This is the problem - not that a brand new McMansion is going for 3,000 square and $900k - it's that the 750 crackshack is going for $500k.

Building adequate housing also brings down the medium cost, by a lot. At worst, it prevents the median house from rising in price.

Prices are set through a combination of supply-demand and cost of providing housing. Almost all increase in housing costs are coming from land price increase, due to land shortage from planning policies that limit land use density.

Housing has been made into an investment first, and a home second, by creating housing austerity and shortage. The only way to prevent housing from being an investment is to stop the artificial shortage of housing.

Being charitable here (though... when called a "dunce" it's hard sometimes to want to be charitable), the statement would be perfectly correct if slightly reworded to:

"increasing supply isn't going to solve many of our problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity"

It would just help with some of them.

But that's a statement that's obvious on the face of it - cheaper housing costs buy time if you lose your job, and makes it easier to have a bigger emergency fund, but it isn't an infinite reprieve. So. The charitable interpretation still hits a wall because that would be acknowledging that supply would help with some of them, and the "dunces" nonsense suggest that they wouldn't agree even with that.

(In some states in particular, though, home ownership is uniquely protected in ways that would help fight homelessness, so increasing supply and incentivizing selling-to-an-owner vs being a landlord could be very helpful too.)

Abundance only solves scarcity if scarcity is the problem, but the actual problem is economic exclusion, which will always be able to outpace abundance because abundance has physical limits while exclusion does not.

I don’t know about that, I feel like one of the issues when one person-one vote democracies is that it means the greater population demographic (aka the Boomers) hold a relatively higher proportion of the vote and thus can majority rule everyone else.

> Increasing housing supply will absolutely decrease housing prices.

> That’s so obvious it’s nearly a truism.

And that is why Manhattan, due to having the most housing units per square mile, is one of the cheapest places to live in the US.

Since it's not, it is not a truism that merely increasing the housing supply will decrease prices. It takes more than that.

As long as you have excess people willing and able to buy $1M studios, every new studio will get snapped up. Prices can only begin to drop if you build so many that you exhaust the supply of people willing to pay $1M and the highest bid left is $900K.

Think of it as analogous to bond issuances. Just because the government issues more and more bonds the price won't drop as long as there are buyers to clear the price. Bond price only drops when they run dry of buyers at the higher price and must start accepting lower offers.

"Increasing housing supply will absolutely decrease housing prices." True if it's the government building the houses, otherwise you hit a point where construction margins tank well before market saturation is reached. In practice new housing developments have a tendency to drag local real estate prices up (see also: gentrification).

What if I don’t care about affording more things? And instead want to live in an ethical society that prioritizes stability and universal access to housing, healthcare, and education?

No. It's a k-type curve where the high deciles are getting higher and the lows are getting lower, so to speak.

There is increasingly becoming more of a divide between haves and have nots, and it has a temporal component because of how equity has appreciated over the last decade or so. Both housing and stocks.

People from a decade ago have seen absolutely unsustainable appreciation in their assets while doing nothing. That is putting them at structural advantages against younger generations that will not see those same appreciations. It's like the bus has left without them. No matter how hard and fast they run, someone asleep on the bus will always be ahead of them.

From GPT-5.5 via mostly FRED (e.g. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXUTOTALEXPLB1510M):

  Group   Wealth    Income/yr  Spending/yr
  50–95%  ~$75–80T  ~$11–13T   ~$9–11T
  95%+    ~$95–105T ~$7–9T     ~$5–7T
  75–85%  ~$18–22T  ~$2.5–3.0T ~$1.4–1.8T

> I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality.

What is this supposed to be implying and how do you square it with the massive amount of money being poured into "disruption" and VC investment, etc, in the US?

Where is degrowth being practiced at scale, and how has that caused more of a divergence between the wealthy and the rest than the opposite pro-economic-growth, pro-efficiency policies that brought us Walmart, Amazon, etc and happily shit-canned all the displaced workers from the less-efficient-but-more-evenly-distributed businesses they replaced?

> aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality.

Inequality is the result of allowing economic growth, i.e. freedom.

Growth only lessens their power if it benefits those without, which, even by the most optimistic takes, hasn't really happened since at least the 80s.

I don't see aversion to growth. I see aversion to filling to pockets of the top 0.1% at the expense of the bottom 90%.

A rising tide raising all ships sounds great and all, until you notice the tide seems to only be rising on one side.

>I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality.

People say that right up until someone wants to do something and then it's all "not in my back yard" and "won't somebody think of Alex Jones and his gay frogs" or whatever their line is.

I'd say nobody is willing to put their money where their mouth is but it's not money. They'd made more money with growth. It's speculative bullshit "what ifs" that could be mopped up easily if they happened. The problem is people's beliefs, ideology, religion, whatever you want to call it.