Incentives are typically the strongest force to watch, but so are various cultural/political narratives people come up with. People clearly don't all vote in our own economic interests in many situations. I'd assume this is largely because in the current information ecosystem, people don't understand what's in their economic interests.
It's wild that even renter's aren't voting for more housing. I think it's because basic economics isn't taught in k-12 or even college anymore and this is causing a lot of problems.
Of course, there are other solutions too, like starting new cities and incentivizing companies to move there in the beginning. People follow jobs, they have to, now more than ever. if companies move there, people will follow. How is that we used to be able to create new cities and yet now, we all the sudden can't. has our material wealth really dropped so low that we can't afford to build new cities?
and what about down-sizing? in hong kong, you could create bed sized units at a fraction of the cost of a full sized apartment. microapartments? etc? all NOT legal. i think it's wrong of the city to decide that for people. individuals should be able to decide whether they want that or not, rather than being forced onto the streets.
People who lament the lack of rentable pods and don't understand why anyone would pay more for a bigger house in a quitter neighborhood or just for a nice view exist, but you are in the minority. Thus renters are not going to vote to live in a ghetto so they could save a few hundred on rent.
Teaching economics is not the solution (see papers on financial literacy). Rationality is hard and even highly educated people have terrible models of cause and effect. Even your own dependency analysis implies that voting for X helps to get Y (which hasn't been my personal experience).
Some people complain it is "luxury" or even just normal and not "affordable."
If it is single family housing then people complain about the lack of density. If is apartments or condos they complain that there is already so much traffic in that area and adding thousands of new people will make it even worse.
When small old houses are bought up, torn down, and a new apartment / condo complex goes in they complain about the lack of character and soulless new development that all looks the same.
I have to agree with some of the other comments that many people never learned supply and demand or are completely incapable of understanding a for profit business.
I've seen comments about memory / RAM prices going up. Gamers are now so anti-AI because it is making their GPUs more expensive and now memory, flash, and hard drive storage as well. I've seen comments that say the government should step in and force companies to make GPUs at affordable prices. We can argue over whether health care or clean water are a human right but some people seem to think cheap GPUs are a human right.
I can tell you firsthand that that is absolutely not true. The massive rush to renovate or build new short-term rentals in the 2010s had a disastrous impact on rental prices around my city, especially coupled with historically low interest rates that made these enterprises far less risky. It’s also incredibly disruptive to neighborhoods/communities, not just because of bad guests but because it can rapidly drive up value, leading landlords to sell and/or rapidly drive up rent which means kick out lower income tenants whether it’s intentional or not. Most of the STR’s in particular were also not being done by locals. 70%+ were out of town developers. Currently almost 90% of STR’s here are whole home which means not local owner/operators living there. It’s just hotels by a different name taking up housing in residential neighborhoods.
When interest rates and home insurance went up a few years ago, coupled with stricter rules for getting an STR license, a lot of people sold their properties (usually rentals/STR’s), and the price to buy as well as rent noticeably came down pretty rapidly. It’s still too high, but the drop was noticeable and quick. The purpose for construction absolutely factors in to these discussions.
1. "They didn't do an environmental review" 2. She didn't want to hear construction noise. 3. She didn't want the construction to cause rats to leave the lot and go to buildings. 4. She also said she didn't want her rent to go.
I believe it was this lot: https://web.archive.org/web/20250821002539/https://www.nytim...
I think it is common for people to organize, even in the most urban and educated areas in America, against their own interest.
