I'm no NIMBY but places like NYC will never be able to build enough to outpace demand.
Tokyo is 13400 sq km, NYC is 780 sq km. If I rounded Tokyo's land area to the same sig figs as I did for NYC, it would be lowered by half the total area that NYC takes up!
That's just not an accurate comparison.
Live in NYC. Lived in Japan. The difference is transit. It is far easier to get to Saitama or Kawasaki or Yokohama or Chiba than it is to get to Long Island from NYC. You can do the former in an hour at rush hour. Try getting to downtown Manhattan from Bay Shore as a daily commute. You'll go mad.
Here's Tokyo and New York at the same zoom level:
Tokyo: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.736739,139.6246444,10z
NYC: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7983574,-73.948053,10z
The gray area of Tokyo on that map is pretty much all considered an exurb of Tokyo, more-or-less feasible for daily commute by rail. Most of the NYC region is inaccessible from Manhattan, except by car. Look at the Seibu Shinjuku line, or the Chuo line on the Tokyo map -- both offer express trains that will take you from the distant western exurbs, right into the middle of downtown Tokyo:
The density of the NYC MSA is 1/3 that of Tokyo: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
There's plenty of room to grow up. Just because the reason we don't is shitty government organization and FPTP voting doesn't mean we can just ignore the vast swaths of low-density just outside Manhattan 's borders.
At the small scale Tokyo's densest ward is ~22,700/km^2 and Manhattan is ~28,800/km^2 with Manhattan being ~4x-5x the land area of the former (i.e. the core is a lot more dense). At the large scale the Greater Tokyo Area is ~2,900/km^2 and the New York Metropolitan Area is ~2,053/km^2 (i.e. the urban area around Tokyo is a lot more dense).
"Tokyo" is a good example that you can get affordable housing by focusing on how to spread the population over a large urban area but it's not a good example building more housing downtown is a scalable approach.
There's probably also a fear that if you let a new tenant in for lower rent, this might lower the rent other people expect and the problem starts snowballing.
With commercial units (eg - downtown San Francisco) it is even harder because with remote work, the jobs are never coming back to the city.
If property appreciation outpaces the gains one could make from renting it out, then it’s better to leave it empty.
It totally makes sense for the rental property owners.
There's a substantial cost in having a renter living there, both in dollars and risk. So if the rent isn't enough to cover those, it's cheaper to let it sit unused.
Vacancy rates are well low at the moment.
Here's greenpoint as an example: https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/new-york-ny/greenpoint. Same goes for LIC.
Artificially forcing prices low just reduces supply.
But no doubt NYC will head down that path.
Seems like all major cities are repeating the policies of the 60’s-80’s that causes populations to drop.
As a middle-middle-class suburban kid, I just couldn't conceive of how the wealthiest city on earth could have sections that looked like a bombed-out and evacuated European city following World War II.
I asked my father what had happened here. He answer was "rent control".