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Comment by runarberg | Hacker News Reader

When you put oil on fire, it will suddenly stop burning as soon as you stop putting new oil on it.

The housing crisis has multiple causes, regulatory framework which benefits existing homeowners is one of them, capitalists treating houses like the stock market is another, and Laissez Faire hotel market did only make it worse (like a gasoline on a burning fire). Now that the thing that made a bad thing worse has been banned, that does not mean the damage it caused has been fixed, nor does it mean that the other causes have been resolved either.

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The housing crisis has one problem and it is identical to this one:

Taylor Swift is coming to the local stadium to play a concert. There are 1,000,000 fans in the area that would like to see her live. The stadium seats 100,000. How do we reconcile the imbalance between demand and supply of tickets?

Solve this problem, and the housing crisis is also solved.

It is not identical to this one. There exists enough land and construction material to build housing for everyone. Many cities have enough money to buy or construct social housing for anyone who wants, but they don‘t for multiple reasons (including ideological dogma in favor of capitalism; but also conflicting interests; outsized political influence of existing homeowners; etc.).

In this analogy we could use our shared funds to hire Taylor Swift for 10 subsequent concerts, and the only issue would be who gets to see her first.

Sure, she can cancel on 9 other cities so everyone here can get a chance. A fix for us, but really just taking from someone else.

But that's fine, lets ditch the stadium, and move to a park. The park measures greater than 1,000,000 sq. ft., so we should be good. But now we severely downgraded the quality of everything so we could accommodate everyone. The stadium, although limited capacity, is purpose build to accommodate that capacity. The park, is just Earth, and in no way was designed for a concert, much less 1,000,000 people. This has happened before (not sure if with 1,000,000 but maybe) and I don't think I need to spell out the negatives. Taylor gets icey on the show because of the non-low chance it goes in the record books as an absolute disaster.

"Many cities have enough money to buy or construct social housing for anyone who wants"

This is patently untrue. Especially for superstar cities that people actually want to live in precisely because the cost of housing is too large.

"outsized political influence of existing homeowners; "

Otherwise known as NIMBY's not Airbnb's.

No because Airbnb bans are basically political bike shedding. Yell at the guys sprinkling oil on the fire because taking on the NIMBY's flooding the region with oil is too difficult.

"Multiple causes" is just mealy-mouthed pussy-footing, there is one big cause and then a bunch of other distractions as the numbers now prove.

You're theory about some NIMBY conspiracy is significantly worse on every metric then your strawman's theory about Airbnb causing the housing crisis. Both are bad, but yours is worse.

Complex problems seldomly have a single cause not a simple solution.

It's not a conspiracy, they aren't meeting in smoke-filled rooms. It's just a systemic problem, a classic tragedy of the commons. An individual neighborhood move to protect an old church is noble and courageous, but do that all across society and you basically have a construction standstill that is difficult to visualize and effectively regulate against. So yes, it is a complex problem, but the cause is singular, and because of its multi-dimensionality, I find these causes to be far more insidious than "profit-bad" problems.

I think the second more prominent cause maybe costs, labor, material, interest rates etc. But Airbnb's are far..farrr down the list so as to be completely irrelevant, as the natural experiment in New York has proven out.

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