70 floor tower is a bit extreme. What would really benefit places like San Francisco is replacing single family homes with 3-4 stories apartment buildings. Such a low buildings still make neighborhood look nice and cozy, while increasing density 10 times.

I don't see how you think what you're saying contradicts what I'm saying. Prices in urban areas are very much caused by zoning (primarily), but changes in macro-scale pricing of houses in the US are definitely related to supply of financing.

Only partially. Anyplace where you want to live has zoning that limits how many people can live there. Zoning won't stop you from building out on some ranch in the middle of nowhere (ranches are getting bigger so you can find some no longer used homestead to rebuild). However zoning will stop you from building in a city.

Yeah, but zoning outside of the city is a. Much more permissive, b. There are many places to build, and c. There is little demand for the type of housing that is blocked by zoning (ie. Fourlplexes and above) outside of the city.

Zoning does not 'cause' anything.

Demand does.

The notion is ridiculous - housing is extremely affordable in the US.

There absolutely is no affordability crisis.

There is merely 'a lot of people who want to live in SF and NYC'.

You don't have a right to move to a place and demand they tear down their homes so you can jam yourself in with others in a flat.

What is causing prices to increase is either:

a) more people b) interest rates or c) higher wages.

a - isn't happening rapidly (though partly) c - isn't really happening it's b, consistently over time causing greater and greater leverage.

> There absolutely is no affordability crisis.

Even with a very generous look at the general price index for homes, it is going up at a much higher rate than inflation. There's a reason that younger generations are buying homes at a much lower rate. The idea that there is no affordability issue just isn't rooted in reality.

> You don't have a right to move to a place and demand they tear down their homes so you can jam yourself in with others in a flat.

I'm not demanding that anyone tear down their homes. I think that if someone voluntarily sells their property to someone new, and that new person wishes to build a new construction on that property, they should be able to. It is a very new historical phenomenon that doing so (voluntarily building on your own land, not demanding that others tear down their homes) is difficult in major urban areas - that has not historically been the case.

It's pretty ridiculous to demand that people who "got there first" get to demand restrictions on how the "newcomers" get to use their legally acquired property.

  Now go try and get that to happen in San Francisco in less than a decade.

Go take a look at maps of the Mission Bay area (around the ballpark) from 2006 to 2016. It's unrecognizable.