A little more than a year ago I wrote a piece in this space called “All Housing is Affordable Housing.” The claim was that the essential step toward reducing the housing shortage was to make it legal to build new affordable housing. I did an estimate of the break-even cost for a new apartment in Raleigh, NC, where I live, and showed that the required monthly rent was nearly $3,000, and that was if the developer made zero profit on the deal.

In response, I got emails with an argument I had trouble taking seriously, because it seemed ridiculous. But, on checking, it’s totally true: A significant number of “affordable housing advocates” are actually opposed to building new housing, except for subsidized housing for the poor. The reason is that new housing is more expensive than existing housing, and so allowing new construction will drive the price up.

The mind…boggles. Others have tried to make my case; I have to give them credit. The Atlantic, hardly a libertarian outlet, published a piece entitled “Housing Breaks Peoples’ Brains.”  Ditto those right wing nuts at the Washington Post, with this piece called, “Building More Housing Makes It Cheaper, Really.”

But the critics persist. There are far too many different versions of the “supply sceptic argument” to make a comprehensive inventory, but as far as I can tell there are four main categories of argument:

Argument 1: Land — land is so scarce in cities that any use other than for immediately affordable housing will take available land off the market, and will permanently prevent affordable housing from being built on that plot.

Argument 2: Price — new housing will be more expensive than the average existing housing, and so will raise the average price, not lower it.

Argument 3: Induced demand, allowing more high-end housing to be built in response to large increases in people moving to your cities, will lower the price of high-end housing, but that will simply attract even more rich people in the next wave. In growing areas, the price decrease from increased housing, in a static sense, will be more than offset by the additional high-end demanders moving in, in a dynamic context.