> I have to wonder to what extent that's actually true.

It’s fairly easy to do the exercise in many real estate markets. For example, look at recent sales on your favorite real estate platform and find neighborhoods with very different property sizes but otherwise similar features. An easy one is Atherton vs the areas of Menlo Park directly adjacent to it. Effectively identical commutes, literally the same schools, etc. Menlo Park is quite down-zoned by any reasonable standard, but Atherton is very down-zoned and has huge lots. The houses in Atherton look more expensive, but they’re actually dramatically less valuable per unit property size. If you owned property in Atherton and wanted to increase your property value, the best thing you could do is to magically teleport your property a single block away out of Atherton.

Even if you need your home to live in, you can still borrow against your property value, essentially "eating the bricks".

Alternatively, you can use the value of your house as an emergency fund: If you desperately need money, you can move into something smaller, or more distant from the city, and cash out.

If you do neither of these things, your children will inherit the value of your house. Either way, the money you gain are real money, and you actually gain them.

It can go both ways. If a developer wants your house for the land you want big. But if you stay as a house and your neighbour becomes the high rise and you cant then you lose out.

I tend to agree. There might be a big window for someone motivated to get a course "how to maximise the value of your house purchase" into schools to cover all that. If people are going to be greedy and selfish at least they shouldn't be stupid about it, land and housing policy is one of the more consequential things society deals with.

I noticed there is a split how this topic is discussed in (center-)left and (center-)right circles.

The right generally takes as a given that the cause of the problem (if there is a problem at all) is that there is not enough housing and we just have to build more.

The left argues that in we in fact do have enough units that could be used for housing (or at least the situation is not as clear-cut), but that other factors prevent them to be available at affordable prices, like the effects of extreme income and wealth inequality on the market.

Personally, I think the "left-wing" explanation makes more sense - at least I've never understood where that sudden shortage of physical housing is supposed to have come from. We neither had a population explosion, nor a war or catastrophe that would have destroyed a lot of houses. So then why would there have been "enough" housing in the past but not anymore today?

> This may be a monopoly overpricing situation rather than an actual shortage.

An actual shortage is characterized by prices being prevented from rising. It is already understood that "shortage" is being used colloquially here.

Population growth is reduced by a housing shortage because people who otherwise want to move in can't if there aren't units available for them to move in to.

Moreover, who is supposed to have a monopoly on housing in San Francisco? Is there any single entity that owns even as much as 1% of all the housing in the city? And even if there was, wouldn't building more housing still fix it, because the more you build the more you dilute their monopoly?

You have to look at the average household size and number of children, not just population.

A world where most households are man + woman + 0..3 children is very different than one where most households are 1..2 people + cat/dog. The latter demands far more housing than the former, even when populations are otherwise equal.

A population of 10 million singles demand 4 times more "housing units" than a population of 10 million people in 4-person families.

This is what makes immigration-driven population growth so pernicious compared to childbirth-driven. The family structures you end up with are completely different.

Google suggests a whopping 15% if SF homes are empty.

London by comparison is about 2.5%

Why is SFs figure so high. Why are people holding on to unproductive assets, paying to maintain them.

There might not be a housing shortage on the North American continent, but that doesn't help because people want to live in New York, not upper Saskatchewan

What you need is to require new construction to have a certain density along with building standards (sunlight, insulation, etc.).

Just deregulating exposes the land to the whim of the developer’s good will — trusting them not to get the most bang for the buck out of building a slum, which is a fickle guarantee.

If there’s no short term profitability, public sector needs to step in. Housing is infrastructure, it’s crucial to the land’s growth.

> same capacity could have been added

That’s not at all likely.

The housing market in the US is extremely competitive. Major cities have hundreds of thousands if not millions of competing landlords and a similar number of owner-occupied units.

The supply constraint isn't that Comcast and AT&T each own half of the land and you can only get it from one of them, it's that the government effectively prohibits building more, so all the competing construction companies who want to increase supply because that's what makes them money are unable to do it because it's prohibited by law.

> Why would a homeowner support zoning reforms?

Because zoning reforms that allow higher density may lower the value of the house but increase the value of the land, and homeowners of single-family homes have a high ratio of land to house. And because they lower cost of living and lower crime and they like paying less for things and not getting robbed.

Or because they have a small house but need a bigger house, and then higher prices hurt them. Or because they have a bigger house and need a smaller house, in which case they're about to sell it and it's better for them to add a bunch of developers to the bidding who want to build more on the lot and then cash out before the new developments come onto the market. Or because they live in city B and want to move to city A where housing is more expensive, and then they would support state or national-level policies to reduce housing scarcity for the same reason as the person who needs a bigger house.

The places where cities make sense are generally the places where they already are. You could hypothetically build the trappings of a new city in North Dakota or West Texas, but who is going to move to a place which is just a bunch of empty buildings surrounded by farmland? You can already buy a house in such places for less than it costs for one in a major city but there is a reason that people don't.

Whereas if you would just rezone the areas with high demand to allow new construction to actually happen there then you don't need the government to raise and spend a ton of money, all you need them to do is to stop prohibiting the thing people would otherwise be doing.

All the 'large areas of land' that people want to live in already have dense cities. This sort of ideas have been tried again and again, and it falls apart because people just don't want to move there.

Would you be enthusiastic about relocating if this was forty minutes away from Vegas in the desert?

"Residents of the London neighborhood South Tottenham recently persuaded their local councils to let them double the height of their houses", says the article, so evidently there was a restriction on height there. Elsewhere in London there are tower blocks, of course.

I think people voted with their feet to expand geographically into the suburbs where city cores experienced the bimodal outcomes.

If the only place people would genuinely and completely freely choose to live inside a city is a place they can’t afford, but 3-30 miles away is a beautiful neighborhood of detached houses that they can afford, you don’t have to think very long to predict that there will be intense interests in these suburbs by people seeking to escape the city.

Like, moderately expensive areas that are medium density, so that they exacerbate the housing crisis but aren't particularly nice to live in?