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You can always build more dense housing on land that is in high demand. In fact, doing that is the most obvious and effective way to keep prices low for desirable locales. Backed up by pretty much all the economic research on the subject in the last decade.

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>You can always build more dense housing on land that is in high demand.

you CAN. But that takes a while. There's always something under construction in Califnornia and a good portion of that is trying to build more apartments and housing. The time to make those don't keep up with the influx of people emmigrating to LA or otherwise leaving the parents' homes to seek their own lifestyle.

It's honestly a more feasible solution to try and convince certain companies to build in a city that is otherwise "vacant". Make it a place where people will work around, have the existing land and homes appreciate in value. That's why Amazon and Apple had such aggressive bid wars from cities to try and get them to make new campuses in their respective city areas.

We dont have a shortage of dense housing because it takes to long to build

We have a shortage of dense housing because it is illegal to build dense housing in the places it should exist, and where it is legal, community review processes quickly shut it down

It's a bit of both, at least for my state specifically. There is a bunch of gatekeeping, but also some necessary restrictions and codes in California which is stricter than most other states, but necessary given its history. You can't take shortcuts anymore here like you could in the 60's (or heck, even in the 80's in terms of Los Angeles).

It's a a long and expensive process and I wouldn't be surprised if some deals fell through something because the minimum expenses exceeded what some potential clients expected.

> You can always build more dense housing on land that is in high demand. In fact, doing that is the most obvious and effective way to keep prices low for desirable locales. Backed up by pretty much all the economic research on the subject in the last decade.

In which dense cities in Canada (or the USA) did this work, resulting in a desirable dense city with cheap housing?

Great, is that economic research based on thought experiments or reality? I'd love to read it. Let's go back to my example. You build denser housing on top of or next to the condos I mentioned, what happens? The workers move in closer to the city center. The price is low for a short period of time, until more people migrate. Just like when the highway opens up a new lane. The traffic is better for a short period, until more people begin using the highway more. Then you are back to the status quo.

You could argue that you can just keep building up and up until you cross the threshold of demand affecting the price, but without a market incentive to do that, it's wishful thinking at best. "Well the government could fund it" you could say, and indeed it can. But speaking of economic research, everytime the government has done such a thing, it causes widespread economic depression of the local area.

Those are empirical studies. The Finnish one is the most recent I'm aware of, but they all say basically the same thing[1], here are a couple more [2][3].

Housing does not suffer from induced demand like road capacity does. This is easy to disprove by reading those studies. Sure, building nicer better neighborhoods does make them more desirable but it doesn't follow that they have to be more expensive, as long as you build enough homes for people to live in. Taken to its conclusion the induced demand argument against density is an argument against improving quality of life in general, and pretty nihilistic.

[1] https://ideas.repec.org/p/fer/wpaper/146.html

[2] https://www.dropbox.com/s/oplls6utgf7z6ih/Pennington_JMP.pdf...

[3] https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/7fc2bf_ee1737c3c9d4468881bf14...

>You could argue that you can just keep building up and up until you cross the threshold of demand affecting the price, but without a market incentive to do that, it's wishful thinking at best.

Tokyo, with its reasonable zoning, seems to have figured out how to build densely without being absurdly expensive. The key here is that the "market" is indeed allowed to figure it out, and not as restricted by NIMBYism.

The best thing the government can do right now is to get out of the way in regards to building more units.

Tokyo has managed to keep housing prices pretty affordable (and while Japan's population may be shrinking, Tokyo's has continued to grow). Unsurprisingly, they build a LOT of housing and removed most legal/regulatory obstacles to building it a few decades ago.

They issue more permits for new housing units in a year than the entire state of California does, even though California has more than double the population. (or for an East Coast comparison - they issue around 9x the housing permits that NYC does, even though the population is <50% larger).

There have been many articles written on this topic by many publications that you can find, but here's one citation: https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3...

> As of April 1, 2020, there were approximately 115.8 thousand square kilometers of high-class asphalt roads in Tokyo metropolis, Japan, which was the dominant type of pavement.

Tokyo metro area is 14,034 km2.

Meanwhile LA is 14% parking lots or so I’ve heard.

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