Prices are set by supply and demand, not by whether the seller has decided to be evil or not that day. They cannot collude without assistance from governments restricting new construction.
> Prices are set by supply and demand, not by whether the seller has decided to be evil or not that day.
Whether and to what extent the sellers in the market have decided to be evil is, in fact, an aspect of "supply", which is simply the function mapping the terms of sale (in simplest terms, price) to the number of units sellers are willing to sell on those terms.
This is true even under perfect rationality, since deciding to be evil is just a way of describing someone whose utility function gives high positive value to something that the person making the description sees as a source of strongly negative value.
I think the "build more" stuff rings very hollow. I live in the sun belt where no politician has ever said no to a developer, and I assure you that rents and home prices are broadly unaffordable here too, though perhaps less so than elsewhere.
It's definitely less than elsewhere - housing is only really bad in coastal blue states esp. CA/NY.
You have single family zoning and height limits like everywhere else in the US. Allowing sprawl development works for a while but eventually you just run out of sprawl.
Rents are down in Austin, Berkeley and LA lately because of construction though. Funny enough, the LA one was an accident and they're trying to undo it.
> It's definitely less than elsewhere - housing is only really bad in coastal blue states esp. CA/NY.
Rents in my politically purple region 900+ miles from any coast have increased 100% over the past decade. What I pay now for a 1bd exceeds what I paid for a 2bd in a nicer part of the city when I originally moved here. Rental applications no longer require 3x income, only 2x now; it's just expected that people devote half their gross income on housing.
How anyone not making six digits lives in NYC is beyond me.
Check the median personal and household incomes over the last decade; both have increased, while household sizes have gotten smaller.
As people get richer, they have smaller households - ie, they stop living with their parents. If you don't allow smaller housing units to be built to match this, they will compete for existing ones and drive prices up.
