Comment by rainsford

It might be unsatisfyingly simplistic, but if prices are high in an area because a lot of people want to live there, building more housing seems like a fundamentally better approach than demanding everyone who wants to live in San Francisco instead accept living in Mississippi. Even if prices stabilize back to where they were before, it would still be a net win that more people than before get to live in a desirable place for the same cost. I'm genuinely not "sneering" at Mississippi here. But if you want to live in San Francisco, Mississippi is probably not going to be a reasonable substitute and maybe making it easier for you to live in San Francisco is a reasonable policy goal.

But history and lots of examples suggests prices are unlikely to remain the same if you build more supply, which makes sense from an economics perspective. There aren't an unlimited number of people wanting to live in a particular area at a given price point, otherwise they would likely have driven the price higher in the first place. Induced demand is a problem for highways because the cost of driving that particular route at a particular time is essentially zero, which his not really true of moving to a different area.