If only we had some example of a city that built as much as the market demands. https://jamesjgleeson.wordpress.com/2018/02/19/how-tokyo-bui...
Also, I'd recommend talking to people in Tokyo about the cost of living/working there (you'll find most people commute in over an hour by train) and about rising homelessness. This is with a population growth rate over the last 30 years of less than 0.5% and is EXPECTED TO RELENTLESSLY DECLINE AFTER 2020 to 2100 by 6million people.
http://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/tokyo-populati...
If you want some other data points on massive building increases, I offer you Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, where prices have doubled many times while the available housing has also more than doubled over less than 30 years at a more than 2.5% population growth rate.
From 1990 to 2010 (latest year in data), the population grew 9.6%.
In the same time period, SF's population grew 11.3%: http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-counties/ca/san-francisc...
Not a big difference if you ask me. Yet SF prices have skyrocketed.
Tokyo may require citizenship to buy, but that doesn't mean foreigners can't rent. Rent prices in central Tokyo often start at around $1500/month, which is a lot less than that of SF bay area suburbs.
Source: I am a homeowner in Tokyo.
I live in a median market, where the price per square foot is about $150 for a detached house in an urban area with tight supply.
The difference why places like California and NYC are so out of control has less to do with supply than demand. As fiscal policy and philosophy demand consolidation and concentration, more and more people in the same circumstances go to the same place.
Since the mid 70s, smart jobs go to the top 10 cities, dumb jobs go the the South or offshore, and everything else is mined for value.
It doesn’t have to be that way. When IBM was at its prime, their big engineering centers were in places like Upstate NY, Minneapolis, Tampa, RTP, Toronto, etc. GE did similar things.
Modern tech companies would rather pay 3-7x more for folks in the Bay Area or NYC. That’s all about control and where the money is.
I imagine the answer runs around government intervention and wealth concentration.
The consolidation / concentration issue applies more to normal businesses. Regional banking, for example is dead, and that has all sorts of negative impacts on places that aren’t the biggest cities. Not only are the workers gone, but there’s no commercial banking available anymore.
(And the US shutting down immigration to control the SF housing market, aside from being a radical national solution to an isolated local issue, would also undercut the economic engine driving progress in SF--and lots of other places in the country. While that also would contribute to lower housing prices, we've done "tank the economy to drop housing prices" back around 2008, and I don't think it was all that popular; the cure is worse than the disease.)
I wish the people pointing to Asian cities as a role model for SF bothered to do research on the differences between the situation facing SF and those facing the Asian cities at issue.