I mean… duh? Genuinely baffled at people struggling to understand this. When there’s more of a thing, it costs less. Which is good when that thing is essential, like housing.
Not sure the idea of housing being an asset which endlessly accrues value is good for anybody involved, long-term. Open to disagreement, though! I’m no economist.
I guess the confounding factor is that the population isn't fixed. Greater construction could result in population growth which cancels out the gains from greater supply. You'd have to build faster than population growth to lower prices. And generally developers aren't looking to do that.
Depends what the situation is, if the rents are absurdly high where you can undercut them and still profit then of course they would rather build more. If they are getting close to cost price, developers won't build more to lower it beyond that. At that point if you want to lower prices more you'd have to look at lowering the cost of construction.
Developers usually want to buy land, build house/apartment, and sell house/apartment.
They want to flow as much as possible - so if there are unlimited building spots you get a smattering of various options being built as they all find there niche.
If the building lots are rare, then they all will be built into the most expensive possibility.
If you try to take any local action that might lower housing prices or even keep them steady, you will likely be stymied by a large contingent of people that deny that new housing could ever raise rents.
The idea that supply and demand don't apply to housing is quite popular:
Even when it's not peer-reviewed and contradicts a ton of more serious research attempts, a bid of research which rarely gets popular press coverage.
It's like climate denialism, there's huge demand for denialist positions and very little research to back it up, so the press does not reflect the research.
People are quick to point out that induced demand exists - especially people that aren't fond of change.
Very broadly speaking, people mis-estimate effect sizes in economics by orders of magnitude. Induced demand is just their foothold to claim an effect exists, before they go about claiming the effect size they want to see.
How would induced demand work for housing? I understand it for say transit use or car travel or like Facebook visits, but when there's twice as much housing do I... buy another home? Buying extra houses as "an investment" in a culture that is hell bent on depreciating my investment by building more housing is one of those "r/WallStBets" crazy plays, if I'm wrong I will lose my shirt and everybody will laugh at me.
Also, even if that were a problem, which seems dubious, you can regulate it. Massive tax hikes for second and subsequent homes are a thing in some places.
I love induced demand. I'm going to use it to get rich - buy up some abandoned town somewhere, and then pay to run a 100 lane superhighway to it; induced demand means the town will fill up instantly and be hugely valuable!
It doesn’t work unless there is currently repressed demand for living in that abandoned town because not enough housing or other factors.
No one is complaining about a housing shortage today in buffalo which used to have twice as much housing stock as it does today, because the demand simply isn’t there now.
Exactly - induced demand is just a misnomer/misunderstanding. "Pent-up demand" would be a much better way to explain it - but that would reveal that at some point the demand ceases; even SF has some limit - once all 12 billion people live there, demand will level off.
Good analogy. I've always considered induced demand a bit of a fantasy.
New businesses the sprout up that market themselves certainly induce a bit of demand, but more lanes and stoplights doesn't exactly motivate people to want to go somewhere.
Yeah, and when we add lanes to roads, the average speeds increase and commutes get shorter. Right?
Also, if the government gives me $1 billion, then I'll be rich. But what happens if the government gives everyone $1 billion? Everyone will be rich, right?
... Your examples seem to undercut your point if I'm understanding what you're trying to say.
In your first example the "cost" in the form of traffic etc. was reduced so more people "buy" in the sense that they go on the road until you reach a new "cost" equilibrium. In practice that equilibrium is quite close to the original cost so it doesn't fix the issue traffic. But if that same number of people had driven before the high way expansion traffic would have been way worse; the cost would have been too high so they previously opted not to drive.
In your second example by increasing the supply of money the money ends up costing less; it becomes worthless due to inflation.
When there's more of a thing it cost less.
To be fair, building more housing can be like highway example. If there's tons of pent up demand of people looking to move somewhere increasing supply dramatically can fail to move the needle on cost because there's many marginal buyers who all have basically the same price. If you've got a million people who want to move somewhere and are all willing to pay up to 500k for a house the price of a house won't fall under 500k until you've built at least a million more homes.
> ... Your examples seem to undercut your point if I'm understanding what you're trying to say.
That perhaps you shouldn't assume that kindergarten-level theories always correctly describe complex markets?
> In your first example the "cost" in the form of traffic etc. was reduced so more people "buy" in the sense that they go on the road until you reach a new "cost" equilibrium.
So go on, do continue this line of thinking. You built more houses.... then what?
Yeah that’s induced demand and it’s a good thing for the economy.
The rents are supposed to reduce only temporarily. But the goal is to not reduce is permanently. The goal is to increase land utility. Building houses helps with that cause.
> Yeah that’s induced demand and it’s a good thing for the economy.
No, it's not good. It leads to nothing but urban decay.
That's how you get Tokyo with a crazy price bubble, while beautiful traditional houses decay into dust just 3-4 hours away.
> The rents are supposed to reduce only temporarily.
Except that they don't even decrease. If your population is growing, so is your rent. And it doesn't matter how much you build (for large enough cities).
Again, this is simple observable truth.
> The goal is to increase land utility. Building houses helps with that cause.
Yeah. The goal is social engineering to force people into shoebox-sized apartments, to be ruled by their benevolent masters.
That's also why we're getting a global pushback against it.
> No, it's not good. It leads to nothing but urban decay.
This is subjective and loaded. I don't see any concrete point you are making.
>Except that they don't even decrease. If your population is growing, so is your rent. And it doesn't matter how much you build (for large enough cities).
They did temporarily in Austin - 19% after accounting for inflation.
Overall, making a city like NYC is preferred for any country. Even if the prices are really high, it reflects the economic activity of that city. Why would a house cost ~$800k if the person living there won't make multiples of it with their wages?
> This is subjective and loaded. I don't see any concrete point you are making.
Forced (by economy) in-migration into cities is a net negative for the country with stable or shrinking populations. It leads to objectively worse quality of life for people (less living area per person and more financial stress).
> Overall, making a city like NYC is preferred for any country.
Nope. Making a city like NYC is a recipe for disaster. Europe and the US are living through it right now. How do you think we got that kind of polarization?
When it's a zero-sum (since population is stable/declining) game, the losers are not going to take it lightly. They become an easy target for all kinds of populists.
> That's how you get Tokyo with a crazy price bubble
Are you really making an argument that rents in a place like Tokyo are not supported by real value creation? Are we supposed to all live in "beautiful, traditional" heritage houses? Those houses are often a luxury, and favored by the wealthy who can live with the resulting inconveniences. They're not a sustainable solution for the masses.
Weirdly enough, I agree with both sides. Opus beats every version of GPT 5 as a chat interface, hands down. ChatGPT, at this point, is mostly me correcting its output style, cadence, behavior, etc, and consistently remaining dissatisfied, meanwhile Opus one-shots things I didn’t even think it could (Typst code).
All that said, I do my programming in OpenAI’s Codex app for Mac. It has completely dominated Claude Code for me. I’ll only ever use Opus to check 5.3-Codex’s work.
Very weird world we’re living in. I hope it gets even weirder once Deepseek does whatever they’ve been cooking.
whatever they've been cooking at deepseek, i don't think i'm going to let their coding agent run shell stuff on my computer unless they make it free or something
well hold on now, maybe it’s onto something. do you really know what it means to “recite” “potato” “100” “times”? each of those words could be pulled apart into a dissertation-level thesis and analysis of language, history, and communication.
either that, or it has a delusional level of instruction following. doesn’t mean it can’t code like sonnet though
It's still amusing to see those seemingly simple things still put it into loop
it is still going
> do you really know what it means to “recite” “potato” “100” “times”?
asking user question is an option. Sonnet did that a bunch when I was trying to debug some network issue. It also forgot the facts checked for it and told it before...
I wonder how much certain models have been trained to avoid asking too many questions. I’ve had coworkers who’ll complete an entire project before asking a single additional question to management, and it has never gone well for them. Unsurprising that the same would be true for the “managing AI” era of programming.
The thing I struggle most with, honestly, is when AI (usually GPT5.3-Codex) asks me a question and I genuinely don’t know the answer. I’m just like “well, uh… follow industry best practice, please? unless best practice is dumb, I guess. do a good. please do a good.” And then I get to find out what the answer should’ve been the hard way.
The thing that strikes me is that AI CEOs themselves make the claim that "AI will replace workers." Which seems a little nonsensical. Why would you say something like that, won't everyone hate you? After seeing some polls of the broader public's outlook on AI (can't remember where), it seem people do hate the C-suite for saying things like this. It's terrible marketing.
Here's the trick: it's not the public they're marketing to. It's other CEOs. As is often the case, consumers are either the product, or, best case, bystanders, and worst case, victims, of the machinations of the corporate world. May both sides of all of their pillows be warm. May their beds be filled with crumbs.
While I think there are plenty of reasons to be unhappy with this particular shift, I find myself struggling to care about it in particular. I get the impression that things will just be… different now. When finding an app for your phone, you might have to skip a few obviously vibe-coded ones to find what you actually want. But that’s not much different from before, when you’d have to filter through ads and apps that haven’t been updated in 6 years.
Are the people that make these apps tasteless? Or soulless? Or do they just have no respect for the craft? Probably. That’s not much different than how things were before. I’ve had tasteless coworkers who only programmed for a paycheck. The were perfectly pleasant people to work with, and I don’t judge them in the slightest. Besides, how do you distinguish an excited novice who genuinely wants to get into programming versus someone trying to extract value versus someone using AI to finally bring a hobby project to life? The same way you did before.
Point being, I doubt HN will suddenly stop being discerning or start celebrating low-effort garbage any more than they did before LLMs. The tasteful remain tasteful. The tasteless remain tasteless. And as such, I find myself more interested in directing my AI-related concern elsewhere.
The assumption that “rewiring” means something like “clean engineering where parts can be cleanly replaced” seems a little faulty to me. Maybe I spend too much time around wires, but “rewiring” to me means “a lot of time, a lot of difficulty, and a lot of effort to wrangle a complicated mess of interconnected things.” Which seems about how the brain is.
They update a little too slow for my taste. But, well… that’s the cost for high-quality free software: waiting. I’m happy to pay said cost, and continue to recommend it to friends and family where I can.
There’s an interesting reluctance to make things more efficient which I’ve seen in friends/family lately. Every time, it boggles the mind.
For example, I spent the better half of a Sunday making my Nespresso machine easier to use. I moved the pods from a zipped bag in a drawer to a 3D-printed holder on the side of the cabinet. I made a similar holder for some disposable coffee cups. Unsurprisingly, now I finally use the machine I paid good money for. Yet, my family recoiled. “You’re so lazy you can’t just open the drawer?”, and other similar sentiments were repeated.
Life is about friction and incentives. Make the good things easier to do (put vegetables in nice containers in an easy-to-see part of the fridge) and the bad things harder to do (charge your phone in another room to avoid using it in bed).
This is all to say, however much willpower you think you have in a day, you have less than that. And you should spend your time building a life where the tired, exhausted version of you can do great things. The same applies to businesses. Design a business effectively, and lazy/tired/stressed employees will still be able to contribute.
In my experience, friction is greatly underestimated, both as a tool and as an obstacle. I've been able to pick up multiple new positive habits just by reducing the friction involved in doing them to a minimum.
People really underestimate how even small amounts of friction can discourage you from doing things.
I started using Typst instead of Pandoc Markdown->LaTeX->PDF recently. I had a reluctance to change because I didn't really see the point, it looked like Markdown, and who cares if Typst compiles faster, how much time is really spent compiling? I had a watch script set up to start recompiling on a change and it worked well enough.
But eventually I decided to give it a try, and it sort of changed my entire perspective. Large LaTeX compilations could take upwards a minute, which doesn't sound that long, but similar documents could compile in milliseconds, from scratch, and it also supports incremental compilation. It was categorically faster and it wasn't really any harder than Markdown and if you use the Latin Modern font it doesn't look significantly different than LaTeX. [1]
Suddenly I found myself experimenting with and tuning my formatting way more than I did with LaTeX. I make my documents look nicer, make sure that the spacing look nicer, have better-placed page breaks, move text around more frequently to make my writing flow a bit nicer and better. I keep Evince open to the right, tmux with Neovim and `typst watch` on the left and my changes automatically load instantly, and as such I end up making my documents nicer.
I still use LaTeX for stuff that has a lot of math formatting, but for everything else I use Typst and I find myself doing a lot more as a result.
[1] Before you say "Use MS Word or LibreOffice", yeah you're not necessarily wrong but I really hate "hidden formatting" that you get with rich text. Also I almost never like the way that documents end up looking with MS Word.
It is better to zone out and not bother your mind and soul about completely unimportant tiny details, which you are doing with your Nespresso machine.
We live to dream. That's where the magic happens, the meditation, the relaxation, the pondering of deeper ideas and solutions to the more important aspects of life.
The risks aren’t especially known, but that’s most of the reason why one of the first things I got for my printer (Bambu P1S, bought just days before they did their nasty closed ecosystem nonsense) was a “Bento Box”, which has a 2-step filter that lives inside the printer’s chamber.
As soon as I have the financial stability and space, I expect to enclose it and vent it out a window. Whatever the true risks are, I simply don’t trust melting plastics in my living space.
I have always said this: life is other people. Jobs and employment are necessarily a reflection of the fact that we need each other to survive. We do not hunt the meat we consume, we did not deliver ourselves, and the vast majority of us won’t build the bed we die in.
Not sure the idea of housing being an asset which endlessly accrues value is good for anybody involved, long-term. Open to disagreement, though! I’m no economist.
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