Rent goes up because we have insufficient housing construction, and we have insufficient going construction becuause zoning laws prevent housing construction. Literally none of the places you bring up have anything approaching a free market wrt housing construction.
I am aware that the government can encourage building and it should do so. Vote locally to repeal zoning laws.
If government says the private sector cannot do something, then yeah you’ll see few or no businesses doing that thing.
Zoning is only a small part of the problem. Even if you zoned a bunch of new land today, if you let the private, free market have its course, then what do you think will be built on that land? Highly unaffordable luxury flats/houses, because that is what leads to the highest profit margins for the private sectors builders. And those flats will be bought up by investors or wealthy individuals to create more unaffordable rent.
That’s the core issue, individual private sector interests are not aligned to be altruistic interests for the good of society. They want to maximise profit, nothing more. Hence, you need someone willing to build houses and sell them at a loss, so average people can afford housing again. Only the government can sell for a loss and remain in business.
Ergo, you can zone all the land you want, but if you only let private sector builders have it, then you’ll just get more and more unaffordable properties built, chasing rich foreign investors, tech millionaires, or pension funds.
This is the core issue with Thatcherism/deregulation/privatisation. An individual company’s profit margins don’t always align with the good of society, but society needs essential services (water, sewage, electricity, food, housing, defense). These things need to be provided to all citizens, urban and rural, but doing so doesn’t always guarantee a profit, so you can’t just leave it to the private sector only.
You’re so close! Once you figure out those luxury flats will go for quite a lot, then free up downchannel housing you’ll understand how this all actually shakes out when people can build.
But that’s not what actually happens!! It’s like the Laffer Curve, we don’t actually see any of these benefits of letting the free market try to create all these supposed benefits and efficiencies. The textbooks say they should happen but in practice they never do. Even when the UK government releases state owned brownfield land, developers build overpriced flats no one in the local area can actually afford. So it doesn’t actually create any net new living space because 1) the local populace can’t afford it, 2) it gets bought by investors.
How does having investors scoop up luxury flats release downchannel housing at all? I have never seen that happen. Even in places where land is cheap and zoned for residential, like in areas of Utah, they never actually build affordable housing on it. People end up locked into renting.
