I probably mentioned this before, but ...

What would you all think of a law that exempted home builders from collusion laws when the unsold new home supply was above some stated level. This would allow them to come to agreements which allocate the number of units each builder could produce. Builders that do not build on spec and those that agreed to produce fewer than some stated number of homes per month could opt out of the agreement, but when their reasons for the exemption were no longer valid, they would be required to join the allocation pool. There would need to be some sort of ramped transition between the allocated and the free-for-all planning to provide hysteresis.

that doesn't help the workers who would have to be fired on account of not enough work to go around. Consider California, where over 10% of people working in construction lost their job(over 100k decent jobs, gone). Who cares if the big dogs have a love fest and collude to survive?

Those workers can be better employed in building and repairing infra-structure, for which there is a current need, than empty houses, for which there is no current need. I have noted, in my own area, that there has been an upturn in such work. I believe that the local governments have quietly taken up the idea that this sort of employment is the best they can do at this time, given the structure of our economy.

Sometimes, I think you disagree with me merely for the sake of disagreeing. I believe I made the sort of suggestion you might well have made if I hadn't gotten there first.

Phil: Sometimes, I think you disagree with me merely for the sake of disagreeing.

LeRoy: No, I disagree. But, then, I am feeling very disagreeable today.