[ckissick]

This may belong in PARF, but let's start here and see what direction it goes.

I just read another article about skyrocketing rents and house prices. In this article, they said even doctors can't afford to live on Martha's Vineyard. I live right over the hill from Silicon Valley and prices are absurd. A tear-down there will cost over 2 mil. And I read that prices are rapidly going up everywhere.

They blame a shortage of housing. You know, supply and demand. Of course, that has to be a big part of it. So why is there a shortage of housing? Around here, it's take years and huge sums of money to get a building permit. That has to be part of it, as well. And in that liberal bastion of Palo Alto, (oops one step toward PARF-sorry) a complex of dozens of affordable housing units was planned. The citizens got together, wrote a ballot measure, and voted it down. So the developer built a few 5-million-dollar houses instead. So NIMBYs may be partly to blame.

On the demand side, around here I see a lot of people coming over from China with loads of money and snapping up multiple houses. So there's that. And then there are the second and third homes used as sources of short term vacation rental income.

What did I miss? More importantly, what is the solution?