> Less-profitable than hypothetically possible (in a totally unregulated market/resources) does not necessarily mean unprofitable
This is true but the less profitable it is the less investment there will be. Less investment in housing either means less housing or worse housing.
> nor does it necessarily mean less-profitable than investment options elsewhere.
This is not. Whether within a domestic market or internationally there are a plethora of options for where to invest money, from equities and bonds to venture capital to commercial and presidential real estate. If you artificially reduce the profitability of residential real estate you’ll get less of it unless you subsidise it. That’s just the government paying money to solve a problem the government created.
This is, unfortunately, naive.
The city will use its power to serve the interests of those who hold power in the city, while of course saying it's for the common good.
Typically, those in power do want higher housing prices, and thus promote a housing shortage.
The only solution is to not give the city that power.
I don't get that, wouldn't a housing shortage bring the prices up?
Thanks for pointing it out. I fixed it. But I can understand if no one is that impressed by my Deep Thoughts regardless...
Disagree that dense building is the deciding factor in a 10x difference. The home prices being higher than other metro areas reflects the strength of the Bay Area job market. There are plenty of markets less expensive than Palo Alto, some of them allowing more construction and having good jobs, but there is no metro area in the United States 10x cheaper than Palo Alto with the same access to a job market of the same caliber.
Example: Seattle is cheaper, builds more and is a tech hub. But it's not 10x cheaper, maybe within 2x last I checked a long time ago. To get a 10x difference you need to sacrifice on another metric, and go to a place with a less booming economy and fewer jobs.
If you want to see what building dense can do don’t look at Seattle. Look at New York City. Brooklyn isn’t Manhattan dense but it’s more affordable. But NYC’s entire metro area is comparatively dense in the US. People commute from Jersey City in under an hour. If all of NYC was zoned to allow the level of density you see in Manhattan prices wouldn’t drop as much as you’d naively expect because there’d be even more economic activity but they’d drop plenty. Tokyo has increased ~50% in population over the past thirty years and land and rent prices have been pretty much flat. That’s what allowing dense building makes possible.
This is obvious, but it's also obvious that, with respect, few people want to live in Boise and if they did, and could make Palo Alto money, housing would become much more expensive.
> Look at New York City.
A very expensive place, not 10x cheaper than Palo Alto and not Boise. Nothing you said is news to me or refutes the point.
Yes, these differences can be big, and housing policy affects the number. But you can't say it's the reason a non job center city is cheap, or claim that the factor is 10x.