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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The obvious answer here is to increase the supply of housing -- by so much that no one will want to live here.

Tear down all the single family homes, beginning with all the gorgeous old rowhouses. Replace them with modern-day tenement housing. Pack as many people in as humanly possible so that everyone is mean because they don't have enough space to live (just like in NYC!) and so that the entire infrastructure -- the schools, the electrical grid, the water system, the transportation system and everything else -- is on the verge of collapse.

Only then, when DC is ugly, horrible place to live, and when no one in their right mind will want to live here, will you finally control housing prices.

Mission accomplished! Yay!
[/quote]

Fortunately nobody is proposing to do anything of the sort. But your dislike of apartments is evident.[/quote]

I know this idea of increasing housing supply is like a religion to its advocates, and there's no evidence anyone could ever present that would change their mind, but there is a fundamental contradiction in their arguments.

An area is expensive because lots of people want to live there. Some people get shut out because of the prices are too high. If you create more housing in the area -- enough to actually affect the prices -- more people will show up to buy them, including all those people who had been shut out. That will bid up prices. So prices won't actually go down -- this might go up beyond what they would have otherwise been, and you'll just have more people all trying to live in the same area.

Prices won't go down until the area becomes less desirable. Have you every gone to one of those beach towns that are horribly overbuilt? And you just want to get out of there because there are too many people and it is so ugly? It's like that. [/quote]

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