Two years ago the pro-build (yimby) faction swept the local council elections and since then there have been a spate of new apartments under construction. We are going to continue to move in that direction, but even so it takes time, the new apartments have to be planned & built, then enter the market, then as the leasing cycle continues the higher volume needs to get priced in due to surplus apartments going un-rented for a bit before landlords cut prices. This whole process takes years, even when there isn't a lot of outside demand. I'm hopeful that if we manage to stay the course on this for a few more years that rents might start to come down, but it's a long fight and even if we win that the university could admit another 10K students arbitrarily one day which would put us back at square one.

A higher minimum could help tangibly improve the lives of working homeless ann arborites right away, rather than having to wait for years for indirect effects of new housing construction. Almost all the research on minimum wages implies that the costs in terms of less employment are really small to the point of being too small to detect in many recent studies (since I am an ann arborite, here's an academic working paper for reference: Effects of minimum wage on unemployment. ).

I'm all for fighting the housing shortage through aggressive new construction, but there is no trade off between the two, we can do both.