What's the point? NYC could have issued more supply to reduce the price. The fact that they chose not to until the demand for them dropped has no bearing on the supply/demand relationship.
Not really, taxi medallion owners are a powerful special interest group. Just like Bay Area homeowners.
My other favorite YIMBY argument is that the Bay Area would have super cheap housing if only it were more like New York. New York has (had?) some of the most expensive housing in the entire world. Sure, there are zoning laws and regulations that could be changed to build even more housing, but the primary issue is not that New York has less housing than other parts of the country. To the contrary, the cheapest places to live in the US tend to be have the least dense housing.
The issue is that there are not a fixed number of people who want to live in a given area; if there were, every new unit built would allow someone else in the area to either not be homeless or to live with fewer roommates. Really what happens in practice in a high-demand city (conceptually, at least) is the additional supply causes prices to drop by some amount, which attracts new residents attracted by the drop in prices until the housing costs almost as much as it did before. So it’s definitely getting more crowded, with the associated problems, but the effect on housing prices is fairly small in comparison.
The fact that housing prices in the Bay Area create such a concentration of people who work in tech by driving everyone else out contributes to the region’s culture in important ways, some positively and some negatively. My favorite theory (from Date-onomics) is that this causes the local gender ratio to skew predominantly male, which causes the single straight men in the area (while this certainly does not describe the entire labor force, it describes a substantial portion) to work harder (both because they’re trying to stand out to attract a partner and also because they’re less distracted by dating).
This is a description of supply and demand, not some kind of trump card against it. Notice that more people are getting their preferences satisfied. That's the point.
And YIMBY-type groups fight against these artificial restrictions on supply. That's not an argument that the fundamentals of supply and demand doesn't apply.
> is the additional supply causes prices to drop by some amount, which attracts new residents attracted by the drop in prices until the housing costs almost as much as it did before
That's the definition of demand: the number of people who would buy a good at a given price.