You can't just take those two data points and assume that they are connected by a straight line. Vienna was down to about 1.5 million around 1990 and has been growing since. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna#Demographics
> Vienna's rents are stable and low
For the record, they are neither. There has been crazy, and accelerating, growth in rental costs over the last ten years.
[1] 2523.4/1798.7 = 1.4 from https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SANF806NAN
SF is doing everything it can to maximize home prices while minimizing rent and property tax increase for current residents. Which is arguably exactly what’s in current local voters best interest.
Democracy working as intended?
0-day: San Francisco real estate prices vulnerable to 51% attack.
That doesn't work either, though it may slow the rate of price growth.
If you want to reduce the price of housing, tank the local economy. It's the only thing that works. Supply side policy is neutralized by its own effect on accelerating/decelerating economic growth, e.g., the attack you suggest doesn't work because reducing the growth of the cost of housing in the short-term accelerates local economic growth which creates upward demand-side pressure on housing, and eventually there are limits to supply in any geographical region (and even moreso in any commute time radius, since density shrinks the radius for any given time.)
If you want to reduce the ratio between median wages and the cost of housing (which is probably more important than nominal or even real housing prices), attack the distribution of income.
I do not know what it is really like in SF, but here in Aotearoa that is where we find ourselves. House prices and rents double what they ought to be and no state actor willing to take the hit of doing anything about it
The pro forms that will finance any construction loan/mortgage is not going to let the builder assume big increases in rents beyond inflation.
In fact, if the only way to increase rents is to build a larger building and collect from more units, rent control could actually incentivize building.
Where rent control gets into trouble is where it encourages "got mine, forget allowing anybody new here" sort of NIMBYism that accompanies home ownership. But that's a cultural problem, not a rent control or home ownership problem. And it's only a problem when the ability to build is gated by letting a tiny number of people veto new buildings.
This veto power of tiny minorities is the true problem with building more in SF and other supply constrained places. A more democratic process that took into account the broader views of the people would fix it.
The policy doesn't make half as much sense if you also increase construction.
Why we can’t have nice things is the fascination with enabling rich people to get richer directly at the expense of the poorest and most vulnerable in society.
It is all about balance, in a turbulent world
Serving the economy is literally putting the cart before the horse.
I need to eat and poop. I don’t measure my value as a person by how much I poop. When people value the metric of pooping over the quality of life of the pooper, you create a broken society.
So too, valuing the movement of money over what the money is used for distorts our society.
More people inflates GDP. GDP is not a measure of anything worthwhile. The economy is not the thing we need to be nurturing — it is a side effect.
Though if you want to reduce the prices of housing quickly, I don't think anything could beat rent control plus an aggressive use of eminent domain to build lots of public housing quickly. Even though public housing was done extremely poorly in the US and earned a very bad reputation, other countries have done it much more successfully.
A market solution would naturally take far more time (at a minimum, there'd be no reduction in prices until new development project finish and their supply hits the market), and the equilibrium price may still end up being lower but still unaffordable to too many people.
[1] https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000067989262/wohnhistorike...
For a full assessment I would like to see other Austrian cities that have had similarly stable population sizes but don't have Vienna's policies.
Question: > has less to offer along many dimensions of quality-of-life.
Which one are saying has less to offer, Munich or Vienna?
Islington (London)'s population is around half what it was in 1914, but rents are out-of-control.