I have never seen more supply of apartments make existing rents go down.
I had a friend's rent go up 25% in one year in an area that has seen a huge amount of apartment buildings go up. That's not rational. The companies that own these apartment buildings care about nothing more than more money and know that they'll be able to find someone to pay the exhorbant prices.
That is not necessarily the only conclusion that supports that, but it is one. A lot of urban designers just think that building apartment buildings will help with the demand problem in the same way that people think building highways alleviates congestion, which perhaps surprisingly urban designers know that that doesn't work for highways. And I see no evidence, at least in big metropolitan areas like Boston with a huge amount of attraction, that building supply does anything to ease demand. If anything, it increases it.
I would argue that demand in major cities will never go down. In particular, the greater Boston area has more than 500,000 college students. Many of those graduate and stay and work in the area and many more graduates move into the greater Boston area to work. It's a big area with lots of growing fields with a lot of professional people moving into. Demand is simply not going to go down for apartments, and the demand for housing shows no signs of slowing either.
A bit of my point was that landlords siphon off money from society knowing how important housing is to people and will charge the absolute maximum they can get away with. It's predatory.
You absolutely could build your way out of highway traffic given sufficient lanes. However, given the constraints of land and how density inefficient cars are, you'd have to build double or even triple (etc) decker highways all over the place, which is totally economically infeasible.
Meanwhile, you can build a shitton of lanes out in the exurbs, sure, but then all the cars on your thirty lane highway have to go somewhere when they get into the city and land is a lot more scarce.
What is the alternative to building more housing in a world where demand exceeds supply, we've been underbuilding in blue rich coastal cities for generations, and young people need places to live?
That's because companies only build new housing in booming areas. Plus, it's incredibly rare to get a large amount of housing "at once" in a metropolitan area, such that you could see the effects.
IIRC, there are studies that show that places that built more housing had smaller price increases than economically comparable places that built less housing.
You didn't live in the world where the extra supply of apartments didn't exist. Maybe the rents didn't go down, but you don't know how high they would have gotten.
Positive effects can exist even if they don't singlehandedly flip a decades long trend.
Same in New York City where I live. A major reason is that the demand curve is effectively vertical - people here who would like to buy a home to live in are not competing just with other residents but with a global investor class who want to park capital in NYC property (and expect an appreciation rate that far exceeds inflation).
Under what conditions or reality will supply ever outpace demand in big cities like Boston or New York? I don't think it's physically, realistically, or pragmatically possible.
Well it happened to Commercial RE because of COVID, which was seemingly unthinkable. So now we want to convert some to residential.
What other unthinkable future could lead to a change in net migration out of urban areas rather than into urban areas? Happened ~1950->1990s. Flipped 2000-2020s. Could flip back? Who knows!
I had a friend's rent go up 25% in one year in an area that has seen a huge amount of apartment buildings go up. That's not rational. The companies that own these apartment buildings care about nothing more than more money and know that they'll be able to find someone to pay the exhorbant prices.