Point by point:

> How is adding more supply going to fix this?

Adding supply helps because we now have a situation in California where there are many more jobs than homes for people to live. Conservatives keep saying people should work hard, right? Then they need to move where there are jobs. Liberals keep saying people should have access to dignity and a social safety net, right? Then they need to move where there is a friendly political climate and a robust economy to support that safety net. Being a “sanctuary state” is no good when refugees can’t afford to live here.

The big debate is over how to increase supply. The number of homes is increasing, but it is increasing much too slowly. That’s why even with visible construction, prices still increase. But even a slow increase of luxury homes helps, slightly, because every rich person buying a luxury home is a rich person not outbidding a middle-class family for a run-down hovel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQGQU0T6NBc

> 20 people want to buy in my neighborhood, how much supply would have to be built to even reduce prices?

It’s a region-wide market. But on a simple level, yes, you’d need 20 homes to stabilize prices. That seems more humane to me than forcing people to double-up or live in tents.

> How do you prevent over-supply from being built?

You don’t. You need like 10% vacancy, ± some amount, to have a healthy amount of wiggle room for people to move, in case they get a baby or need to fumigate the house or something.

In practice, developers have teams of economists working to make sure they don’t build too much. If the local government makes development excessively difficult and expensive, then they will develop only a limited supply of luxury apartments, unless they get some subsidy. If the local government makes development easy, then they will make profits building for the vast middle class. We should make developer profit margins align with what we need as a society.

> How do you ensure that the housing is of suitable quality?

Competition and building codes. That’s how we ensure suitable quality for everything else.

Note that building codes necessarily mean marginal housing is excluded, so they need to be balanced with our ability to subsidize. Otherwise, you end up with luxury housing in a sea of tents.

We should also be much more willing to destroy existing homes. This urge to preserve the exterior of every existing home is destroying the fabric of society. I call that, “The literal façade of neighborhood character destroying the neighborhood’s character.”

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/12/the-power-of-g...

> I’ve witnessed first hand developers destroying areas for quick profits.

So we need to make competition easier. Experience has shown that trying to control the process in a central government manner just tilts the playing field in favor of huge well-connected firms that can absorb the overhead of dealing with endless processes, and disenfranchises small local developers.

I strongly disagree with restricting the process to build slowly. We have had 50 years of building slowly when we should have been building quickly. Some places should build slowly, but when the economy is changing, then building quickly should be possible.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/upshot/what-happened-to-t...