alt Hacker NewsThere's a huge disconnect between perceived amount of building and actual need for housing, in my experience. People are used to seeing nothing, so when even a single building goes up they think it seems like a lot.
In my downtown area, there has been a trickle of a new building with a few hundred apartments per year for the past four years, and people are freaked out at that tiny amount of new housing in a city of 50,000 people. in reality we need at least double that amount of housing per year, but that small amount has people shocked and thinking we're building way too much.
It's been far too normalized that we shouldn't build housing, and it's hurting society at a very deep level and causing massive inequality while blocking access to opportunity.
Replies
In a free market, the builders would just build to demand better because they’re incentivized to
This is also the cause of the gentrification anger and resulting NIMBYism.
If you build some, but not enough vs what's actually needed, you get both:
- expensive new market-rate construction that most people can't afford
- localized bumps in rent for increased relative desirability
- overall prices that continue to rise across the city because the new construction was just a drop in the bucket compared to the need
And then it's easy to point to "they built that building AND our rent went up!" as a reason to oppose construction, even though in the long run they'd go up even more if that building wasn't built.