I'm perplexed that in the midst of a piece about rising housing prices, no one mentions housing supply. The tools necessary to increase housing supply in the face of rising demand have been available since the early 1900s—as discussed extensively here, in The Rent is Too Damn High (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO)—and yet this endless series of articles doesn't mention the obvious.
The solution to rising prices is to increase the supply of the good in question. Yet reporters rarely seem to mention this, and they treat rising housing prices as some kind of law of nature.
The strange thing is that the same things that people use to fight rent increases (rent control, etc) wind up creating perverse incentives that reduce the quality and quantity of the housing stock. If you want cheap rent, encourage people to build houses.
I'm perplexed that in the midst of a piece about rising housing prices, no one mentions housing supply. The tools necessary to increase housing supply in the face of rising demand have been available since the early 1900s—as discussed extensively here, in The Rent is Too Damn High (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO)—and yet this endless series of articles doesn't mention the obvious.
The solution to rising prices is to increase the supply of the good in question. Yet reporters rarely seem to mention this, and they treat rising housing prices as some kind of law of nature.