Most people pretty intuitively “get” how supply and demand affect the price of automobiles or bicycles.
When new cars stopped being produced during the pandemic, the price of both new and used cars went up, because some people, unable to get ahold of a new car, opted to go looking for a used car. Enough people did that, that they bid the price of used cars up. The lack of new, relatively expensive cars translated into higher prices even for older, less appealing cars.
The same holds true for housing. Stop building new housing in the places people want to live, like Bend, and the price of “used” housing rises. The evidence from research is overwhelming at this point:
https://cayimby.org/news-events/its-only-a-housing-market-if-you-can-move-evidence-from-helsinki/ – New market rate housing kicks off “moving chains” that free up older housing stock for middle- and lower-income households. Far from just a long-term theoretical trend, data from the Helsinki Metropolitan Area shows that new housing benefits lower-income households quickly, after just a few rounds of moving. The effect is widespread throughout the region, not just in specific “submarkets” where the new housing is built.
https://cayimby.org/blog/new-housing-gentrification/ – “By running Zillow listings from 11 major cities ranging between 2013-2018, the authors found the same result in every control condition: new market-rate housing reduces rents by 5-7% relative to what they would be if the housing hadn’t been built.”
https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/berkeley-rents-fall-amid-construction – Berkeley prices are dropping as more apartments are built.
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5d00z61m – Researchers have long known that building new market-rate housing helps stabilize housing prices at the metro area level, but until recently it hasn’t been possible to empirically determine the impact of market-rate development on buildings in their immediate vicinity.
https://furmancenter.org/thestoop/entry/supply-skepticism-revisited-research-supply-affordability – “New research shows building more homes can slow regional rent growth and free up units for residents across the spectrum of incomes”
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2023/04/17/more-flexible-zoning-helps-contain-rising-rents – “New data from 4 jurisdictions that are allowing more housing shows
sharply slowed rent growth”
https://www.redfin.com/news/redfin-rental-report-november-2023/ – “The median U.S. asking rent fell 2% year over year in November—the biggest decline since 2020—as landlords grappled with rising vacancies due to a building boom in recent years”
https://stateline.org/2023/10/18/a-historic-housing-construction-boom-may-finally-moderate-rent-hikes/ – “An unprecedented surge in the nationwide construction of new housing — mostly apartments — may finally be making a dent in fast-rising rents that have been making life harder for tenants.”
https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2016/05/25/housing-does-filter/ – a slightly wonky, older article from Josh Lehner an economist with the state of Oregon – “one linchpin to the filtering process is to continuously add housing supply, particularly in popular and growing cities and regions.”
Researchers in Hawai’i tracked the “vacancy chain” of people moving into a brand new condo building, showing how that frees up more affordable options: https://uhero.hawaii.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/UHEROwp2503.pdf
And in conclusion, a simplistic video from the Sightline Institute that, however, effectively illustrates how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQGQU0T6NBc
Strangely, it seems that a lot of people seem pretty resistant to the idea of supply and demand with regards to housing. The local paper even wrote an editorial on it:
https://www.bendbulletin.com/opinion/editorial-does-supply-and-demand-apply-to-housing-in-bend/article_9eea052c-92d6-11ee-a2fc-e3ea251a3a0b.html which cites a research paper on this subject: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4266459
Indeed, housing policy expert Jerusalem Demsas goes so far as to say that “housing breaks people’s brains”: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/us-housing-supply-shortage-crisis-2022/672240/
If we want to see lower rents, or at the very least, stop rents from increasing, we need to build more housing.
Bend YIMBY 