Why affordable housing is scarce in progressive cities

This assumes your own lived experience is prescriptively good for everyone else. There's more than one way to the same goal.

Let's put the situation another way. At a certain socioeconomic strata, which describes most of HN's readership, networking is loosely coupled to one's geographic nexus. Walk the gradient beyond that strata with decreasing incomes, and networking increasingly and greatly emphasizes a locus.

Blithely dismissing these different networking modalities devastates the value built up by the networks but not registered in the official econometrics. The neighbors that trade shade tree mechanic automotive fixes for a quarter-fridge-large pile of tamales. The elderly couple who get groceries delivered in trade for watching out for suspicious activity while a young family is away at pre-K and work. The general contracting single dad who builds a porch in exchange for math and SAT tutoring for his daughter. The BBQ block parties done on the cheap instead of at a restaurant or a rented meeting space, where more of these trades are discovered and initiated, often not as quid pro quo trades but just neighbor helping neighbor when an opportunity to help arises.

These arrangements take decades to establish into thriving networks because human trust is either hugely expensive to enforce, or hugely time-consuming to ascertain. These communities are capital starved (especially so if you want to enforce trust via attorneys), so they trade time and evolved cooperative relationships for capital. No amount of "gig economy" unicorn'ism will pencil out to less capital outlay by these residents than a richly diverse network with deeply-established trust protocols.

Break up these networks and you impoverish those forced to move away in a very real economic sense, even though it isn't measured. It just comes out in stories of misery that are then blamed upon poor people too lazy to "look forward to" their change.

1) Because the incentives for enacting the bad policies are widespread, so the bad policies are widespread, so the problem is widespread.

2) It isn't. See cities like Houston and Tokyo which have lower housing costs than San Francisco or NYC.

This is a classic political maneuver. Build two units out of a thousand with regulated prices, then declare victory because you can point to one person paying an affordable price, even though it's being sold below market at restricted volumes and isn't available to everyone.

If the same units were available at that price but in unrestricted quantity to every member of the public, the high prices of competing housing would fall.

And yet that is the phrase we use, because people do feel a sense of ownership about their living space even when legally they have no ownership. A lot of these policies come down to how much we want to back that feeling up with legal rights.

Your ancestors could handle a trip across the country (or an ocean) where half the people died along the way, but people can't handle moving out of some shitty midwestern town entirely supported by the coal plant that's scheduled to shut down to pursue a job because the local Church and T-ball league they're involved with is there?

I'm increasingly not sure the boom in population has been worth it for humanity if these are the kinds of people we're dragging along.