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Comment by choilive | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately yes, because people don't understand basic supply/demand principles. It sounds like common sense/econ 101 (which it is). But the proponents of low-income housing and rent controls don't seem to believe that increasing the supply of market rate housing decreases rents in the long term.

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Most proponents of low-income housing I know of would like to vastly increase density and lower the number of SFH but the vast portion of the market and voters does not want that at all since it would lower their home value.

and it's miserable to live in.

Cool, figure out how to pay for trillions of dollars of sprawling infrastructure then. We in the US haven't figured that one out yet and the bills are coming due.

Increasing density generally increases existing home values more than not doing that; the land becomes more valuable (for free!) if more houses can be sold on top of it, and that's almost always worth more than having renters nearby.

The more common reason people vote against it is because they want their neighborhood to be frozen in time at the precise moment they moved there; that's what they originally chose after all. And they don't want to be forced to look at anything with a FAR above 0.4, and even that much is questionable.

Are you sure they're talking about the long term?

Opponents are usually talking about long term and short term. Basically they will argue that there is no connection between price and supply.

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