I’m hearing rents across board are too low to support building more rentals.

Both. Rentals are particularly hard. Rental development market wants expensive rentals.

A Harris administration can help with this. A Trump administration likes the current focus on bank/developer/property owner profits and wouldn’t change things.

Building more units is great, but the economic system needs to support those units. It has a lot or reason not to if they are moderately priced. Labor and supplies just cost too much to justify building moderately priced housing.

Otherwise, the system is just too biased towards expensive properties, expensive land, and rich banks.

We either need subsidized or government backed financing for projects and/or more government ownership of property, and/or government involvement in development (through non-profits and gov agencies).

To change this, government needs to change the incentives of one or more of these players (property, banks, developers). Changing zoning is a start but it doesn’t fix this.

The anti-developer rhetoric we often hear is actually pro developer, pro bank, and pro rich property owner rhetoric. Cause that is who benefits from this economic system and political approach.

Essentially, banks, developers, and property owners are all aligned (often with local zoning as well) to only build expensive housing. The banks make money this way, so do developers, so do property owners.

I’m hearing Alexandria developers are shying away from building reasonably priced housing because they can’t get bank financing for lower priced units & rentals. This points to a fundamental economic problem that government must fix, ideally federally.