Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilwilson | Hacker News Reader

The issue is always lack of building. Higher interest rates just mask the problem and hand more money to rich people for no effort.

The problem is that the private housing production system responds to increased credit availability only at the margins and does not over produce. That’s largely because houses are still hand built and not really substitutable like a vehicle. You don’t generally have a choice of two houses on the same site.

However if you produce houses publicly then you can force private housing to compete outside the margins. At which point you get excess supply, as we see with cars and then house prices start to stabilise and even depreciate. At which point the “investment” hoards would start to liquidate.

We need the housing market to behave like the production car market, not the classic car market.

The fix is public policy producing housing in order to force a situation of excess supply.

View on HN

> The fix is public policy producing housing in order to force a situation of excess supply.

So... we should have paid builders to build more houses during the pandemic?

Eliminate regulations and laws limiting supply.

Where I used to live, it cost $7k to get a plot of land ready to build on. Today, that cost is $70k and 6months to 1y to get past all the permits and paperwork. And then having to deal with a governing body that doesn't understand how money works, and it is no surprise no one builds affordable houses anymore.

Or increase planning department funding with higher emphasis on throughput. It's the bureaucratic delay (nearly a year for approvals or revisions in many places) that causes much of the pain, not the regulations themselves.

Funding bureaucracy only serves to increase the amount of bureaucracy

Giving them money is unlikely to help. They do not have any incentive to go faster.

About the biggest delay in Seattle permitting is the requirement to get a board of volunteer assholes to approve the visual appearance of the project, which is estimated to add an average of 8 months to the permitting process but is allowed to last for an indefinite period. The average total permitting time for these projects (over 35,000sq ft) is about 18 months.

Hopefully they will be thrown out soon. The really fun note is that these boards are almost entirely made up of architects who are getting the chance to single-handedly destroy a competitor’s work.

This sucks. In addition to adding so much time and costs to projects, visual approval boards are going to be culturally suffocating. Some of the most iconic structures in the world were widely considered to be eye sores when new, see: Eiffel Tower.

Seems like the first amendment should prohibit that, but so far courts have not agreed.

At minimum any sort of approval system needs to come with some sort of rubric to bypass it: "build it this way and it's approved automatically". It gives the approvers the same agency while prohibiting holding anything up, and it puts the onus on the approvers to say what they want to see instead of the builders finding a way to hit a nebulous target.

The better solution along these lines is to give them a week to render a decision (with stated reasoning that can be immediately appealed) or the application is automatically approved. Then they can request more resources if they don't have enough to be thorough but what they can't do is delay rendering a decision.

The regulations themselves are what forces bureaucratic review though. Fewer regulations would mean more throughput with the same resources.

Yes.

One of the ways government can help us by funding counter-cyclical building, keeping the sector afloat and preventing supply crunches when a recession ends.

>The issue is always lack of building.

This is why NY is cheaper than the midwest.

More people are moving in then there are units available to accomidate them. This can be solved by, you guessed it... building.

> Higher interest rates just mask the problem and hand more money to rich people for no effort.

What higher interest rates? We're nowhere near high interest rates.

Yeah, our current "high interest rates" are still artificially lowered by the Fed.

The almost 7% that the US is currently at, vs the < 3% it was at back in 2021, 2.3x as much. It's true 7% isn't high compared to a peak of 18.5% in 1981, but neilwilson said higher, not high.

Lack of building is not the problem - on the contrary.

You cannot realistically build enough so that the rents decrease.

And when you build you just fuel the vicious cycle of people -> opportunities -> people.

> You cannot realistically build enough so that the rents decrease.

I'm curious what makes you think this.

Suppose you built twice as many housing units as you had residents. Rents wouldn't decrease? Why not?

Or do you think that a sufficient amount of housing wouldn't fit? For reference, the San Francisco metro area has ~7.5M people in an area of ~3500 square miles. With housing at the population density of Manhattan, the number of people who could be housed in that area is approximately 250M people, i.e. three quarters of the entire US population. Obviously you wouldn't do this, but you could, so that can't be the constraint.

I think they answered in a curt but succinct way:

> when you build you just fuel the vicious cycle of people -> opportunities -> people

So long as a place is desirable to live, people will keep moving there. Obviously there's a logical limit to the argument- things get weird when you build more housing than there are people- but then so too do the logistical issues of sewer, water, electricity, and geology (some locations simply aren't economical to build high rise buildings on).

> So long as a place is desirable to live, people will keep moving there.

The underlying premise being that they're moving to this place from some other place. But that has an obvious solution: Build more housing everywhere. People can't increase the population of everywhere by moving from everywhere to everywhere.

It also implies that building it in one place still helps to reduce the cost somewhere else. If you make San Jose more attractive and people move from San Francisco to San Jose then you're reducing demand in San Francisco and lowering the prices there.

> Obviously there's a logical limit to the argument- things get weird when you build more housing than there are people- but then so too do the logistical issues of sewer, water, electricity, and geology (some locations simply aren't economical to build high rise buildings on).

The constraints at the physical limit are irrelevant because you don't need to get anywhere close to it. The point is that you could if you had to, not that you actually have to.

This incorrectly assumes that housing is expensive everywhere. It isn't. My house's mortgage payment wouldn't get me a studio apartment in San Francisco.

Not that it necessarily invalidates your comparison, but the home pricing run-up has resulted in many people who wouldn't be able to afford a mortgage on their own home if they had to re-qualify and buy at market price.

Far from assuming this, that is the entire premise. Housing isn't that expensive in Detroit. It's expensive in San Jose. So more housing needs to be built in San Jose. This won't remove people from Detroit because the people have already left Detroit (and those cities are quite far apart). It might remove people from San Francisco, but that's a good thing too.

> Suppose you built twice as many housing units as you had residents. Rents wouldn't decrease? Why not?

People make the same specious arguments about gpu production during mining booms etc. Surely producing more gpus will lower the price, or reduce the profit per gpu at least? Are you saying prices don’t fall with increased supply!?!? that’s a counterintuitive statement, Mr Bear!

it just also turns out to be a true one. Getting more people into the bubble etc, or building more hype around the bubble, often only drives the bubble higher even with increased supply. Macro and micro are different things and the forces can work very differently!

now, ponder the way we’ve turned housing into a bitcoin-style money machine full of people who never want the number to go down… yeah there actually is all sorts of counterintuitive and hazardous second-order effects involved in housing, why would you ever think there aren’t?

(The American housing market is basically the exact same kind of “deflationary asset” as bitcoin by design, in fact - if the system is built around the idea the number can never go down (can never be allowed to go down, in fact) that’s what you’ve got, regardless of any actual utility delivered in the process. We have turned housing into bitcoin instead of a place to live and that’s the overarching problem here.)

Maybe increasing the supply only increases the supply of luxury condos, which if they are all consumed by wealthy individuals might push housing prices upwards etc. Such activity could, similar to bitcoin, actually stimulate enough economic activity in an area itself to sustain upwards trajectory on pricing, or merely crowd everyone else out without prices actually dropping “on older condos” as everyone blithely handwaves. These effects are observable in real towns - Colorado mountain towns have a massive worker shortage yet no workers able to afford housing, so the area has been wracked with crippling labor shortages for multiple decades now! Markets are weird and inefficient in all kinds of exciting ways!

https://www.rmpbs.org/blogs/news/breckenridge-historic-home-...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna17970

Basically economics 101 is barely sufficient for economics 101, and frankly every assertion you can pull from such content is somewhat incorrect and massively oversimplified, even one as simple as “prices will decline if production volume increases”. No, not always - and that’s not the only case I can think of where that simple, confident assertion is completely wrong, it’s not true of giffen goods either for example.

> Surely producing more gpus will lower the price, or reduce the profit per gpu at least?

But that is what happens. The issue with GPUs is that a) there are only a small number of companies that make them b) fab capacity has to be booked in advance, and c) they know it's a bubble, so they're not going to commit to buying a large amount of future fab capacity when it could pop at any time. So then they don't actually increase supply, and prices don't go down.

> Maybe increasing the supply only increases the supply of luxury condos, which if they are all consumed by wealthy individuals might push housing prices upwards etc.

Only in the sense that the average cost might increase because the average unit is now larger, not in the sense that the existing smaller units would cost more rather than less. After all, their occupants no longer have to outbid the wealthy individuals who have put their money into the new luxury units instead.

> Such activity could, similar to bitcoin, actually stimulate enough economic activity in an area itself to sustain upwards trajectory on pricing

The premise here is that if you make an area more attractive then more people may want to live there. But that's fine. Suppose building 10 units increases demand by 5 units. So if you need 10 more units, build 20 more units.

In some kind of hypothetical edge case or rare circumstance, building 10 units might increase demand by 11 units, but that is obviously not sustainable -- if you built 50 million units, there aren't 50 million people in the region to live in the city, so at some point it stops being true, if it even ever was.

> Markets are weird and inefficient in all kinds of exciting ways!

This isn't markets being weird. If prices are high then construction companies want that money, which they get by building new housing. Weirdness only occurs when regulations interfere with their natural market incentive.

> they know it's a bubble,

Especially for nvidia, who have been badly burned by crypto bubbles going from 100->0 very rapidly in the past and ending up with massive oversupply of both used and new GPUs.

Especially given the AI people are buying dedicated business GPUs and not gaming ones like the crypto miners were, that's probably good news for gamers that nvidia haven't gone full bore AI only. If they were, it wouldn't make sense to spend fab time on a new series of gaming GPUs as they have leaked they're doing.

In the case of Nvidia, I don't think they see gaming GPU's and AI as being in direct competition with each other.

Continuing to also produce gaming products give a few advantages, besides simply to serve as something to fall back to if the AI boom turns out to be a bubble.

For instance: - Having consumer GPU's out there has marketing effects and can also increase the population of developers who experiment with AI development.

- Consumer GPU's can be built with cheaper memory types (no HBM needed) and less efficient process technologies (like when the 30-series used Samsung's).

- Having an installed base of consumer GPU's out there allow AI companies to deploy AI products (inference) to edge devices.

- Related to the previous: In the future, AI technology, VR, gaming and TV/film may merge into a single entertainment class, with everything happening or being told in an interactive VR environment, complete with fully AI agents acting within. Having much of the processing power in the edge device may increase the quality of such experiences, and may cause consumers to be willing to significantly increase spending on such products.

>People make the same specious arguments about gpu production during mining booms etc. Surely producing more gpus will lower the price, or reduce the profit per gpu at least? Are you saying prices don’t fall with increased supply!?!? that’s a counterintuitive statement, Mr Bear!

That is not the argument. In your example, demand is increasing more than supply, so obviously prices would not fall.

Supply has to increase at a rate greater than demand (including higher property taxes to incentivize sellers to increase supply of properties for sale).

Yes, exactly. But sometimes a vast increase in supply actually induces additional demand by itself. Demand would not have increased by itself if you did not increase the supply, potentially even if the price increases.

Traffic lanes work this way, notoriously. It’s also fundamentally one of the mechanisms underlying Jevons Paradox.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

Again, the practical example in real estate is Colorado mountain towns. Demand, supply, and prices all accelerate together, and this is particularly amplified because of the customer base in question not having any real price sensitivity etc, and then driving out the portions of the market which do have price sensitivity.

Like it or not, induced demand is a very real phenomenon, and in real estate and similar markets it observably does not always occur at a lesser price due to other positive feedback loops being induced. And you cannot “peel away” those effects separately - the price increase will not necessarily occur exogenously without the demand induction and vice versa.

Again, you’re trying to pick apart the “but that’s separate from the supply increase!” and unfortunately that’s not really severable. The demand increase wouldn’t have occurred without the supply increase. Jevons Paradox being real doesn’t mean gas prices will never go up, so to speak.

> Again, the practical example in real estate is Colorado mountain towns.

This is not a practical example because Colorado mountain towns are not fungible or reproducible. This applies to much of the western US that features amenities in very limited supply that cannot be increased, such as low humidity, tall mountains, surfing, and vast expanses of public land. So the US west will always be expensive, especially if you have an airport/Costco/Apple/Trader Joes nearby.

NYC has a similar dynamic, since no other US city will come close to having a comparable subway transit system.

But this would not apply to places that are relatively fungible and in greater supply, which include many metros in the southeast/midwest/northeast.

Induced demand is a thing, but the population of people is limited hence total demand is limited.

well, no real-estate is fungible, that's not an actual distinction between GP’s thesis and mine.

I don't think that's the fundamental/underlying dysfunction of the real-estate market, because the same induced-demand effects clearly exist in other areas. Again, things like Bitcoin pretty clearly demonstrate that supply can induce its own demand and then build a positive-feedback loop that would not have existed exogenously.

But regardless, it's equally true of the real-estate that both grandparent and I were talking about. If induced demand doesn't count because every real-estate parcel is a unique good, then you also can't ever compute a curve for price, because supply will never exceed n=1 either. Therefore the Law Of Supply and Law Of Demand do not exist in this universe and GP's assertions are still false.

I'm not sure that's a useful way to think about the world, clearly real-estate is at least somewhat fungible (people don't not buy an apartment because they lost a single bid) but if you want to use that model, grandparent's arguments are equally broken, for whatever value of broken you are asserting here.

The more useful analysis imo is that real estate is mostly actually not about real estate - it’s about community, economy, etc. And those are clearly things that are highly susceptible to induced demand. There is a near-infinite supply of beautiful mountain slopes, but that’s not really what people are buying homes in Vale or Breckenridge for. They are buying it for the social factors, which is effectively 100% pure induced demand in this context.

An interesting example of this phenomenon is the development of derelict neighborhoods. I used to live in an area which was re-developed from abandoned buildings and working class housing to a luxury playground. While supply was significantly increased, typical rents skyrocketed.

But what happened to prices in the areas the new residents moved from? Didn't it make them more affordable?

And what would happen to prices in the new area if you kept building, instead of stopping? Finding an inflection point in the curve and passing legislation forcing everybody to live inside it is no proof that there isn't a point higher on the curve where more supply reduces prices again.

> But sometimes a vast increase in supply actually induces additional demand by itself.

Induced demand is a specious argument because the demand is not actually induced by the new construction, it's suppressed by its absence.

If you have traffic congestion, or a housing shortage, then people who would have used the road or moved to the city instead do something else. The normal amount of demand that would exist in a functioning system is suppressed.

If you then alleviate some of the shortfall, that demand comes back. But you haven't induced it, you've just stopped suppressing it through congestion or high prices.

The most important thing about this is that the amount of demand at the lower cost isn't infinite. It's just more than there is at the higher cost. What this means is that you thought you had a shortfall of 100,000 units but you actually had a shortfall of 250,000 units. What it doesn't mean is that you can't solve the problem by building more units -- you just have to build 250,000 rather than 100,000.

Just trying to entertain the thought...

It would seem to me that more supply = more construction + more maintenance + more taxes = more costs. And these costs must go somewhere. Obviously, they would fall under the landlords responsibility, but they probably would try to pass on these costs as much as possible.

Now this is where it gets iffy...

Vacancies don't earn revenue, and so obviously would be costly to landlords. If there is more supply than renters, landlords would be competing with each other for the renters (or risk having vacancy and the costs falling on them), so they would have to compete (such as by lowering rents) in order to attract the renters. Rents therefore decrease.

However...

Let's assume again that there is more supply than renters, but this time there is few landlords (for hyperbole one landlord). Competition for the renters is thus low, (in the case of one landlord - none), and so there is less need to lower rents to attract renters. In fact, in the case of one landlord, he can raise prices despite there being more apartment supply than renters, and have them pay for all the units, including the vacancies. Rents therefore increase, despite there being more supply.

> It would seem to me that more supply = more construction + more maintenance + more taxes = more costs.

More total costs divided by more total units is just the same cost per unit, if not lower because of economies of scale.

> Rents therefore increase, despite there being more supply.

If there is a monopoly landlord then rents will be at the monopoly rent whether you increase supply or not. Even then increasing supply could lower rents, because the monopoly landlord could capture more rents by charging $9000/month on twice as many units than $10,000/month on half as many units, and can't charge $10,000/month on twice as many units because there aren't enough tenants who can afford that.

Also, the premise here is that you're increasing supply. The monopoly landlord would have to outbid everybody else for the new supply or they'd lose their monopoly, and have to pay the monopoly price or else the new units would be cheaper than their existing ones. But then the construction companies would be receiving the monopoly price and become flush with cash to build even more housing until the monopoly landlord ran out of money.

There is a reason landlords collude through zoning boards: It's otherwise quite easy for someone new to enter the market.

> Also, the premise here is that you're increasing supply. The monopoly landlord would have to outbid everybody else for the new supply or they'd lose their monopoly, and have to pay the monopoly price or else the new units would be cheaper than their existing ones. But then the construction companies would be receiving the monopoly price and become flush with cash to build even more housing until the monopoly landlord ran out of money.

All of which presumes the risk here is all on the monopoly landlord, when this isn't the case. Even disregarding zoning, construction companies have to compete for bidders, and the monopoly landlord may not have to compete with bidders. Additionally, if insufficient housing is really a problem because more people and businesses are moving into the neighborhood, then the monopoly landlord isn't likely to have problems running out of money. If that isn't the case, and there is sufficient housing (or renters are struggling to afford rent), then they have market advantage over new entrants to the market in the appropriate pricing of bids. This increases risk and pressures margins for new entrants, limiting their ability to compete, which puts risk onto construction companies in bids. In other words: it is quite possible the new entrants or construction companies fold before the monopoly landlord does.

Again, it's all iffy, but, fact is, every new supply constructed comes with a cost, and it falls on someone, even if cost/unit goes down. The assumption that that cost won't fall on renters, isn't a certainty, nor is the assumption that renters will be the ones to benefit from a decreased cost/unit.

> Even disregarding zoning, construction companies have to compete for bidders, and the monopoly landlord may not have to compete with bidders.

What?

The premise is that there is a monopoly landlord but it's possible for others to create housing, e.g. the landlord owns all of the existing rental properties but anybody can buy an empty lot or single-family home and build a multi-unit building there instead.

Obviously if the monopoly landlord owns all of the land then you have a different problem, but that isn't even close to the case in any metro area in the US. (Though neither is anyone owning all of the rental properties for that matter.)

> Additionally, if insufficient housing is really a problem because more people and businesses are moving into the neighborhood, then the monopoly landlord isn't likely to have problems running out of money.

Won't they?

Suppose it costs $200,000 to build a new housing unit, but because of the existing monopoly they sell for $1,000,000, whether it's to the monopolist to sustain their monopoly or to someone else who would break it. To sustain the monopoly the monopolist has to remain the high bidder.

But now the construction company has a million dollars, and it still costs $200,000 to build a housing unit. So they build five new housing units, and now they have five million dollars. So they hire more guys and start training new apprentices because in the next round they're going to have 25 million dollars and build 125 new units which the landlord will still have to buy for a million dollars each.

It doesn't matter how much money the landlord has, the landlord is going to run out of money, because now the construction company has its own R&D division dedicated to construction automation it's only five more rounds before the landlord is paying the entire US GDP to the construction company.

> In other words: it is quite possible the new entrants or construction companies fold before the monopoly landlord does.

It costs them $200,000 to build something the monopoly landlord has to buy from them for a million dollars, or someone else will buy it from them for $999,999 which then happens again and again and destroys the monopoly.

> but anybody can buy an empty lot or single-family home and build a multi-unit building there instead

Anybody can buy and build? Yeah... only if they have the funds for it!

That's what you're ignoring: running out of funds isn't just a possibility for the monopoly landlord, it's possible for new entrants to the market, as well as the construction companies. The new entrants and construction companies are facing that risk, just as the monopoly landlord is.

For example, a new entrant to the market may have to go into debt to fund his bid or construction in order to compete with the landlord. The monopoly landlord on the other hand, might not have debt and instead has large capital reserves. Depending on the circumstances, it is even possible for the new entrant needing to rent ABOVE what the monopoly landlord already does to just to break even on costs that the monopoly landlord doesn't have (e.g. because of debt, and/or they overbid for the risk in the market, higher land costs, and other reasons). If done in a market where there is already more supply than renters, it would be a very risky venture for the new entrant.

And again, it's also entirely possible that there are 0 bidders showing up to compete with the monopoly landlord (due to shear lack of other participants willing to step in to compete). In which case, the monopoly landlord doesn't have just a monopoly on rents, but bids, and the construction companies would have tough time running the monopoly landlord out of business, no matter how much they build.

> It costs them $200,000 to build something the monopoly landlord has to buy from them for a million dollars, or someone else will buy it from them for $999,999 which then happens again and again and destroys the monopoly

Look... we can make a bunch of "what if" scenarios, but the scenario you made doesn't necessarily have to be the case (nor any of my examples). But, you had inquired about:

    >> You cannot realistically build enough so that the rents decrease.

    >I'm curious what makes you think this.

All I need is one possible example to demonstrate how that can be.

> Anybody can buy and build? Yeah... only if they have the funds for it!

The construction costs are much lower than property values, so construction would be highly profitable. Every wealthy person in the world would be lining up to invest in a hundred construction companies because they would be yielding a 400% year-over-year return until the monopoly is broken.

> All I need is one possible example to demonstrate how that can be.

You need a real example, not a contrived one. "What if the emperor of the world declared that rents have to stay high?" Then you don't have a market anymore and we're no longer talking about what happens in markets at all.

>The construction costs are much lower than property values, so construction would be highly profitable

You have purchase property to construct something on. So high property values works against your own argument.

> You need a real example, not a contrived one

No I don't, as I did not make the original argument you inquired on. That poster needs a real example, I however, only need to entertain how that possibly could be.

> You have purchase property to construct something on. So high property values works against your own argument.

The basis of construction is that you're converting fewer units into more, on the same piece of property. If a single-family home is a million dollars then you can buy one for a million dollars, build a 50-unit condo tower on the lot at a cost of $180,000/unit, apportion the original million dollars across 50 new units so the cost per unit is $20,000, and you're creating new units at a cost of $200,000/unit while selling into a market where a unit goes for a million dollars.

> I however, only need to entertain how that possibly could be.

But that's only interesting if it's something that might plausibly happen in practice. You can make anything possibly happen given an arbitrary set of unrealistic constraints.

Again, we can make up a bunch of made up scenario's, but you seem to want to ignore your own questions, which suggests you're not arguing in good faith. Let's revisit this question of yours:

>Suppose you built twice as many housing units as you had residents. Rents wouldn't decrease? Why not?

I gave you an example of how that would not happen: in an uncompetitive market such as a monopoly, additional supply doesn't impact price if it is simply hoarded. Now we could argue whether that's realistically to happen or not, but I see not why that is relevant to your question.

> in an uncompetitive market such as a monopoly, additional supply doesn't impact price if it is simply hoarded.

Let's consider whether this can even possibly happen. In order for a monopolist to own all the housing, there would have to be somebody with that much money.

The largest wealth fund in the world is China's, with a total value of around $2.75 trillion US dollars. This is the entire fund across all asset classes. Jeff Bezos with his paltry $200 billion can't even hold a candle to it. By contrast, the total value of US housing is north of $47 trillion dollars. So if you were to double the amount of housing in the US, no one in the entire world exists who could afford to buy all of it. Even the entire government of China isn't within an order of magnitude of it.

> > You cannot realistically build enough so that the rents decrease.

> I'm curious what makes you think this.

> Suppose you built twice as many housing units as you had residents. Rents wouldn't decrease? Why not?

It seems entirely logical that rents should decrease.

Not the OP but I do always question this, despite sounding logical. Why? Because it has never worked that way in practice. Can you think of a city that built so much housing that rents became cheap (relative to local income)?

It's easy to say "built twice as many housing units as you had residents" and I agree if you could do that overnight, rents would free-fall. But in practice it would take years to build so much housing. Meanwhile, more and more people and jobs are moving in, attracted by all that new housing. The area becomes ever more popular and more expensive. So you end up with a city that is more vibrant, with a lot more people and a lot more jobs and economic activity. All good things, but rents don't go down, given all this success rents go up.

> Can you think of a city that built so much housing that rents became cheap (relative to local income)?

Most cities with a declining population. They built more housing than they needed, then people moved out, so now housing costs there are low.

It's hard to find other examples of places that have built too much housing, because there is no market incentive to do that. In practice the best you can do is prevent there from being too little.

But the areas with less restrictive zoning do have lower housing costs.

Houston metro, not very restrictive zoning:

  Per capita income: $68,344
  Median home price: $192,500

Riverside metro, California zoning:

  Per capita income: $50,407
  Median home price: $393,000

> Meanwhile, more and more people and jobs are moving in, attracted by all that new housing. The area becomes ever more popular and more expensive.

It isn't the housing that attracts them, it's jobs etc. The housing is then needed to give them somewhere to live, or you get California.

In some ways having more people will create more jobs and attract more people, but the idea that it's not possible to keep up with demand is just defeatism. You can't build a million new units overnight but neither do a million new people move in overnight, and even if they did, you would then be better off to build a million new units over five or ten years than to not do this.

Whereas the argument is simply that building the units should not be prohibited. You obviously don't need a law against it if your actual problem was people not doing it fast enough, right?

If we magic in twice as many housing units there would be calamity and chaos, because a bunch of building magically appeared, in violation of the understood laws of physics. I doubt money would be as much of an important concern in the ensuing chaos. So sure, if we look at a supply and demand graph, and double the supply, the intersection of the two moves, meaning the price goes down.

However, we don't live in a world of perfectly spherical cows and because we don't live in a world where we can double housing units overnight, realistically the reasons we're in this problem is because we can't build enough housing units. Given than, we're not going to be able to double the number of housing units, so realistically we can't build enough to lower rents.

The reasons we can't build enough housing aren't going away overnight, so even pretending they did, it would still take many months, if not years, before new housing units were being sold. Given the time it would take to double housing supply, the natural increase in demand over time because the population is increasing means it would rise to meet supply to keep rents at the current level. Lets say demand increases by 9% each year and it takes 10 years for double the housing stock to come online. Demand is basically doubled by the end of 10 years if that 9% remains constant.

With those problems not disappearing, new housing units are going to be slow to come online, so realistically, again, realistically, because we're not going to double the housing supply, so the best (and my bias is that of being in the SF Bay Area) we can hope for is for rents to increase at a slower rate. (Aka the derivative of rents goes down.)

I just don't seeing the rents themselves decreasing, relative to inflation of money, as well as inflation of the population.

So an actual recipe for increasing GDP? If only.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com