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Comment by ranman | Hacker News Reader

Housing doesn’t fit the traditional supply/demand model b/c of the time constraint. It takes time to build housing but companies can grow and hire faster than housing can be built. You don’t want to overbuild and create ghost towns where developers go bankrupt trying to sell (a couple of these places exist in Europe, Canada, and America - I think China too but I haven’t seen it in person), but you don’t want to underbuild a la SF. So I agree with you that the zoning laws have a lot to do with it - but housing isn’t an instant commodity either - it can take many years, esp for high density projects.

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Housing doesn’t fit the traditional supply/demand model b/c incumbent owners are able to increase there wealth by using the power of the state to constrain supply through zoning and other regulatory means.

The time constraint you mention is often artificial, six months for permitting here and two months for an impact study there. Actual construction is surprisingly fast.

Nobody overbuilds into ghost towns where there are real housing problems. The only ghost towns I've seen were really small areas that didn't really need all of the houses.

Also, manufacturing delays don't have any impact on supply and demand. They are part of the "supply".

What allows companies to hire faster than cities can grow? The companies still need office space that means more and bigger buildings, it's the same damn problem as housing.

...with one significant difference: communities are generally much more amenable to increased jobs than increased residents. And companies growing fast usually are cool with huge buildings in the city center, which is the one place where cities are generally fine with high density. Getting cities to be okay with, say, low-rise housing developments across the city is a much harder ask. So it really does just come down to zoning and zoning-adjacent concerns (e.g. community input meetings where developments get shot down).

I'll take the occasional unlucky overbuild if it means sanity in the bay area, Seattle, NYC, Boston, etc.

Companies can't grow faster than the supply of office space, which also has time constraints.

Overbuilt is not a function of supply and demand, but more often speculation.

It doesn't take time to build warehouses and factories?

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