That belief has reached prominent political leaders as well. I listened to a bit of the Ocasio-Cortez/Tim Walz Madden livestream on Twitch, and they were talking about how something needed to be done about the greedy developers who were driving the housing shortage.

,"having talked themselves into the nonsense belief that building fewer homes makes people more money."

Can you show me an example of someone pushing this?

I have been doing YIMBY stuff for around 8 years now, and it does not map nicely onto any kind of left-right narrative.

There was one conservative dude who ran for city council here who was all about 'private property' and 'get rid of government regulations', who also ran against the idea of liberalizing zoning.

I've met left wing people who I agree with on many issues who will do the most spectacular, Olympic level mental gymnastics to avoid the notion that 'supply and demand' apply to housing.

There are moderate Democrats who are big backers of various reforms. And some on the far left who get that if you want Vienna style social housing, you also need Vienna style zoning and building regulations.

A former mayor here is a moderate Republican - he totally got what we were about and said some really nice things about welcoming new neighbors in one speech a few weeks after he met up with our YIMBY group.

It's just not an issue that - so far - has been slotted into the trench warfare that other issues have been.

Supply destruction to put a floor on prices is not an unknown phenomenon.

The effort to make it seem silly to think that there aren't enough houses because the industry whose job it is to build houses did not build enough houses is itself a little silly. Circumstantial as the evidence may be, it's logical to assume that they didn't because it was more profitable not to.