Yes. In fact, the simplest solution to making housing more affordable, and thus alleviating some of the resentment of the youth, is the correct one which is to just build more homes. The reason this doesn’t happen however is much more complicated. First, consider the nature of the city. Suburban commuters commute every day into the city for work but since they don’t live there, they cannot vote there to increase housing supply. Second consider those with voting power in the city. On one hand you have landlords who do not want more housing built and renters who do want more housing built. Surely, renters out number landlords. So why don’t they just vote to increase housing? Because of a mix of corruption and bureaucratic obfuscation. Landowners need only expend enough lobbying capital to outweigh the numerical advantage of renters. The renters also being more numerous makes them harder to coordinate. In other words, a “noble cause” must be invented to subvert the vote of part of the renters to the landlords’ cause. Building a house here will hurt the environment. Building a skyscraper there will put local coffee shops out of business as the area gets manhattenized and Starbucks comes in. Eventually, lots of arbitrary rules and regulations are put in place which don’t actually prohibit building new housing but makes it unnecessarily difficult and costly. This obfuscation makes it difficult for renters to even understand what is preventing new housing from being built. They can’t actually vote to allow new housing to be built because technically building new housing isn’t prohibited. They have to dig through the labyrinthine maze of regulations to finally understand that they need to vote to fuck over the delta smelt or whatever for rents and housing prices to go down. Basically an impossible task. It gets worse. Because if that isn’t possible, what is possible? Something simple to understand but actually counterproductive. Rent control and greater hurdles for eviction. Renters basically vote themselves into greater shortages and higher rents. This is the world we live in.(Galois Kevin)