What large US city has actually built enough housing to even match natural population growth in the last 25 years?
More housing can only lower prices, in absolute terms, if it actually exceeds demand, but it still lowers prices compared to what they would have been had nothing been built, all else being equal.
There is broad consensus among economists that it is stringent regulatory controls constraining supply that lead to higher housing prices - not building more housing.
If we look at the growth from 2000-2020, it basically went from 1% to .12%, so I guess we could use a step method to integrate (or just take population delta from 2024 to 1999 and subtract immigrants?). I don’t think we’ve grown that much, and growth is incredibly uneven.
> There is broad consensus among economists that it is stringent regulatory controls constraining supply that lead to higher housing prices - not building more housing.
People say things like this without backing it up. We get:
“Big Real Estate Says Regulations Caused Housing Crisis, But They Wrote the Rules”
But if you try to key in on specifically economists, they don’t say that. The fact that we have a global housing crisis, not just in America, seems to hint that something else is going on. Of course, we can build baby build Chinese style and wind up with 1.5 houses for every household, but that is probably a worse problem.
So you mean growth in population from 1975 to 2000 as the 25 year window we should be looking at?
We went through a property bust in the late 80s/early 90s due to Japan’s larger property bust and the S/L crisis, among having wicked recessions at the time.
No large city in the US managed to decrease prices by building more housing (dense or not) within the last 25 years.
There are several fundamental reasons why density increases won't work.