We have a natural experiment: Minneapolis vs. Madison.
Minneapolis abolished the single-family zoning and parking requirements in 2018. And it worked, developers swarmed the city like vultures attracted to carrion.
Madison did no such nonsense.
Can you guess the impact of these policies on housing costs?
There is too much complexity in that single example and the law of supply/demand has been proven too frequently for it to not make sense that increasing demand to meet supply would reduce cost.
Firstly, your link is focused on zoning changes, specifically how they are insufficient to prompt addition supply to be built.
From your linked blog post:
> Freemark finds extremely mixed and uncertain evidence for the effects of upzoning, and one of several reasons he identifies is that the link between upzoning and actual housing production is tenuous. In other words, “Are they allowed to build it?” is a different question from, “Are they building it?”
Secondly, building more suburbs and more cities increases the supply… which indicates agreement that the price problem is one of insufficient supply.
EDIT: To be perfectly clear, the data I disagree with is that increasing supply in Minneapolis failed to impact price. This is the contention of the comment I responded to, and it is fundamentally different from the claim that zoning changes fail to increase supply.
Minneapolis abolished the single-family zoning and parking requirements in 2018. And it worked, developers swarmed the city like vultures attracted to carrion.
Madison did no such nonsense.
Can you guess the impact of these policies on housing costs?
The house price growth in Minneapolis _accelerated_, just like in the nearby Madison. Here are the price growth charts: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1COwL