Even if they did vote, a lot of the politically active young renters oppose new development since they see it as gentrification or only enriching real estate developers or only building luxury housing.
That's the bug right there. Rental housing is a popular investment vehicle, at a ROI of 9.5 % it slightly outperforms the stock market. Any regulation and anything that would decrease profit will be stridently opposed by the wealthy classes. They go and vote and sit on the city council.
Even if you do move back into the same neighborhood after construction is complete and your rent isn't impacted too much (which is not a super common outcome), it's likely the community around you has changed. Gentrification increases the costs of basic food, clothing, and other resources in your area. You're local diner might be replaced with a wagyu beef slinging $15 hamburger joint. It's doing brisk business, but you can't afford to eat there. Your old dinged and dented grocery store or market stall is now a fancy Whole Foods.
That's not to say it's impossible to build or improve neighborhoods, but it's also not so easy as 'just build more on top of existing units.' The disruption and displacement of hundreds or thousands of lives for years is significant.
There's a healthy debate around how best to deal with this -- do we just bite the bullet and build a TON of housing all at once? Do we try to preserve the residency of the people currently living there and build up opportunistically? Do we try to decommodify housing altogether to remove the incentives that lead to this situation? (If we priced housing based on how well it provided housing, rather than based on what the market would bear, we'd see a different sort of situation, I'd imagine.) I dunno, maybe the combination is all three.
I highly, highly recommend this youtube playlist which works through these sorts of things using Cities Skylines (which is a great city sim game): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvUByM-fZk&list=PLwkSQD3vqK...
I think it needs to be solved at a macro level, in a way that is nuanced and delicate. Because on one hand, assuming the rest of the world doesn’t change, making an area nicer to live is objectively good. And upper middle class people deserve housing too, and landowners perhaps should have at least some level of control over what they do with their property (you can argue that landlording in general could be abolished, but that’s a separate discussion).
Of course on the other hand, it is a shame that poor people have to fight to keep their neighborhoods shitty so that they don’t get displaced to somewhere far away from their jobs and community.
I’m not sure if there’s a great economic solution that still involves a market housing economy. The least worst solution I can think of is to basically carve out special units for the exact people displaced. IE if I want to built a 300 unit condo tower in West Oakland taking up a whole block, I have to provide current-market-rate rents for all the people currently living in that block.
Yes, we absolutely should. I live in a tract house/neighborhood from the 40s in the East Bay, which is a cookie cutter house that was constructed en mass, and was cheap (For the time) and high quality. I believe the house was initially purchased for something like ~8k (~140k in 2019 money), but it is worth many more times than that solely because no more housing has been built en mass since the war.
We should of course move onto building multifamily homes, and away from the mess SFH suburbia created, but the principle remains the same: More housing availability pushes down prices for everyone.
Look at Palo Alto and East Palo Alto.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Palo_Alto,_California
So... yeah, build a ton of housing, but start doing it a lot more in the rich areas that have been exempt from it for far too long.
It sure worked for Harlem.
Also, nobody is entitled to live anywhere they want at whatever price they want. It's this attitude that drives so many "affordable" housing programs that are complete failures (and a tax on the middle class).
In my area, new construction has raised the rent of “nice” apartments and shifted aging properties to Section 8, which is a defacto price floor.