Why and how did that ear worm infect so many people?
It's a story they want to believe.
The big bad out-of-town corporation is causing the housing crisis and not the complex web of dozens of factors: existing owners wanting to protect their largest asset, more people wanting to live in fewer places, inflation, tariffs on Canadian lumber, safety standards, etc.
Unfortunately, there are a ton of people who will deny that that factual, well-studied shortage exists, and will try to blame its effects on anything and everything else even tangentially related.
A desirable location will never have enough capacity. Regardless of how much building occurs. If you don’t believe me, look at NYC, Paris, etc, etc.
People move as close to a desirable location as they can afford. And often more.
Don’t get me wrong, rules set where and how bad the line is, but there is no realistic situation where everyone who wants to live in SF can, and can afford to, and it is anything like SF.
Anti-growth people will point to neighborhoods like Glen Park, NoPa and Noe as "SF" while forgetting most of the surface area of the city is empty neighborhoods like Parkside, Mt Davidson Manor, etc.
And because larger cities tend to also be more attractive (Tokyo is still growing, for instance), you’ll never have enough density to be ‘enough’ - aka where it’s cheap enough for everyone to live where they want.
You will have more people though.
Paris is cheaper than SF, even in the middle of downtown along the river, because they actually have consistent housing density throughout the city. Look at the arrondissements that are even 20 minutes out from downtown by subway and you can find apartments that people in SF and NYC would kill to have at that price. Paris will never be free to live in, but it's extremely obvious that they have avoided the worst of the US housing crisis by just actually building lots of housing.
> There are ~ 15 million unoccupied houses in the US
Unoccupied houses across the entire country don't matter. What matters is housing in the places that people live.
Which is why comparing against the rest of the country is valid. Just like comparing SF to Vacaville. Or South SF. Or Oakland.
There are definitely parts of Paris that your typical Parisian (or even atypical French citizen!) cannot afford to live, yes? And many, many live in Paris’s equivalent to Oakland. (Or NYC’s Harlem)
It could be better - but people also have this weird mental block where the only place they ‘can live’ is also the same place everyone else wants too, but they can’t afford it, and somehow it is everyone else’s problem to fix that for them.
Give businesses a reason to spread out a bit and not concentrate in these urban centers, and voila - all those ‘undesirable houses’ are all the sudden more desirable, and all those crazy zoning issues and nimby’s are not such an issue anymore. And the housing crisis mostly evaporates.
But since availability is also a proxy for competition for those jobs, it’s not like folks have too much incentive to make it easy eh?
There were two years during the pandemic when people moved out- because jobs let them - but people moved back and it has more than made up for it since.
Every major city in the world has seen significant population increases as mechanized farm work and fertilizers have removed the need for many farm workers, and economy activity has concentrated.
It’s been a consistent trend for almost 100 years.