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WinsingtonIII t1_jdwtm24 wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in Officially less homes for sale in Greater Boston than any other time during pandemic market craziness. by [deleted]

I mean, I agree it's a massive issue, but I don't really understand how you are coming to the conclusion that building more housing is a bad thing in this context.

Not building more housing just makes the huge problem even worse. Waiting 25 years until the Baby Boom generation dies off while not building any housing right now isn't really a "solution."

Obviously developers build to make money. Building more housing is still preferable to not building more housing when there is a severe housing supply/demand mismatch.

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[deleted] OP t1_jdwugcg wrote

[deleted]

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amos106 t1_jdy0m3s wrote

Developers don't build affordable housing but that doesn't mean that "luxury" units don't provide pressure relief from gentrification. The road infrastructure isn't scalable for single family housing. Right now the best solution is to build 5-over-1's near public transit and hope that the market can sort itself out over time.

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dcgrey t1_jdxqfda wrote

The country's population fundamentals are part of all that too. For housing developers, there's every incentive to choose to build pricey houses because there are still plenty of people buying them.

I saw this recently in a city in the south. Dozens of recently built (<20 years old) developments, each with a hundred or so houses...and none of them affordable on an average income, because there were always plenty of above-average earners ready to buy them.

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aSadEconBoi t1_jdxwvvw wrote

I have a feeling you have a very tenuous grasp of how your employer projects returns for potential developments. The short version of the story is just that there is so much demand that whatever additional units we build aren't going to immediately result in drastically lower housing prices, but it's still a step in the right direction. There is no overnight solution to a problem of this magnitude.

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