I'm now writing a book provisionally called "How Democracy Got Strangled by Bike Lanes".
> Everyone agrees that this is crazy, seemingly very little changes.
People understand instinctively that "just building more" is not working and never will.
During that time, the population grew from 16785299 to 17722333.
So they literally built MORE houses than the increase in population! Yet it's somehow a "housing crisis".
You need to account for:
- Existing deficit
- The changing demographics, people are more likely to (prefer to) live alone putting more stress on the housing market
- The location
More young people are single and more old people prefer to live alone.
At the same time the housing crisis in Groningen might be less severe than in Amsterdam which is not visible in the nationwide numbers.
For a young single person in Amsterdam the situation will definitely feel like a crisis.
So there's clearly something else going on.
And what makes you think that just building even more housing without understanding the underlying reasons can solve the issue of the soaring costs?
Wait. Why? Do they?
If the problem is the lack of housing. Why wouldn't building more be a solution?
Or are you refering that the phrase itself is dismissive of existing issues?
It's not. I don't have statistics for the Netherlands ready, but I would bet that they have more housing units than households. In the US, there's 1.1 housing unit per household.
> Why wouldn't building more be a solution?
Because it's not a housing problem. It's a problem with housing near dense city cores in an ever-dwindling number of cities.
Economic forces concentrate people into dense areas: dense population provides a larger talent pool for employers, so companies with offices in dense city cores have a long-term competitive advantage. This in turn attracts more people. Rinse, wash, repeat.
The solution is to recognize the externalities and properly manage them. For example: cap&trade/tax the dense office space, give tax incentives for remote work, provide tax holidays for people in sparse areas, and so on.
On the other hand if you also have public and co-op projects, rent control, vacancy and second home taxes to complement private developers then prices will definitely go down or at least stop growing faster than inflation. The housing market can never be competitive without state involvement because land is a natural monopoly.
Of course making building easier is also an important piece of the solution. One radical change I support is replace top-down zoning with a community vote so corrupt developers can't bribe their way to gentrification, and loud NIMBYs can't stop projects everyone else wants. Architects will hate it but cities are for the locals not for aesthetics.
Does this seem to you like it's working?
You're still going to have someone sleeping under a bridge, but now really smart people will raise their hand, and yell: "See? Building more was stupid, it didn't work."