Building lots and lots of housing will never induce more per capita housing use in the same way that better roads induce longer per capital commutes.
Because the fundamental concept of induced demand doesn’t really track with the concept of having a place to live. You need a place to live, you don’t start using more “place to live” because there are more of them.
It can only happen at the fringes — fewer shared leases, more people with 2nd homes. The vast majority will still have one place to live for their family.
Population mobility to desirable neighborhoods is also
not “induced demand”.
Building more housing in hit areas can unsuppress suppressed demand. Say, somebody in Spokane really wants to move to Seattle, but hears about how hard is to get a place to live so stays put in Spokane. But then they build a bunch of new apartments, leading to vacancies, making their dream of moving to the big city more realistic. So if Seattle caters to all housing demand, they could grow from 700k to 7 or 70 million. Which obviously isn’t feasible.
Likewise, when we (Americans at least) talk about housing shortages, we don’t mean the USA as a whole, it’s just a few cities that everyone wants to live in, not say small towns in the Midwest or Deep South. So a lot of demand and is already suppressed because not everyone can live in those few hot places.
