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> The shortage isn't about the amount of available housing at all, it's about people's ability to live there too. And if you're just doubling the building heights, you haven't talked about wages or ability to live there etc.

How is the housing shortage not about the amount of available housing? Wages don’t need to increase if housing prices fall as a result of an increase in supply. If the problem isn’t a shortage in housing, it wouldn’t be a housing shortage.

I also don’t agree with the commenter you were replying to; it’s a naive assumption that height limits are responsible for less construction. More likely, it’s hard to purchase properties, tear them down, and rebuild higher. This would be solved at least partially by what we call a “land value tax,” which incentivizes economically efficient use of the land [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

> How is the housing shortage not about the amount of available housing?

The name of the problem itself oversimplifies the problem space. There are lots of scenarios playing out today where there is ample housing and still a housing shortage. A major problem is that often the houses available do not match the ability of the renters to pay. So you can have lots of expensive houses being vacant, and lots of renters with nowhere to live, and have a housing shortage.

> Wages don’t need to increase if housing prices fall as a result of an increase in supply.

What? Yes they do! Wages are already too low to support a normal housing market, due to long-term wage suppression of the middle over many decades. Wages definitely need to rise for this problem to fix.

> So you can have lots of expensive houses being vacant, and lots of renters with nowhere to live, and have a housing shortage.

Do you have a source for this? Sounds far-fetched. I can't imagine many landlords wanting to rent but unwilling to lower their price.

The assumption comes from simple math. If you have a 10 story building and make it twice as high by duplicating the bottom 10 stories, you've just doubled the number of living units. Considering that some buildings have large lobbies or retail in the bottom few stories you might actually be able to get o more livable units. It isn't like we are building pyramids. Yes, not 100% of the building isn't livable, and I don't think anyone implied that. But if you double the height, you should be able to double the living space. You don't need a ton more infrastructure to support the extra floors. Of course the double comment assumes you essentially copy the lower floors, and not make the upper floors into larger living spaces.

> The shortage isn't about the amount of available housing at all

Yes it is. That's literally all there is to it. A housing shortage by definition means that there's not enough housing to satisfy the demand.

> it's about people's ability to live there too

People can't afford to live there because the shortage of housing has caused the price of housing to go up.

> This stuff is super complicated!

It's not complicated at all. Onerous zoning and land use laws have made it impossible for developers to build to the level of density necessary to support NYC's rapidly growing population.

> Yes it is. That's literally all there is to it.

No, it isn't, and no, it isn't. This stuff is a lot more complicated that you think it is.

> A housing shortage by definition means that there's not enough housing to satisfy the demand

That's not true. You need to mention that there are different prices that people are able to pay, and with wage stagnation being such a big issue for the middle class, you need enough housing to satisfy the demand _at each economic level_.

You can't just make a bunch of rich people houses, have them sit empty while there are homeless outside, and say you've solved the shortage because there's "enough housing!!" to satisfy demand.

> It's not complicated at all.

Yes, it is. You are being condescending, rude, and you are also wrong to boot.

> Onerous zoning and land use laws have made it impossible for developers to build to the level of density necessary to support NYC's rapidly growing population.

I do not agree with this at all. My fingers are tired and I have debate this point endlessly here. I'll be short: Wages are too artificially low for this to make any sense.

> The shortage isn't about the amount of available housing at all, it's about people's ability to live there too. And if you're just doubling the building heights, you haven't talked about wages or ability to live there etc.

It's supply and demand. More available housing means lower prices.

> It's supply and demand. More available housing means lower prices.

Does it? I don't understand this, at all.

More available housing would also create more demand, no? More people online will see the lower prices and move to Manhattan, immediately increasing the price again, no? The situation is complicated. You can't just say "supply and demand" and think you've solved NYC's problems in housing.

ECON textbooks teaching students that every person is a financially rational actor and that supply + demand plays out real nice in the real world is supper dangerous. My econ textbook was wrong in a lot of ways and it's upsetting to see continuing oversimplification and massive condescension for these antiquated and not-real-world-tested perspectives on how to solve complicated urban problems.

> More available housing would also create more demand, no?

By that logic, I could build a massive apartment tower in the middle of nowhere and people would flock to live there. China tried that - it didn't work.

https://www.businessinsider.com/these-chinese-cities-are-gho...

Housing is a market just like anything else. In any market, if the price gets too high, competitors jump in to create more supply to meet the demand. If apples were $100 a piece, everyone would grow apple trees in their backyard and make a fortune until the prices came back down to a reasonable level.

So why aren't developers pumping out cheap apartment buildings left and right? Why aren't they buying empty parcels of land and putting up massive towers? Because they can't. Because local zoning laws won't allow them to.