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Comment by dadoge | Hacker News Reader

The US hasn’t done jack shit for the supply lately.

The doom cycle of the last 50 years:

- Fed lowers interest rates to increase demand. Prices go up, only the most well off can afford.

- Fed goes back to increasing rates again. Demand goes down. Prices generally don’t decrease all that much really, they just stop going up, and higher interest rates are what stop more from getting a house.

Literally nothing for supply side. Our society has decided to leave housing up the The Fed to tweak demand.

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Well, private property matters in the United States. "The government" can't just decide to bulldoze everything and start over. And seeing as how this isn't going to change, it's possible that not much can or should be done about it. Zoning is a tool that municipalities have at their disposal, but local government officials represent the people in their jurisdictions, often property owners--who pay significant taxes--so chances are they won't vote against their own interests.

I'm afraid there really aren't any good answers to these problems.

> Zoning is a tool that municipalities have at their disposal, but local government officials represent the people in their jurisdictions, often property owners--who pay significant taxes--so chances are they won't vote against their own interests.

One possible solution is for states to limit the zoning authority of high-demand municipalities that fail to produce housing. This is basically the idea of RHNA[1, 2] in California, although the process didn't have much teeth until recently.

[1] https://abag.ca.gov/our-work/housing/rhna-regional-housing-n...

[2] https://abag.ca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2021-06/Co...

But the US government can do something. They could pass a bill that allows a progressive tax write-off for builders who build X units. More write offs for redeveloping houses older than a hundred years.

Instead of all the tax cuts, borrowing and money printing done since trump era, we could have incentivized builders to build more.

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