Build more housing? In a place like Austin, you can just keep building out, basically. To a point. Eventually cities doing this reach a limit. Houston and Atlanta are pretty much at or beyond that limit.
And it's not that building low-density SFH housing is the most economic. It's simply the most subsidized. Every road, every parking space, every sewer pipe, every water pipe, every utility pole, every school, every hospital, every police station, every fire station... they all add factor in to the true cost of housing and the more spread out things are, the more expensive those things become. Taken to extremes, look at the billions Houston spends now to add just one more lane (because this one will totally solve traffic) on, say, the Katy Freeway or the ring roads.
Yes it does need to be affordable. NYC is the posterchild for this. Nothing that's getting built on billionaire's row will ever trickle down to being affordable housing. They build ultra-luxury housing because it's the most profitable and it does absolutely nothing for anyone else because these units are just ways for non-residents (mostly) to park wealth and not pay their fair share of taxes.
Rent control is the wrong solution for the right problem and it's typically American. By that I mean it forces the solution onto private landlords who are going to do everything possible to get out of those obligations and deliver subpar but compliant housing. And they'll demand tax breaks for it. When in fact the solution is for the government to supply a large chunk of the housing market ie social housing. But there's a pervasive and wrong idea that we can only solve problems in the private sector and that's nothing more than a wealth transfer from the government to the already-wealthy.
"Just build more housing". Yeah, and then you get Houston. Cities need to be planned. Cities require infrastructure. And one of the most important thing cities need is public transit infrastructure, something sadly lacking in virtually every American city.
The core to so many of these problems is that we need to stop treating housing as a speculative asset. Owning two or more houses should be incredibly difficult and expensive and should be taxed punitively. By this I mean the capital gains on non-primary residences should be 80% and property taxes should be significantly higher.
Also taxing homeowners harder doesnt really solve the problem. CA has insane taxes, SF especially has a giant budget. They just waste it. I dont believe that once the govt raises taxes they will suddenly become efficient and competent.
The idea that the more spread things out the more expensive they are is sound theory. However in practice, per capita taxes in a city are often higher than the rural or suburban regions. One water main should serve more people in a city and its cost amortized across the population should be cheaper.
In practice, cities tend to have tons of programs that drive taxes up. They are free to do that, not necessarily bad, but also not efficient from a tax payer perspective.
Housing should be for residents of that city to provide a utility: shelter. Not as an investment vehicle.
It simply doesn't have to be this way. The poster child for this is Vienna [1][2].
Increasing house prices are an illusion of wealth creation. Let's say you buy a house for $200k but over the years it goes up to $800k. But every house costs $800k so you still have only 1 housing unit's worth of wealth. You've simply increased the barrier for younger people to buy houses.
Put another way: increasing house prices are simply stealing from the next generation and that money is really going to the already-wealthy and, to a lesser extent, the old. Just look at the median age of homebuyers in the US, currently 59 [3].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-soc...
[3]: https://www.apolloacademy.com/median-age-of-all-us-homebuyer...
But let's not miss the point of the article. This is a right-ward shift of the supply curve. It means that the economics of building the next unit got cheaper. That's the point.
I've seen a lot of neighborhoods across the USA, and Austin making way for higher-density housing on urban corridors (Lamar) is like, duh, this is more live-able. There are new towers along rail and bus route, townhomes packed in, and behind the tree line it's now possible for some single-family lots to become duplexes or fourplexes. And rather than McMansion ugly, the new Austin residents are dressing those up to look pretty darn cool.
There is a lot more to be done to remove supply-side barriers in every city.