it's crazy that people nowadays seriously question basic market pressure being a thing
And this pattern repeats across the US. Add in the fact that people want to freeze the area they moved to in time (like suburbs refusing to increase density, even urban yet car reliant neighborhoods panicking if a single parking space is removed: https://hudsoncountyview.com/outraged-jersey-city-residents-...) and we get constant blockers to housing supply growth we so desparately need.
Its been frustrating watching the half baked measures to make housing "more affordable" by making mortgages cheaper when really they need to stimulate the supply side. It seems like an easy political win IMHO as long as you can sell it up front- stimulate GDP by juicing house building, and everyone gets cheaper housing. Just keep it under control lest you end up in a China type situation.
The best I could find was a couple of comments from two years ago which have a similar theme.
Most comments that I see are about how from a policy perspective it’s more complicated. There’s no single “build more homes” magic wand that works for every market. And in some markets there are real people with real issues who could be helped by temporary policies that make landlording less profitable on the margins while people figure out how to best “build more homes” for that market.
For example, healthcare in the US is basically exempt from typical free market dynamics like supply and demand because of how the market works. Consumers don't choose, everyone has a moat and parents, and costs are often subsidized.
It's built upon untrue assumptions
- infinite buyers / sellers
- perfect information
- no switching / transaction costs
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The article itself has 3 different year ranges provided so I'm not sure how you can use it as evidence. Plus overall the rent is still up by a lot since 93% - 4% is still at least 80%.
- Rents increase by 93% from 2010 to 2019
- Housing increase from 2015 to 2024 (this overlaps with when rents increased ...)
- Rents fell from 2021 to 2026 by 4%
"Lol economists are dumb they think humans are robots!"
No they don't. Sorry, we won't be throwing away an entire field of human endeavor based on a straw man caricature that isn't true.
We don't call physicists dumb and throw out their ideas because the real world isn't a perfect vacuum either. They know this, don't be silly.
The movement of satellites is not modeled using distance = speed * time. It would do well to consider if econ 101 is an accurate way to model the world since for other domains the 101 course is not.
The existence of nuance and external factors don't negate the original principle.
The equivalent to arguments made by 'economics deniers' in this thread would be if you argued: the satellite moving at 7.8 km/s actually causes the earth to spin 8 km/s faster, so trying to make the satellite move faster makes it go slower! Applying acceleration doesn't help!
No. Making the satellite move faster generally makes it move faster. Building more housing generally makes it cheaper.
Let's not do the HN thing and get lost in pedantry.
Eh, ok throwing out all of physics 101 is a little strong. But you still don't use the original formulas you learned to do actual analysis. So using the basic models from econ 101 to do analysis can lead you to incorrect answers (but also correct ones; from a False premise you can imply both True and False; see "Material Implication" [1]).
So sure on a forum like HN it can be appropriate to use basic econ 101 logic but when somebody is trying to be an expert or write an article for thousands+ people you should really question why they're only using 101 logic.
> Let's not do the HN thing and get lost in pedantry.
Lets actually do the not HN thing and read the article.
There's too little rigor in the article to support the argument in the title. The articles _own numbers_ are that after building 120k housing units the rent went up 85% (4% decrease after 96% increase). Just looking causally at this the only data in the article supports more housing = more rent; the article is only casual observations so little reason to do anything else ...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebra#Secondary_oper...
- the main input (land) is also an output, so when the price of the output goes up, so does the value of the input.
- economies of scale don't really work, due to the impracticality of transporting the good (houses) and fitting the good inside a machine (in house "factories", normal workers go inside the house and work on it by hand; not a lot changes compared to traditional construction)
- more supply in one area increases the value (and therefore demand) in that area, so it's not actually clear-cut whether building more would reduce the price more than it increases it, at first glance.