Then they just aren't building enough. To be sure, if Vancouver added ten million units, vacancy rates would go up. If vacancy rates are staying flat now, that just means the number of units being added now is insufficiently close to ten million to effectively meet the demand for housing
The problem with the "simple" solution of "just add more supply" is that supply creation is physically restrained by real world factors. It's not lines on a chart like in econ 101 class.
New development is constrained by available trades, construction times, design time, and city review time. Already the City of Vancouver has increased development application fees in order to hire more persons to review development applications faster.
In my neighbourhood there is a high rise under construction that is still not completed but already one year over due. The development industry is continuously stating that more supply is required, but they can't even finish building their own buildings.
> supply creation is physically restrained by real world factors.
Yes, but regulatory factors usually dominate those in these high-cost markets. Like in Seattle's case, it's literally illegal to add to housing supply in most of the city; a majority of land is zoned exclusively for detached single-family homes. What new density there is comes in little strips, which means it tends to come in larger buildings, which have higher base costs to build. It's impossible to make "affordable housing" in a skyscraper.
If more cities allowed more "missing middle" type housing throughout their area, they could make a serious dent in housing prices. But, SFH areas are sacred cows in America (and I'm guessing much of Canada too).
Vancouver multi-unit under construction is about 33k units, which is 10k above the 23k Seattle had under construction in July of 2017 (the first figure I found on google).
"Units under construction" seems like a pretty useless metric. Like, skyscrapers take way longer to build than, say, townhomes, so they'll remain in the under construction pool a lot longer.
Why not use "units started" or "units finished" instead?
At some point, sure. But not at the point where you're just doing 50% more than Seattle. Get back to me when your ratio of new units to immigrants is double or triple that of Seattle on a sustained basis. If the price still isn't going down then, maybe we'll have something to talk about. 50% more just isn't much of a difference.
