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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

Elasticity of demand is the elephant in the room for build-more-housing advocates. Let's say NYC's mayor rubbed a genie's lamp and wished to double the city's housing supply overnight. Yes, rental and real estate prices would crash through the floor due to the glut of supply. But then millions of people would move to the city and buy up all that supply.

This would rapidly double the population of the city which would cause tons of businesses to move there to hire everyone and then commercial real estate would skyrocket. At the end of the day, the city would be twice as large and more overcrowded than ever. Sure, they'd be more efficient in terms of infrastructure (plumbing, electricity, transit) but rents would skyrocket to capture that extra efficiency for landlords.

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The elephant in the room for people who are against building enough housing is that they're all convinced that everyone would move to their particular locale.

I have heard that "everyone" would move to

* San Francisco

* Bend, Oregon

* Boulder, Colorado

* Seattle

* Austin, Texas

* New York City

* Santa Barbara, California

* Hawaii

* Montana

* and on and on and on

You know what? No, not everyone is going to move to New York or Bend or San Francisco. Building more housing keeps rents in check. And if some more people get to live in a place they want to be, that is a good thing.

What is different between building more housing and building more highway lanes?

If you could get all cities to build more housing simultaneously then you’d be in great shape. The question is: how do you do that? Most of the biggest problems facing humanity are coordination problems. The answer to all these problems can’t be “everyone should just do X.”

In reality, your best hope is to get one city to build a lot of housing. Then everyone moves there and we’re all unhappy.

This, by the way, is the reason homelessness is so bad in San Francisco despite their government spending enormous amounts of money fighting homelessness. All the other cities in the US sent all their homeless people to SF!

It's going to happen in fits and starts and not all at once everywhere. But there's also something of a ratchet effect as places copy what's working in other places. And no one reforming because they're all waiting would be catastrophic.

And really, not everyone is going to move somewhere. You could not pay me enough to live in NYC or San Francisco. People who love NYC would probably be bored in my small city.

Burdensome parking mandates are being eliminated or reduced across the country, as one example.

One way to try to get more places to reform on a similar timeline is to join a nationwide group, like https://new.yimbyaction.org/ or https://welcomingneighbors.us/

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