I’ve become convinced there’s no solution. It takes a lot of money and time to build. If you make it easy to build then there’s less money to be made and therefore less will be built.

Make it hard to be build and there will be immense pressure to build but it won’t happen.

The two ends are constantly trying to find an equilibrium. The only way to make housing affordable is to overbuild, but private money won’t do it for obvious reasons.

The government could subsidize building but in essence that’s just making rich people richer. Perhaps that’s the only way short of forcing people to build (like prison labor or something horrible like that).

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I used to believe that eliminating zoning and increasing density is the solution (still think so), but induced demand is a thing. When I studied this I found no evidence denser areas are cheaper. In fact the denser areas tend to be more expensive from my own research.