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The problem though isn't a lack of housing, we actually have plenty for everyone. The problem is corporations buying up homes to rent them and in the process jacking up home prices.
If all these newly made homes are left to the tender mercies of the market there won't be a slew of new homeowners. Just more rentals.
Houses in the middle of Nebraska do not meaningfully help the housing market of New York City or San Francisco. Sure, I could go and buy a house in my hometown in bumfuck rural Missouri, but I don't want to live in a homophobic conservative hellhole, so housing stock there isn't really relevant to me in any way.
And if you look at a city like Seattle, where there actually has been meaningful construction, the pressure on renters has been way lower. Straight from the horses mouth:
https://fortune.com/2023/10/24/how-much-seattle-west-coast-apartment-worth-landlords-rents-capital-economics-forecast/amp/
Here's a London-based investment firm complaining about how housing in Seattle is becoming a bad investment due to increasing supply.
Not to mention, more rentals isn't a bad thing! More rental units means fewer competition for each individual unit and ultimately cheaper rents. If you have 1000 people wanting to move to a city but there are only 500 open apartments, only the richest 500 people get to move. If you have 1200 open apartments, those landlords have to find a price that'll get them a tenant or they'll completely miss out on rents.
I completely agree with the sentiment that housing shouldn't be treated as a productive investment asset, but the real question worth asking is why the market is so slanted towards landlords that housing can even serve as a productive asset in the first place. If you look at places like the Soviet Union or Communist China, they managed to house everyone easily because they build a metric fuckton of housing everywhere, so the questions of determining who gets housing and who gets to starve on the streets didn't even apply.
It's a supply issue. Essentially every economist agrees that it's a supply issue. Evidence has shown time and time again that increasing supply lowers rent pressures. This is not a controversial question.
As of the last time a city government report was made on this just two years ago, over 61,000 homes were vacant in San Francisco. In answer to anyone who would write that off to pandemic effects, the number a few years before was around 40,000 homes sitting uninhabited. In San Francisco. Just sitting around being some well-off person or corporation's investment, empty.
From some data I could find, the average one bedroom rent in January 2020 was $3050. From the same source, it's currently around $2900. That 2020 number adjusted for inflation is $3600. So, rents seem to have both nominally and truly fallen.
I'd assume it's largely due to lower demand because of remote work, since SF surely hasn't been building anything. Thanks for the good example that increased vacancy does indeed lead to lower rents.