> To give an concrete example. The Netherlands has a severe housing crisis. Despite being a relatively rich country it's not uncommon for people (sometimes even couples) to live with their parents untill they're well in their 30ies.

I'm now writing a book provisionally called "How Democracy Got Strangled by Bike Lanes".

> Everyone agrees that this is crazy, seemingly very little changes.

People understand instinctively that "just building more" is not working and never will.

▲

zaphar 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It is my understanding that they didn't in fact "Just build more" so how would they know it was or wasn't working?

▲

undersuit 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They did build more they just didn't build that.

▲

zaphar 11 hours ago | parent [-]

What did they build more of then?

▲

undersuit 10 hours ago | parent [-]

They built at least one house. That's more housing.

▲

zaphar 8 hours ago | parent [-]

So they did not in fact build more, by any definition that a reasonable person would use.

	▲	undersuit 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		OK so the "at least one" is a Binface campaign promise, used as a joke here. I'm going to leave it up to you to figure out if the Netherlands builds more than 1 additional housing unit every year.

▲

cyberax 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They did. The Netherlands added more than 1 million new units between 2012 (8,425,398 units) and 2025 (9,486,933 units). Source: https://opendata.cbs.nl/#/CBS/en/dataset/81955ENG/table

During that time, the population grew from 16785299 to 17722333.

So they literally built MORE houses than the increase in population! Yet it's somehow a "housing crisis".

	▲	brailsafe 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I feel like relying so much on supply is a farce if the supply is always able to be bought up by people who are already rich and able to continue owning everything by outcompeting working people. Building more has started to mean little to me if we (as in arbitrary municipalities or governing bodies) don't treat it as a special market in which people can't just buy as many as they want

▲

fallingbananna 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>People understand instinctively that "just building more" is not working and never will.

Wait. Why? Do they?

If the problem is the lack of housing. Why wouldn't building more be a solution?

Or are you refering that the phrase itself is dismissive of existing issues?

▲

tancop 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The key word is just. If all the new apartments are luxury or investment properties and your economy is unequal enough then investors will buy them all up and sit on them forever (because selling would drop the value of their portfolio). That keeps them off the market so housing prices never go down.

On the other hand if you also have public and co-op projects, rent control, vacancy and second home taxes to complement private developers then prices will definitely go down or at least stop growing faster than inflation. The housing market can never be competitive without state involvement because land is a natural monopoly.

Of course making building easier is also an important piece of the solution. One radical change I support is replace top-down zoning with a community vote so corrupt developers can't bribe their way to gentrification, and loud NIMBYs can't stop projects everyone else wants. Architects will hate it but cities are for the locals not for aesthetics.

	▲	cyberax 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		A third of new construction in Amsterdam is social housing (subsidized housing for poor people). Does this seem to you like it's working?

▲

cyberax 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> If the problem is the lack of housing.

It's not. I don't have statistics for the Netherlands ready, but I would bet that they have more housing units than households. In the US, there's 1.1 housing unit per household.

> Why wouldn't building more be a solution?

Because it's not a housing problem. It's a problem with housing near dense city cores in an ever-dwindling number of cities.

Economic forces concentrate people into dense areas: dense population provides a larger talent pool for employers, so companies with offices in dense city cores have a long-term competitive advantage. This in turn attracts more people. Rinse, wash, repeat.

The solution is to recognize the externalities and properly manage them. For example: cap&trade/tax the dense office space, give tax incentives for remote work, provide tax holidays for people in sparse areas, and so on.

▲

FeepingCreature 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I agree. Which is a problem, considering that it absolutely would work if only they actually did it.

▲

liveoneggs 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

but isn't the story that they did build more?

▲

vkou 12 hours ago | parent [-]

If you live in a town with eight beds and ten people, and you just 'build more' your way into building another bed...

You're still going to have someone sleeping under a bridge, but now really smart people will raise their hand, and yell: "See? Building more was stupid, it didn't work."

	▲	cyberax an hour ago \| parent [-]
		And smarter people ask: "Hmm... It would be nice to know why ten people had to come to a town with 8 beds, while there's a town with 20 empty beds nearby"