Eh, people really need to be questioning econ 101 more often.

It's built upon untrue assumptions

- infinite buyers / sellers

- perfect information

- no switching / transaction costs

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The article itself has 3 different year ranges provided so I'm not sure how you can use it as evidence. Plus overall the rent is still up by a lot since 93% - 4% is still at least 80%.

- Rents increase by 93% from 2010 to 2019

- Housing increase from 2015 to 2024 (this overlaps with when rents increased ...)

- Rents fell from 2021 to 2026 by 4%

First year economics models all these things, through behavioral economics, microeconomics and utility theory. It's the basics.

Housing is also really weird:

- the main input (land) is also an output, so when the price of the output goes up, so does the value of the input.

- economies of scale don't really work, due to the impracticality of transporting the good (houses) and fitting the good inside a machine (in house "factories", normal workers go inside the house and work on it by hand; not a lot changes compared to traditional construction)

- more supply in one area increases the value (and therefore demand) in that area, so it's not actually clear-cut whether building more would reduce the price more than it increases it, at first glance.

Ah yes, that 150 year old meme reflexively copy-pasta'd by internet commenters since the days of usenet to refute basic concepts like supply and demand.

"Lol economists are dumb they think humans are robots!"

No they don't. Sorry, we won't be throwing away an entire field of human endeavor based on a straw man caricature that isn't true.

We don't call physicists dumb and throw out their ideas because the real world isn't a perfect vacuum either. They know this, don't be silly.