This is a massive discouragement to investment in real estate, which means less capital is made available to expand housing stock.
Along the same vein, these are a couple mentions of how rent control constrained New York City housing supply expansion in this article on the effects of rent control:
>>New York State legislators defend the War Emergency Tenant Protection Act—also known as rent control—as a way of protecting tenants from war-related housing shortages. The war referred to in the law is not the 2003 war in Iraq, however, or the Vietnam War; it is World War II. That is when rent control started in New York City. Of course, war has very little to do with apartment shortages. On the contrary, the shortage is created by rent control, the supposed solution.
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>>Also, the decades-long boom in the New York City housing market is not in rent-controlled or rent-stabilized units, but in condominiums and cooperative housing. But these two forms of housing ownership grew important as a way of getting around rent control.
One study estimates that if just three US cities; New York, San Francisco and San Jose, had maintained their land-use rights at the median level for US cities since 1964, US income would have been higher $3,685 by 2009:
Can I just reply to your first line? I'm in the middle of the US. We have plenty of jobs here and poverty is less severe than on the coasts.
I would like to purchase a house. 10 years ago, I could have gotten the size of house I want in the area I want for $125k. Now I'm looking at $200k-250k for the exact same house. Wages have not risen proportionally in that time.
You say it's discouraging to investment in real estate, but in my situation, investment in real estate is what has left me in a position where it will cost me $75-125k more to purchase a house compared to 10 years ago. More houses are being built, but that hasn't helped to reduce the average cost of a home.
I guess my question is in what way in this situation is investment in real estate a positive thing for the average person? Yes, more homes are being built, but the 100 year old homes in my area are somehow still all I can afford. To be honest, I'm not sure I can even afford them. We have radon to deal with here on top of all the maintenance and inconveniences that come with a 100 year old house.
>>I guess my question is in what way in this situation is investment in real estate a positive thing for the average person?
A higher volume of investment into real estate will increase the value of land, so land-consuming real estate like Single Family Houses will go up in price.
In contrast, the cost of units in very dense developments, like high rises, will be dominated by building costs, not land prices, so their price would mostly stay constant as real estate investment increases, if all other factors were controlled for, and assuming no major market-freedom-inhibiting distortions of the construction industry via government regulations or organized crime.
Anyway, what goes down in price with rising supply is not the cost of buying real estate. It's the cost of renting it. If a real estate market has regulations that discourage investment, and suddenly those were repealed, and the market saw a flurry of construction, you'd also expect the purchase price of units in dense developments (where land is a minor cost input) to come down, as units available for purchase become less scarce, and that scarcity premium disappears.
I and most people my age in my area are trying to purchase our living space. When you rent, you don't have to pay for maintenance, but you also don't get any return from the money you put into it. It's a fee you pay for a place to sleep, rather than an investment. There being more rental space in my area isn't beneficial to me or most people in my generation and socioeconomic class. It's beneficial to those who own the rental homes. You'd think the price of rent would at least go down with all these new apartment buildings coming in, but it's risen much faster than inflation even for my no frills, poorly maintained apartment.
Along the same vein, these are a couple mentions of how rent control constrained New York City housing supply expansion in this article on the effects of rent control:
https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html
>>New York State legislators defend the War Emergency Tenant Protection Act—also known as rent control—as a way of protecting tenants from war-related housing shortages. The war referred to in the law is not the 2003 war in Iraq, however, or the Vietnam War; it is World War II. That is when rent control started in New York City. Of course, war has very little to do with apartment shortages. On the contrary, the shortage is created by rent control, the supposed solution.
**
>>Also, the decades-long boom in the New York City housing market is not in rent-controlled or rent-stabilized units, but in condominiums and cooperative housing. But these two forms of housing ownership grew important as a way of getting around rent control.
One study estimates that if just three US cities; New York, San Francisco and San Jose, had maintained their land-use rights at the median level for US cities since 1964, US income would have been higher $3,685 by 2009:
https://eml.berkeley.edu/~moretti/growth.pdf