A lot of people are concerned that 3,000 Apple employees coming to town will mean housing in our region will get more expensive. They are right. Prices are set by supply and demand, and the increase in demand from new tech workers will mean prices go up. https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article250934144.html

Good news: we can counter this with more supply. Now, any time someone says this, supply and demand deniers chime in to assert that supply and demand does not apply to housing. They are wrong.

Not only does supply and demand apply to housing, it's much easier to see it setting prices for housing than to see how it sets prices for like, toasters or haircuts or plane tickets. We can watch prices go up as a result of increasing demand and constrained supply.

I've lived in the Triangle since 2002. In the first 10 years, demand was increasing as people moved here, but supply was keeping up, as conveniently-located land was available for clearcutting and developing. Prices stayed pretty stable.

Then things changed. It seems developers ran out of conveniently-located land; there's still some clearcutting and outgrowth going on, but it's a lot less, since people don't want hourlong commutes. So supply slowed down, but demand didn't. Prices:

How else can we increase supply, besides sprawling outward? We can do infill development. This has been happening a little. Durham passed Expanding Housing Choices in 2019 to legalize duplexes and other denser housing near downtown.

But it hasn't been nearly enough. EHC has produced a couple dozen new units over the past year and a half. Meanwhile, thousands of people are moving here, and prices continue to go up.

There's a common trope in local discourse, where people say we need more housing, but we need it to be affordable housing, not market-rate housing. They are half-right. We need affordable housing. And we also need a lot of market-rate housing.

Hopefully this Apple news gets people to realize this. If new market-rate housing doesn't get built for the Apple employees, then they will outbid others to turn existing $800,000 houses into $900,000 houses.

The losers of those bidding wars will lick their wounds and move on to other neighborhoods, and outbid others to turn $700,000 houses into $800,000 houses. And so on down the line. This is how we end up with no $100,000 houses. This is supply and demand.

This makes housing more expensive for the 90+% of people who don't live in subsidized affordable housing. People at all income levels.

I followed the EHC debate, and it's dismaying how ill-equipped our system is for the quantity of new housing we need. 1.5 years of meetings and outreach to add a few dozen units! Something has to change dramatically if we are ever going to have enough housing for everyone.