Instead, housing supply growth has a strong positive relationship with population growth. In fact, almost all metro areas saw housing units grow faster than their population—even in expensive residential markets like Los Angeles or San Francisco.

This needs to be screamed at every yimby espousing "it's just supply and demand stupid". San Francisco is still down population wise since the pandemic, but has this increase in available supply resulted in lower housing costs, No.

It's because San Francisco is a very nice place to live, and a lot of rich people will pay a lot of money to live here, and that bids up prices out of reach of normal people. This is just the end result of housing commodification and the only thing that can stop it is rent control and public housing.

[–] invalidusernamelol@hexbear.net 3 points 1 month ago

It's not just rich people buying homes for themselves, it's investors that purchase housing for use as short term rentals.

This drastically sways the "real" market value of homes since those short term rental properties will just sit gathering dust and netting their owners depreciation breaks while they get to leverage that asset/debt in the market.

That's why they're so insistent that housing prices have to go up, because even a minor dip absolutely wrecks the billions of dollars in leveraged debt that's propping the whole system up.