What we need now is to let markets give people what they want, at a price more people can afford (Krugman on housing)

See Wonking Out: How the Remote Work Craze Made Housing Affordability Worse. Excerpts:

"The most likely explanation is that this time there was, indeed, a big rise in the underlying demand for housing, not just speculation, and that this rise took place too fast for housing construction to keep up, even in places where building isn’t overly restricted. (Supply-chain problems for construction materials didn’t help, either.)

So what happened? Like many people, I’ve speculated that the pandemic-induced rise in remote work led to a demand for more space at home. New research from economists at the San Francisco Fed supports this view. They found that remote work expanded most in locations where it was already relatively common and that home prices rose the most in these locations.  

Crunching the numbers, they estimated that 60 percent of the increase in home prices was caused by the rise in remote work. This may seem like a lot, given that even now, only about 30 percent of work is taking place from home, but remote workers tend to have above-average incomes and presumably account for a disproportionate share of housing demand."

"Rents will probably come down over time in places where housing construction isn’t prevented by excessive regulation. (Sorry, this is one policy area where blue states generally get it wrong while many red states get it right.) But NIMBYism in places like California and, yes, New York will do even more damage in the remote-work era."

"What we need now is to let markets give people what they want, at a price more people can afford."