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Comment by eli_gottlieb | Hacker News Reader

Housing would be cheaper if they built more of it. Rents in Seattle actually declined this year.

Broadly speaking you're right, but in London in particular housing stock growth has been significant in the last 10 years but it has had consequently little effect on housing price deflation[0].

There are many theories as to why that is, but a personal pet one is that London is lacking in housing stock across the market and as such it is economically more viable to build at the middle and top end of the market where profits are higher than at the low end. When this is combined with a record low investment in local government social housing in London you get London's extreme housing market e.g. demand is high, but supply has all gravitated to the place where returns are highest

[0]: http://data.london.gov.uk/housingmarket/

Very dense residential areas still seem rare in London, compared to other cities of comparable size (it has lower population density than e.g. NYC, Paris, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo...)

Completely agree. London really needs to embrace 'up' as a viable building solution. Apparently, a lot of it has to do with some archaic laws surrounding building in London, the 'Protected Views' one is of particular note:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_view

No idea why you are being downvoted. Supply and demand, this is Economics 101. I have made the same arguments about SF and people downvote me too. The #1 way to decrease rent is to build more supply. If there was double the apartments in SF, the rent would not be as high.

Many European countries had big supply pre 2008 and prices continued to rise. China has huge oversupply and yet prices have risen.

It's loose credit. It's the banks.

I'm not familiar with European real estate, but I have to ask: Where within these countries are prices rising? Is it universal or is it constrained to popular, low-unit count areas (like is generally the case in the US)?

> No idea why you are being downvoted.

Perhaps because the parent poster is wrong. Seattle rents did not decrease this year, or last year.

The rate at which rent is increasing has slowed (previously double-digit percentage increases have dropped to single-digit percentage increases). But actual rents have not fallen.

Seattle rents continue to grow each year, just at a slightly slower pace than before.

http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/2015/11/bad-timingas...

(This is not an argument against building new housing, I also believe we need more of that. But the issue is far more complicated than simply "supply and demand, economics 101")

>Perhaps because the parent poster is wrong. Seattle rents did not decrease this year, or last year.

Ah! Then someone really should have just told me instead of downvoting!

I was surprised to see how much of greater London is covered by town houses, detached homes and 2-3 story buildings when I visited.

The population of greater London is about the same as that of NYC (~8.5m people), but the population density is half (5,432/km^2 for London vs 10,756.0/km^2 for NYC).

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