Considering how crazy expensive accommodations have become the last couple of years, concentrated in the hands of greedy corporations, landlords and how little politicians seem to care about this problem, do you think we will ever experience a real estate market crash that would bring those exorbitant prices back to Earth?
I think zoning is a related and secondary issue, but so long as the housing market is a market, and a few people have almost all the money, all zoning changes can do for housing prices is temporarily alleviate the problem. People with money are always looking for places to park their capital and collect rent. There’s no better vessel for that than real estate.
Obviously, we need to gut literally every aspect of American urban planning for a million other reasons too, but on this specific issue, I think it’s second order.