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That part is the obvious part. I want to know how they got all the entrenched landowners to let new builds in their neighborhoods and drive down values. The NIMBYs are usually the problem.
California passed a number of laws protecting landowners’ ability to build ADUs, and the San Diego council super-charged those:

https://calmatters.org/housing/2023/11/adu-san-diego/

Tons of San Diego houses have a ton of land thanks to the mid-20th century lawn fetish back when everyone was pretending that there was enough water so there are a lot of places where someone can turn some dead grass into as many as 5 ADUs.

Well, once you loosen up building codes to allow apartment buildings instead of single family homes then suddenly the developers will come with a lot of cash to buy those homes from NIMBYs. And cash is always convincing.
If you are an owner of rental houses, I would think that it's in your interest to be able to build ADUs on those properties. Even if everyone does it and prices go down a bit you're still making a lot more per property than you were before, assuming reasonable building costs (and if building costs are not reasonable then not many owners will be building ADUs and prices won't go down).
Unfortunately, it's not actually obvious. There are heaps of people, even and especially in the most expensive housing markets in the US, who will outright argue that supply and demand doesn't apply to housing.
I have to guess it’s along similar lines to the claim that additional road capacity leads to more congestion.
The problem with roads is that cars are really really inefficient and drivers don't have to pay for the road, so a driver can extract government subsidies by driving more.

You run into the same problem with free or heavily subsidized public transit. The trains were crowded in Germany when the government instated a temporary 9€ ticket for all public transit (buses, subway, tram, regional trains, etc) in all cities.

> drivers don't have to pay for the road

It is more complicated than that, for sure. I definitely pay for the roads in my city. And I pay for the mass transit in my city despite almost never using it.

It does not seem controversial that if you raise the cost for something, less people will make that choice. That does not mean that the underlying demand actually did not exist to begin with. If you made the cost zero, you would find the real demand.

The concept of "pent up demand" seems to be incomprehensible to some.
Yeah it seems like there is a widely held belief that people are freeloaders looking for any opportunity to take something they perceive to be free, so they go do things they would not otherwise do. A much simpler explanation is that when the cost is low they do what they wanted/needed to do, and when the cost pushes the ROI too low they do without something, or find a workaround. The demand is still there, just unmet.
Maybe renters were such a crazy high percent that despite the fact they were all wrapped up in their jobs and children vs retirees with nothing else to do in their $1M house than show up to meeting to influence the political apparatus they they still finally balanced out at the planning and zoning meetings.
California also passed a ton of laws that effectively upzoned the state in various ways. Minnesota did the same thing a few years back.

This seems like the only real path - you cannot beat out these skeezy local homeowners and landlords at the corrupt local politics game. You need statewide politicians who have political ambitions to build off of solving these problems.

plenty of renters ask for rent control instead of increasing supply. Often they make the mistake of seeing high prices for new apartments and mistakenly believe those high prices mean the rent is going up over all.
A mainstream view on one side of the political spectrum that increase in new home supply(especially if high end) does not lower prices or reduce shortage.

> One well-worn refrain of progressive urban politics is that new, “luxury” housing will not help solve the housing shortage. A 2024 study of U.S. voters found that 30 to 40 percent believed more housing would, instead, increase prices, and another 30 percent believed it would have no effect

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/housing-crisis-ric...

That's because "progressive" urban politics is generally not progressive at all and dominated by the upper middle those that benefit or think they benefits from squeezing the working class out of their neighborhoods.
Those people aren’t progressives: they’re NIMBYs who learned that certain language can make it easier to get the policies they want. We have a ton of them here in DC, and you can tell by seeing what else they support: they’ll talk about affordability to block luxury apartments, flip to pretending to be staunch environmentalists to block an affordable housing project, talk about traffic or “the poor” when protesting a bike lane before pivoting to block transit projects, etc. It seems incoherent until you look at it through the lens of whether something would add competition to their future home sale or cause the city to subsidize them driving every everywhere less.
No True Scotsman?

They are progressive (Statistically)... it's just that they are human too. Meaning they can have progressive ideology and vote for weed, pronouns, but when you touch the wallet, not so much.

You raise a fair point but I think you can draw a line between people who actually do progressive things in other areas and those who sometimes use the language but never show up for anything other than preserving the status quo.
Agreed, it's a spectrum.
Well, building luxury housing still helps, to some degree: the richest residents of the area would buy it, and they would sell their old house to someone slightly less rich, who in turn would sell their old house… At the end of this chain you get affordable housing.
Affordable housing has always been old housing. Housing is essentially a pigeon hole problem, where some pigeon holes are nice and fancy and some are older. The pigeons simply bid their way in, and the more extra holes the cheaper they are.
I think the steelman argument is that maybe you induce demand and it's a wash on housing costs as rich people move into the city or etc to use the new condos

But you do at least get more property taxes?

Well, that would mean the rich people moving in aren't hogging or bidding up existing housing stock in the city, and the cities they moved out of will have the same price lowering effect that the GP mentioned.
There is at least some truth to induced demand with new housing driving an influx of new residents, especially in cities with economic opportunity.

Just like transportation induced demand, the solution is different style of infrastructure. High capacity metros, bus lanes, and regional rail to get people out of cars and use limited transportation corridors more efficiently than single occupancy vehicles. One more lane bro doesn’t work, but adding new forms of more efficient transportation does.

New, denser housing with mid rise and high rise buildings and a mixture of unit sizes in walkable neighbourhoods with good transit access absorbs new residents and drives down housing costs for everyone. Single family sprawl doesn’t work, but density can.

We have under-built for decades, so it’s easy to misunderstand the signals. More housing gets built and prices still go up, and many people are concluding more housing just increases prices, leading to people with good intentions decrying “luxury housing”. There are plenty of nimby actors in the mix too, tossing in all sorts of misinformation and bad faith arguments, muddying the water.

The reality is areas with strong economic growth are all failing to add enough new housing and demand continues to outstrip supply, leading to higher prices. Many studies have shown even new high end housing helps manage prices, as someone rich enough upgrades, leaving their unit empty for someone else to upgrade into. That chain continues all the way down into the lower cost units, each time freeing up space someone else can afford. Large migration into a region can mess with how much prices can be affected, but studies still show even high priced new units do slow down growth in prices. Supply and demand does apply, we have just massively underestimated how far behind supply is for the demand and need to add so much more housing.

How does the induced demand argument not apply to AMI-median affordable housing as well? Demand is demand.
> and they would sell their old house

lol

in reality they just keep their "investment" and, in some cases, decide to convert their old house to an airbnb for extra passive income

There's only so much demand for airbnb, and most of those kept houses would be rented out which still improves supply.
> there's only so much demand

Yet SoCal suburbs are full of them. And it doesn't necessarily add supply, since most people seek leases longer than the maximum 90 days set by Airbnb. Unused short-term rentals offer significant tax writeoffs. The owners don't need demand, they just need the plot's assessed value to continue increasing.

It's surreal that orange site seriously thinks rich people would ever liquidate the most inflationary asset in the West.

> Yet SoCal suburbs are full of them.

According to google results there's around 10k airbnb listings in san diego, around 1% of households or maybe "less than 2%" by one article.

Even if 30% of new houses ended up causing a bad use like airbnb, all the rest would be still be significantly improving the situation. And you would not be able to balloon the airbnb supply for long until the price drops and a lot of those houses switch to normal rental.

And that's still playing into the "nobody sells a house" situation. Many people would sell houses.

> Unused short-term rentals offer significant tax writeoffs.

Losing money sucks even if you don't pay taxes on it. But what kind of writeoffs in particular?

> The owners don't need demand, they just need the plot's assessed value to continue increasing.

Which it would not be doing in a situation with significant building. A self-reinforcing supply constriction going to airbnb can't absorb that many houses. I don't think it would survive a doubling in the number of airbnb listings.

And even if the value keeps rising, not having renters loses you a lot of money. Many of those empty houses are going to turn into long-term housing.

> It's surreal that orange site seriously thinks rich people would ever liquidate the most inflationary asset in the West.

There's a lot of people in 5 million (or 4,3,2,1 million) dollar houses that cannot afford a second one.

You can make $100-200k in 'easy' profit where I live by dropping the cheapest manufactured home on a plot. If you live in a place that allows it, I don't understand why people don't do it. I literally got a ~270k house for under $100k by being willing to be the guy the develops the plot. The actual house was laughably cheap, like 60k, there is a burnt out house dressed up in new paint selling next to me for like $300,000 and someone will snatch it up shortly.
So does decrease in demand! Pinch you again.
Except when it doesn't. From the same article, Seattle and Oakland had supply increase 13% and 6% respectively and both saw average rents go up. Long Beach, CA and Santa Ana, CA both had supply increase by over 10% and saw rents stay basically flat.

More supply generally will help, but it's not a silver bullet.

Maybe more recently it's up but Oakland has been a supply success story as prices diverged with SF starting around 2021. There's a chart past the fold that illustrates it well:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/article/oakland-rent-...