions of square feet of real estate have been announced in NYC in the past week alone: https://newyorkyimby.com/

Given that each city effectively has unlimited housing potential, the idea that tourists are driving out locals makes zero sense.

Right. Because NYC is a magical fairytale-land of affordable rents.

Construction does not fix the fact that tourists pay 5-10x what local residents do for the same real estate. If you want to keep that from affecting rents, there's a very effective and inexpensive way to do it: don't let people turn rentals into hotels. Just like New York.

> Because NYC is a magical fairytale-land of affordable rents.

I mean if you're willing to take the subway to work, you can get a pretty large 2BR for less than $2K / mo. Yes you need a job to be able to afford that, but not a particularly amazing job. Just not unemployed for the entire year every year.

I agree that good transit is the key to affordable housing. Those kinds of apartments aren't located in dense neighborhoods: they're in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn. Places are well-connected to Manhattan by transit. Places that would be impractical otherwise.

https://streeteasy.com/for-rent/nyc/price:-2000%7Cbeds:2?vie...

I've no idea what you mean when you say "cities have unlimited housing". Should we just bulldoze everything and build skyscrapers, is that your idea of a good city to live?

Not everything, but North American cities need a lot more skyscrapers. Instead most North American cities sprawl.

Density increases innovation. Density decreases travel carbon emissions.

I don't know about North America, but replacing everything with skyscrapers is simply not the least bit desirable in the vast majority of city centres in Europe, for example.

A city of skyscrapers would also make a pretty dystopian city, the way I see it.

This is just not true, it may be a factor but it's not the "only". What you have in many cases is simple market pressure: kick out the residents and transform nearly every house in the city centre into a hostel/airbnb because renting to tourists rakes you in much more money. Now residents either pay 3x 4x the price they did, or they abandon the city centre for good, leaving it little more than a playground for tourists.

One and a half million new citizens every two weeks, globally.

We need smart solutions to a complex problem.

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