Everyone is suggesting ineffective solutions with idiotic side effects. The proper way of solving this problem is to build a lot more homes. Otherwise you'll be creating a plan economy where bureaucrats are constantly scrambling to alleviate the side effects of their shuffling of deck-chairs on the sinking ship.

But of course, few cities want to do this. The biggest cities in Norway are particularly bad at not even attempting to solve this problem at the root.

Let's just say it loudly and proudly: If you're against allowing the free market to build as much as the demand indicates, you're for high housing costs and screw everyone who is negatively affected. This hypocritical virtue signalling has gotten really old.

I can envision a scenario where both are true and result in short term (possibly on the order of decades) pain for locals. The supply of housing is not meeting the demand of local residents and the supply of “desirable” investments in stable societies is not met for global investors.

It is an arbitrage and inefficiency scenario created by the ability of capital to move easily around the world, but not people.

Do you have any examples where building more would have resulted in stabilizing or lowering housing prices? This is the classical suggestion but doesn't seem like there would be any supporting evidence of it actually working in practice.

Of course I want cities to build more. But I don't imagine it will ever actually lower the housing costs.

Cities rarely try this out in practice. There are examples of smaller cities that manage to keep up - e.g. Kristiansand in Norway, which kept the real estate price development slightly negative during a decade when the rest of the country had a massive increase. I get the impression Copenhagen has also managed to build enough. Their bubble popped in 2006 AFAICT, with moderate development since then in spite of negative interest rates.

But for large cities, there seems to almost universally be democratic agreement that we won’t build a lot more right here.

You get the odd symbolic attempt. But I’m not talking about re-zoning the odd industrial park and rationing them out to the three developers that get things done in this town.

I’m talking about building 40 stories everywhere, where previously there were 8. Consistently allowing developers to build in front of their neighbors’ ocean view. Turning 50% of the beloved hills around the city into high-rise apartments. Stuff like this, to a degree proportional with demand. Annual price increase or decrease is the signal to steer by.

My point: If you support local democratic policy that will lead to an outcome every passing ECON101 student can predict -

Own it.