Affordable housing is NIMBY whitewashing of reducing supply through rationining. (Note the supporters of affordable housing programmes count the largest landowning families in San Francisco and New York among their ranks.)
There is an article on the front page, right now, about Denver moderating its rents through construction [1]. We've also seen this in Montana [2].
[1] https://denverite.com/2025/07/25/denver-rent-prices-drop-q2/
[2] https://montanafreepress.org/2024/09/09/can-bozeman-find-rel...
100%
"Supply and Demand" is a law of nature.
If you build infinite luxury apartments, in the limit their value is zero.
Build more luxury housing and the inventory increases. If you've met the city's housing demands (which you probably won't since nearly every city is behind on meeting demand), then it follows that typically less desirable inventory experiences less demand and will subsequently experience a price drop.
The problem is nobody is building enough. The equations of taxes, property value, and developer profit all balance each other out and control the rate of building. Regulations slow this equilibrium even more.
A few policies that can help:
- Remove stupid regulations against building dense housing. Keep the fire safety regulations, but nix the multifamily zoning regulations, the building height regulations, curb space and parking space minimums, etc. There are so many NIMBY and outdated 1950's era regulations that make it costly and time consuming to break ground.
- Tax unproductive land use, eg. storage units and parking garages. This will convert those plots into housing and businesses.
- Heavily tax unused and dilapidated land that is not currently occupied by businesses or residents. Burned out houses have no place in the city. Tax these properties to the point that they fall into foreclosure and give cities the power to take over the land and sell it at a profit to developers. Give owners the chance to cure the issue, but make quick work of clearing these useless plots.
- More controversially, tax single family housing more than multi-family housing. Tax it proportional to how many people could live on the plot if it were occupied by a 10-story development. Or if you don't want to raise taxes, lower taxes on multi-family housing. This will encourage density.
- Give tax breaks to developers, apartment and condo complexes, and businesses that help underwrite development.
Note that these policies only make sense in dense metropolitan cities. Suburbs and rural areas don't need to operate in this way.
And housing is a substitutable good.
The people moving into the new luxury units are moving out of older less desirable units, which (with enough of this movement) see their prices decline
> "Supply and Demand" is a law of nature
It's a law of human nature. Value is inherently subjective, which makes deriving it from natural laws conditional upon a physical explanation for humanity.
Ecologists have been studying how groups of animals deal with famines, natural disasters, loss of habitat, climate change, etc for many years. These conditions change supply and demand on resources that are out of those animal populations control. Studying cooperation in bacteria colonies from a similar lens was pretty hot in academia in the late 2010s from what I remember.
Each animal defines value differently (heck, different groups of different people define value differently). A half-eaten sandwich thrown on the street is trash to you, but a jackpot for your local crow. The crow has no interest in the housing market though.
Value is partly subjective but all value eventually can tied to the reversal of entropy. And the reversal of entropy costs energy.
It is naive to think the topic is wholly subjective. Subjectivity is one aspect of value but not only does the subjectivity coincidentally correlate with entropy reversal… but entropy reversal is also intrinsic to all value as even a human being alive and assigning value to something carries an energy cost. This cost is non trivial as it takes a lot for you to live and a lot more to have the luxury to think in terms of value.
A lot of other models closely resemble economics:
- Computational systems, distributed systems, and operating system theory model resources and demand. They often attribute a cost to units of space, time, or compute based on availability.
- Ecological systems very closely model economics with respect to predator-prey dynamics.
- There are so many systems in biology that resemble economics. Evolutionary systems often increase gene dosage over generations in order to meet demand for gene products: polyploidity in plants, gene duplication, promoter amplification, etc. There are then also suppressive measures taken when deleterious effects arise. The balance of telomerase, etc. Within a living organism, there are the dynamics of apoptosis and proliferation pathways to follow the developmental program, to avoid disease states, etc. And then there are the biochemical flux of metabolites, etc.
> Tax unproductive land use, eg. storage units and parking garages.
Good luck doing that before you've fixed transit, which will take forever even with a miracle of political will.
There's that, but also it's more difficult to get mixed-density builds than detached homes developed, or the type of builds the left associate with "affordable housing".
While being able to build detached homes faster is nice and all for those on the market, for an effective YIMBY approach allowing density is preferable.
Plus, trying to sprawl out into perpetuity is putting cities in the hole. The suburbs are money pits that are subsidized by the city cores.