alt Hacker News> 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).
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Induced demand can only function if there's a scarcity to begin with, and it's premised on increased supply increasing affordability (that's the mechanism by which it works), but these axiomatic derivations don't matter because we have case studies (in MN, in TX, and now CO, a story we're literally commenting on). Empirical observations win.
That's why you have to allow large-scale building everywhere. Then the market will find its own level.
The inverse of this situation is that everyone lives somewhere they consider unpleasant because the rent is affordable there.
The megacities you mention are enormously economically productive per capita. All sorts of efficiencies pop up when a huge number of people live near one another.
> only if you believe that more capacity does not induce more demand
No, it doesn't. What you're describing is elasticity. It's a well-studed concept, and means that a 5% increase in supply will probably reduce prices by less than 4.8%.
(An interesting side effect of a government committing to a zero real-price increase housing strategy is it eliminates whole categories of speculative demand. I wouldn't count on this for policy effects. But it's another feather in the cap for pro-housing policy.)
Giving significantly more people a way to live a lifestyle they seek, while holding the cost of housing flat -- if thats the worst case outcome, that seems totally fine, and arguably a better solution than trying to crash the cost of housing.
I would imagine for most people, this is what "solving the housing crisis" means
Except that all the folks that left Austin to move to Denver makes the houses prices in Austin drop.
Now the folks in Denver who hadn't considered Austin due to high rates can move there and reduce the costs in Denver again.
A 5% increase in supply annually indefinitely would crash the housing market there, induced demand be damned. To put it in perspective, a metro area growing at 2% is killing it, the highest growth rate is Austin at 3%. Denver only grows at less than 1%.
Cheaper homes may induce demand, they won't induce a 5% growth rate.
You keep building until supply meets demand, regardless of what that demand is or where it comes from.
We don't have an infinite number of people available to move into housing. There are only a certain number of people who will want to move into a particular region, and that number will stop growing at some point.
Granted, you don't want to build too much and end up with a ghost town. There's a balance to be maintained, and I think housing should be affordable, not a race-to-the-bottom cheap as possible.
How much demand do you think CAN be induced? Colorado has 2.6M housing units for ~6M people. If Denver builds 20k units a year for the next 5 years, that would represent the entire state growing by 4% (230k people) off the back of one city alone. I guess that's not terribly unreasonable - if Denver was the only city in the country.
Except, it's not. Where would all of these extra people come from?
More to the point, Denver is already quite expensive. Where are you going to find another 230k people capable of paying even higher rents than folks do today?
Are there people who have been avoiding Denver because the rent is too high? I think of Denver as somewhere you go if you're sick of the cost of living on the coast.
Better to have good problems than to have bad problems.
Is you idea that people will be renting multiple units just for the fun of it? In large enough numbers to be impactful?
This argument always comes up when discussing a specific place.
"Everyone would move to ________ because it is the best place in the spiral arm of the Milky Way", where ________ is Boulder, Bend, Austin, Portland, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Hawai'i, Santa Fe, etc.... etc....
It cannot be true for all of them. So they all need to build and people will figure out where they actually want to live.
Bozeman, Montana, a small city of 50K people, is seeing falling rents because they built a lot of housing:
https://montanafreepress.org/2025/06/23/has-bozemans-rental-...
And it's very much the kind of small place where "everyone wants to live there".