Josh Gordon wrote the sentence "There's only one problem: there's no good evidence for [the supply narrative]." when the rental vacancy rate is ~1%. This sort of refusal to engage with real estate economics would seem to be mostly hubris

Like no shit buddy. Supply is how you respond to demand!

Consider, if you will, that at some point, SFU had more demand for poli-sci education, and they hired an assistant professor to teach poli-sci students. Gordon-o-nomics would seem to imply that they should have just gotten rid of the students!

It's utterly unsurprising that the highest ever prices generated a supply response.

What this would come down to is not considering the difference between a 'change in supply' and a 'change in quantity supplied.' High prices can pay for more supply, but that doesn't really demonstrate that housing-supply affecting policies are optimal

The claim regarding the development geography of surrounding cities could be better fleshed out. For instance, there's not exactly a huge amount of greenfield development potential in Metro Vancouver, between the mountains, the border and the ALR.

As for building new homes on existing sites, the bulk of the region is well spoken for in terms of [gasp] existing single family zoning.

Area-man finds simple correlation

This is sorta where Gordon elides the supply argument. The point isn't really form - it's capacity. the problem with single family zoning in a high demand region is that it can't respond to demand.

Claiming that the argument is form-->price is simply a strawman argument. But if you want to actually talk about quantities supplied in London, Hong Kong or Manhattan, buddy let's have a look!

London is building literally 19th Century levels of housing supply for a city that is millions of people bigger. I can't emphasize enough that a city where housing starts peaked nearly 90 years ago is not what you want to be citing here.

Stockholm, on the other hand, realized they had a problem. Market prices were high. social wait-lists were long, and so they've taken measures to increase supply and have succeeded at softening the market.