> You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater

If you buy a house for $400k, and suddenly it is worth $300k, you don't need to be "bailed out" for your purchase decision. You should have been certain that the house was worth $400k to you at the time of purchase. Otherwise you're a speculator, and we shouldn't be bailing out speculators.

It's called buyer's remorse. We accept it when it's a car or a TV, but suddenly when it's a house we're supposed to give massive government support to correct the buyer's mistake?

> It does. Twenty thousand units represent about 5% of Denver's housing stock [1]. Commit to adding this many units to the housing stock every year for the next 10 years and you'll have solved the housing crisis. (You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater, but that's a separate issue.)

That is only if you believe that more capacity does not induce more demand, which really isn't true as long as the city remains popular for jobs/climate/nature/etc.... People not moving to Denver because the rent is too high will decide to move to Denver if rents decrease (and the demand they add will cause rents to increase, wash/rinse/repeat until an equilibrium is reached). You also have cases where a city becomes even more attractive because of growing density alone (NYC, Hong Kong, Tokyo).

> It does. Twenty thousand units represent about 5% of Denver's housing stock [1]. Commit to adding this many units to the housing stock every year for the next 10 years and you'll have solved the housing crisis. (You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater, but that's a separate issue.)

"Committing to doing this every year" is VERY different than doing it in one particular year. Yes, that would solve it. But of course, 2022 was part of a very unusual cycle including a lot of migration and you should note the last line in the article:

> Meanwhile, the pipeline of new apartment buildings is drying up. The number of properties under construction is down by roughly one-third from the peak in 2023, the report found. That likely means fewer units coming available in the months ahead, potentially giving landlords room to start raising rents again.

> Commit to adding this many units to the housing stock every year for the next 10 years and you'll have solved the housing crisis.

That would be an incredible commitment, and not something which has happened. This burst of new rental property is already subsiding, with an expectation that rents will again raise next year. Moreso, it would be hard to get private organizations to commit to building such a massive glut of property knowing that they are tanking the market that would pay back their investment.

That is why this doesn't magically solve the housing crisis.

Why would we consider bailing out entities that are financially solvent? These homeowners may have an underwater investment, but they (presumably) can still pay the mortgage to get it paid off

I think Denver home prices have decreased by 4% since the peak in 2022.

I don't think anybody is going to be permanently underwater. Home prices changing should be a second order effect of building more apartments.

And what happens if all that new stock isn't needed?

Detroit?

Nope. Smaller more affordable homes would be a better solution. Most people who rent cant afford to buy, but rent is a worse deal long term.

It is instructive to look at how we got expensive housing in the first place. Expensive housing comes from a surplus of people. How did we get all those people? By building more housing and having people breed there.

New housing is only a temporary salve and perpetuates a vicious cycle. The people who move into these new units will have more babies, because they have new habitat. These babies will grow up and eventually drive up housing prices. Even before then, people will move or emigrate into cheap housing and fill it up. Housing then becomes expensive again, only with more people filling up the earth: polluting the air, straining water supplies, clogging roads, uglifying neighborhoods with massive buildings, overrunning parks and trails.

Thankfully, expensive housing, in part, has reduced American baby making to 1.6 per woman, a sustainable rate. Unfortunately, because humans are living longer, the US population still continues to rise. The U.S. Census Bureau currently projects that the resident U.S. population will peak at nearly 370 million around the year 2080, before it gradually declines to about 366 million by 2100. If immortality is invented before 2080, the population may never go down, ever.

Meanwhile, the latest estimates put the current U.S. population (as of mid‑2025) at approximately 342 million. The population has increased roughly 4.5x since 1900. From building new housing.