Ask yourself, do Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US, Britain, Ireland, etc, all have the same inability to build or is there maybe some other common cause?

In my view this is symptomatic of a more fundamental issue - global asset price inflation driven by a broken financial system (i.e. a system being artificially pumped up with cheap credit). Housing is just where the rubber hits the road and regular lives are directly effected. Just look at the tight correlation between the increase in the money supply and property prices.

For those who insist that the number of properties is inadequate, take a look at the numbers for each of the countries I mentioned in the first chart here: https://www.oecd.org/els/family/HM1-1-Housing-stock-and-cons... (Total number of dwellings per thousand inhabitants, 2022 and 2011).

This is a problem of underutilisation in my view. Too many properties are being used as investments and not as a primary residence.

Cheap credit causes an increase in demand. This is not demand for homes but additional 'artificial' demand for properties as investments. Think short term rentals, second homes, land banked properties, etc. By definition, only investment properties can be underutilised - owner occupied homes are occupied! So in an environment that encourages property investment you will see more underutilisation.

What will cause prices to fall is higher interest rates. This is what has been happening in NZ.

Here in Canada, the desirable places to live all have relatively low vacancy rates for residential housing, and have for quite some time. Ie, it's rare to see cities with vacancy rates for apartments exceeding 3%, let alone a healthy 5%.[0] The CMHC estimates that by 2030 we will need 3.5M additional homes beyond the expected number to be produced.[1] The PBO has come up with similar numbers; roughly speaking, Canada needs to complete a new home every 50 seconds just to maintain current price levels.

There's much gnashing of teeth up here over our housing crisis, and it's clear to me that it's a multi-factor concern[2]. While there simply exists much more demand than the supply can service, the reasons for low supply are many and complicated. There are the obvious zoning and infrastructure issues; we don't build for mid and high density nearly enough, and we rely too heavily on cars. There's the labour supply issue the politicians focus on. But most unnerving, to me, is the suggestion that we simply do not have the capacity to produce or source the raw materials necessary in construction.

0: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=341001...

1: https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/blog/2023/estimating-how-much-ho...

2: https://thoughtleadership.rbc.com/the-great-rebuild-seven-wa...

Is it that there isn’t enough housing period, in the entire country. Or is it is people and investments abandoning rural areas in favor of a handful of city neighborhoods?

I’m also curious if those vacancy rates can be / have incentive to be gamed by the homeowners, or otherwise don’t paint a very accurate picture. I lived in a wealthy part of NYC for a while, and my apartment faced a courtyard on the interior of the block. As a result, I could see into the windows of 100s of apartments of 3 adjacent buildings. Only maybe like 5 out of 100s of apartments consistently had someone living in them. This reflects my feeling on the street: the streets were empty, especially given the relative density of the apartment buildings.

I know this is anecdotal evidence, but everyone I know that lives in NYC has the same observation.

I wish scientists and experts would take these concerns seriously and research by this gap in perception and the reported vacancy rate is so different.

And you can't necessarily see the lights on when somebody's home because we use the most blackout-y blackout curtains we can get. Urban light pollution has gotten so bad - especially since the switch to superbright LEDs - that they've become a sleep hygiene necessity.

I would be highly surprised if this were true. I lived in NYC for year and the myth of tons of empty units is pernicious and just won't die. There has been a TON of research on this topic and it all points to there being a huge shortage of housing in the city. As a percentage of total housing stock vacant units make up a fraction of a fraction of a percent.

Anecdotally, i know quite a few boomers that own multiple properties (>3) in manhattan, some of which they rent some of which they keep vacant for when they want to come to the city I feel like at least some % of apartments in the city are visibly vacant most of the time because they are just part time homes for the wealthy.

A good friend bought her Hell's Kithen flat (read: condo unit) from a Japanese company. Years ago I had another friend who worked for a company that had a sizeable place in the Village.

Anecdotal, but probably common enough.

So while there might be enough physical houses around the country/province/city, what makes a place desirable to live extends far beyond the walls of your home.

Growing housing costs and wealth inequality have been extremely correlated, anyone looking for other reasons for the housing inequality really needs to have a very good explanation why they are not related.

Consider a city of 10 million people vs 1,000 small towns of 10k people. The variability for demand in those small towns is higher and vacancy rates can’t drop below zero. So some towns hit 0 while others might be 20%. But in a city if some apartment complex is full people just go to the apartment down the street.

It’s similar to how totally full employment is actually a sign of a labor shortage.

3% may represent local shortages as Santa Monica is more desired than West Adams etc. So increasing availability in undesirable places may not reduce rents in general.

In aggregate, 5-7% seems to be a sweet spot where landlords can find tenants in a reasonable amount of time and tenants are not scrambling to send out a dozen applications a week.

Though I agree less desirable locations should definitely increase the average, as should purchases vs rentals etc. It’s just 3% is already including a lot of mandatory time from cleaning, painting walls, replacing carpets, etc. So prices could fall heavily at a sustained 4% long before you hit the 5-7% range.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/states/california...

That includes both births/deaths and in/out migration. Population growth rate has been generally falling since 1990 (except for a peak in 2000) and significantly so since the GFC in 2009. However, prices have skyrocketed.

China has overbuilt their population by 10-100million (yes, and there are even more outrageous numbers) homes over the last 10-15 years, and yet prices in Shanghai/ Beijing/ Shenzhen still exceed NYC or SF by 50%. They have a falling population.

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/city_price_rankings?it...

This is not even a new problem. The imperial landed gentry was so named because bureaucrats would shovel their money into land.

It's harder live further out, when traffic slowdowns extend commute time 10x. And governments love the idea that expensive roads can be waved away using environmentalism as an reason.

Yet these same governments don't build fast transit either, and without fast amd efficient transit, trips take far far longer than a car.

At this stage we should be building both, as we're that far behind.

The point is, there is a move for 'dense urban areas'. Pack 'em in. Increase that housing density. Yet there is another way in North America, where there is often an endless bounty of space. Better transportation corridors.

Better transportation corridors means that housing costs plateau, because it's just easier to drive 10 minutes more, 20 minutes more, than spend 4x for housing.

That said, even the laptop class often does need to commute:

* Many remote workers have to attend once a week, or more often.

* People make lives, friends, contacts, have relatives in specific areas.

* Every once in a while, you may need to go to "the city" for something important. Medical treatment or specialists, specialty products, etc. Not everything can be shipped, or is shipped.

Anyhow, it seems you sort of missed the point, that is... the faster you can get into a city, the further you can live from the city and still be part of it.

This reduces housing value close/in the city.

Sort of? See eg https://www.ft.com/content/dca3f034-bfe8-4f21-bcdc-2b274053f... for some graphs that show Europe vs anglophone countries in an obvious way. Obviously there are lots of differences between the countries, eg the specifics of their planning systems and economies. The US is different because of the big diversity of local governments – housing is more affordable lots of people outside of desirable cities, and places like Austin and Houston do build lots of homes and that seems to be a possible reason they haven’t grown like prices in California.

Credit costs have followed similar trends everywhere (obviously there are differences, especially in the US) and yet house prices have not followed similar trends but rather behaved differently in different places. I agree that when interest rates are lower you should expect to see higher prices, but that’s because interest rates change the price that a given income can afford. I don’t think interest rates are good at explaining the changes to affordability over time, or why affordability is different in different places.

Also, in your linked chart, you see something like 20% more dwellings per person in developed EU countries vs English-speaking countries, which doesn’t feel like no difference at all.

The issue in the article of affordability becoming worse across the US recently is probably interest rate related – prices change more slowly than interest rates, 30-year fixed rate mortgages mean rates change more slowly, and the higher rates mean existing mortgage-payers don’t want to move as they’ll lose their low rate, which reduces supply. I don’t know why prices are still up though – if interest rates being high was making housing unaffordable, one would expect prices to be down.

Housing is still extremely expensive in most major European cities relative to income. e.g. Milan, Lisbon, London, Rome, Munich are significantly more expensive than San Francisco or San Jose (e.g. Milan is more than 2x more expansive) if you're earning the median income.

It's not like most people in some European countries chose to live in rented cramped apartments they simple have no choice because they can't afford anything else.

> you see something like 20% more dwellings per person in developed EU countries vs

It's not clear how much of that is because of lower (or negative) population growth. e.g. Italy has one of the highest dwellings per person ratios and there are towns/villages which are basically giving away houses for free Milan is still relatively the most(?) expensive city in Europe and housing in other major cities is still less affordable than pretty much anywhere in the US.

US cities are vastly larger by land size, because America is larger allowing it, added with fewer public transit options.

Look at Houston, massive sprawl and some of the cheapest housing in the country.

Set this charting tool to Density, plug in Tokyo with a number of other major world cities, you’ll see the effect in the data.

https://jnolan.shinyapps.io/Population_density/

Sad to think the obvious solutions can’t happen in the SF Bay Area due to its politics.

I think you have to be careful with the definition of "unaffordable".

Housing, at this moment, is unaffordable in the sense that the cost of housing squeezes many people's discretionary budget, savings, and even sometimes the budget for necessities. It is not unaffordable in the sense that (most) people do have enough money that they can pay for it, even though paying for it might cause them hardship elsewhere.

Housing is an inelastic good - particularly for demographics who have limited access to transportation and therefore need to live very close to where the jobs are. The price increases until it consumes all the money available to pay for it.

Housing is not rising in price because it is an inelastic good. Housing is rising in price because the growth in the supply of housing is less than the growth in the demand for housing.

Indeed, the very fact that housing has inelastic demand means that it is particularly susceptible to price reductions when supply is higher than demand.

Anyway, supply and demand are murky concepts that don't map well to reality when trying to take them out of the supply/demand chart. You can't actually quantify potential "demand" because "someone wants a good or service" is not a data point for demand, only actual trades that happened do.

Lack of supply would cause prices to rise - but so would cartel behavior on the part of those who control that supply. Housing of the type necessary for relatively low-income individuals, where the location must be close to jobs (see above), is typically controlled by a set of entities who exhibit cartel behavior in how they price the rent.

I was attempting to highlight the change in numbers for those countries I mentioned and how they are clearly inadequate when trying to explain the change in prices over the same time.

In NZ there was little change from 2011 to 2022 but median house price went from NZD350k to NZD900k.

I agree with regard to demand being different in various locations within a country, but those localised demand differences would have had to shift pretty dramatically over the same ten year period to explain much I imagine.

We printed ~25% of all money in existence since 2020 so that obv means more diluted money chasing scarce housing (applies to everyone worldwide)

High real estate prices might be the new norm :(

Because most of the freshly printed money wasn't immediately used to increase the demand for consumer goods. Instead, it only kept consumer goods demand about neutral, until the summer of 2022.

Without inflation in consumer goods, most businesses don't have increased profits, and no incentive to try to hire more people, which kept wages down.

Instead, the extra money found it's way into assets, pumping up the stock market and housing market.

That started changing in 2022, as inflation hit (which SHOULD have surprised nobody). But the inflation was kept in check by increasing the interest rate.

The increase in the interest rate stopped the amount of money from continuing to grow and even fall slightly. But not nearly enough to reach pre-covid levels.

That means that there is still a lot of excess money in the system slushing around. As long as the real interest rate on bank deposits is still low, people are not tempted to keep them as deposits. So the money stays in assets, maintaining the high price.

> Why would money printing postpone its effect on prices until after interest rates increased?

I'm assuming you mean consumer prices here, not housing prices. Consumer prices stayed low during the pandemic, since people generally reduced their consumption, especially the consumption of services (restaurants, entertainment, etc). A lot of "regular" people paid down credit card debt or increased the size of their savings account.

In 2022, that changed. "Regular people" started to spend more of their savings again, and this caused inflation to rise. As inflation was going up, the fed (and other central banks) slowly increased the interest rate, but not quickly enough to stop the sharp rise in aggregate demand. (And war in Ukraine and continued lockdown in China didn't help either, nor did various initiatives to re-shore production of anything from microchips to ventilators, or for that matter the huge investments of capital currently going into AI infrastructure).

And as demand pushed inflation up, that lead to some increase in the demand for labor. So even if the salaries haven't kept up with inflation, inflation definitely has been increased by the increase in salaries.

Naively, one might expect that the inflationary pressure will cease once aggregate inflation reaches 25% relative to 2020.

And if you wonder why wages haven't kept up. I think this can be explained by a weakening of the demand side of consumer goods, driven by various inefficiencies in how capital allocation, due to the cost of building new and robust supply chains, due to the situation in Ukraine/Russia and China and AI investments etc (as listed above, too).

This is counterintuitive, but also persistent across high-interest rate environments. I asked my mom what the housing market was like in 1980, when rates went up to ~20%, and she said "Prices were basically stable, but nobody was selling houses." Similarly, if you look at historical data, you'll notice that home prices usually remain flat during recessions but don't really go down. Even in really bad recessions (eg. the Bay Area from 1989-1994, which got hit with the triple whammy of interest rates going up to 10%, a tech bubble bust in the workstation & AI market, and the crash in defense spending after the end of the cold war), you might see at most a 10% decline.

The reason comes from a fundamental asymmetry in the housing market: everybody needs a place to live, but most home sellers do not need money. If they fail to sell, they can take the place off the market and continue living in it, or rent it out, or just leave it vacant in hopes of better market conditions next year. So the negotiating leverage usually lies with sellers in the housing market.

When rates go up, affordability goes down, but sellers are usually unwilling to take a multi-hundred-K$ hit. So they don't. They rent it out, they live in it, or they hold onto it. It's usually worth taking a few thousand dollar hit in property taxes to avoid a $100K hit in home value. Liquidity dries up - instead of prices going down, inventory disappears. We're seeing that now, and the older generation saw it in 1980 and 1990.

To make prices actually go down substantively, you need those forced sales, where owners want/need to get out at any price. This could take the form of a foreclosure/bankruptcy crisis like in 2008, where the owners legally lose possession of the house, and the banks need to sell at any price to avoid bankruptcy themselves. Or it could be rising crime, like what happened to Detroit & the Rust Belt after the 1970s or SF in 2020. But many things that you would think would destroy home prices don't actually - New Orleans did not see a significant decline after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and Silicon Valley did not see one after the dot-com bust in 2000.

One other thing to note is that when prices in a region decline, it's almost always because nobody wants to live there. This is actually rather intuitive - if rates and affordability go down but people still want to live there nobody will sell, while if people are forced to sell but others still want to live there you will still have competition among bidders and prices will go up. But it means that there's no magic bullet: "affordable" housing means that home prices stay stable while incomes rise, and if you can't get your income to rise, you are just screwed.

“The median home sale price, external in the US has jumped by nearly 30% since the end of 2019”

So I guess you could have the increase due to Covid effects (or whatever else happened around then) and then seller hesitancy due to high interest rates, even though most potential sellers don’t stand to lose much.

If they sell, they need to buy again at a higher interest rate. So they can sell at a profit but then monthly payments will be higher.

Anyway, this is only 1 scenario. Urban areas are hit hard NYC/SF and sellers are sitting out waiting for recovery, so they rent them out.

Affordable is a different issue. Housing assets exhibit strong depreciation under normal circumstances and extreme depreciation under any kind of stress. Affordable houses are used houses in a way similar to how used cars are fundamentally more affordable than cheap new cars.

But then US wants to 'invest' in current wars.. sorry, national security ... and money has to come from somewhere.

I feel like I should explictly state this is not an attempt at derailing this thread.. politics and rates are part of the reason we are in this mess. I agree that 20% rate would clean it all up really quick

In my experience, people "intuitively" jump to basically every conclusion besides this one. "Greedy landlords" or "[favorite scapegoat] collusion" are intuitive conclusions which are far more common than supply and demand.

> Ask yourself, do Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US, Britain, Ireland, etc, all have the same inability to build or is there maybe some other common cause?

Yes they do, to varying degrees. The Anglo land use regime is a disaster.

Population growth (which is mainly concentrated in relatively small number of areas) is not helping either.

e.g. in European countries which have comparable population growth to Ireland/UK like Norway, Sweden, Belgium real estate prices have been increasing at a similar pace.

Chinese housing market is completely messed up, with turn over almost halted since the government won’t let prices fall no matter what, while they have overbuilt like crazy.

Prices haven't plummeted in China. Sales volume has seized since the red families control the real estate agencies. They have added more incentives, like easier access to hukou, and have eliminated limits on how many homes you can buy.

They're generally lower than the US, despite having a higher population density.

> Chinese housing market is completely messed up, with turn over almost halted since the government won’t let prices fall no matter what, while they have overbuilt like crazy.

A place with the government policy objective of not allowing housing prices to decrease isn't much of an argument that supply and demand doesn't work in general. China is just its own kind of broken.

Whereas prices are significantly lower in e.g. India, not just Japan.

China is simply repeating what Japan went through in the 80s/90s. Maybe market sanity comes only after a period of crazy insanity.

The urge to measure everything by income leads to absurd results, like putting Saudi Arabia and the UAE near the top of the "housing affordability" list because they're flush with oil money, and for the same reason the United States.

> We really should have that lower end housing, I agree, but then we are comparing apples to Orenjis.

But that's the point. Someone in the US who makes 20% of the median household income still needs somewhere to live, and by refusing to provide smaller units, we make things cost more for everyone else too. Because now they have to spend their entire salary on housing and make up the rest with government assistance, which bids up housing costs for people in the middle -- who are also the ones footing the bill for subsidies made necessary by the high costs.

It's not just about the cost per square foot, it's also that small units aren't even available because the rules proscribe more units from being built on the same lot. The result is a de facto prohibition on smaller units because ordinarily it costs a similar amount to build a small number of large units and a large number of small units, but now the latter is unlawful and a small number of small units is uneconomical.

If you believe housing is for people to live while doing the work they can get at the salaries those jobs are willing to pay them, then it is absurd not to consider income in housing affordability.

My family bought an apartment couple of hrs from Delhi for about $100K which is huge amount for locals considering it is center/ hub of nothing. And as far as fit/finish goes one can easily spend another $50K on it to bring it barely to level of basic rental apartment in US.

There is a minimum amount that it intrinsically costs to create housing, e.g. the cost of lumber, and in some places local wages are too low to afford that, and that sucks but the reason for it is low wages rather than housing scarcity. Then there are places where housing is unaffordable, not because wages are low, but because housing costs are artificially high, and that is a different problem with a different solution.

First, it costs way more than $200k/unit for new builds where I live (Seattle). Unless they go for scale, then maybe they are getting $200k with lots of profit and a $1k/month HOA. The biggest cost these days is simply labor. Construction workers aren't cheap.

Second, the housing is not at all equivalent in Asia. The standard 30 story overbuilt concrete apartment buildings, completely un-renovated (but at least you can get that done for cheap), but it keeps migrant workers employed (they overbuild on concrete for less technical builds, at the expense of increased building maintnence and/or reduced building lifetime). China and India just don't magic up these buildings, and often times it is used as a jobs program (or they would move on to more expensive but longer lasting builds, the fact that the buildings will be torn down in 20-30 years is seen as a feature and not a bug). But those cheap to build flats are still going for $1 million/each in cities like Shanghai or Shenzhen.

That's the point. If you restrict where they can be built, and how they can be built, they cost more to build. And then prices go up.

> The biggest cost these days is simply labor. Construction workers aren't cheap.

This is part of the regulatory cost. Rules that require labor-intensive construction methods (preferred by both labor and landlords because they both want new construction to be more expensive), and licensing requirements that statutorily take a long time or significant money to satisfy (e.g. multi-year apprenticeships, expensive licensing exam fees) rather than immediately licensing anyone who can pass the exam and not charging to take the test.

> China and India just don't magic up these buildings, and often times it is used as a jobs program

At which point it's a government subsidy, but that doesn't really get you out of anything at scale. Somewhere or another somebody is paying for the construction.

> But those cheap to build flats are still going for $1 million/each in cities like Shanghai or Shenzhen.

You can allow something to be built without allowing enough of something to be built.

You can also build enough of something and still have high prices because of some other constraints or regulations preventing the people paying the high prices from using some of the supply, so it goes to waste.

But these are not the reasons that a $1000/month flat in India is unaffordable to locals. The reason for that is that local wages are low.

What? Measuring relative to income is the only criteria that matters. What would be absurd is not to compare to income.

There isn't any absolute number at which housing is affordable or not affordable. It is purely a function of what percentage you need to spend of your income to be housed.

Whereas if the global price of materials means that it is possible to build a housing unit for $40,000, but local regulations make it cost $800,000, and then as a result local housing costs are $800,000, that is a problem in the local housing market.

I don't think so. Ask any indians about the cost of buying a property in eg. Mumbai.

This really is a global phenomenon. I don't know where the reluctance to admit that comes from (not you specifically, but in general).

It's global in the sense that it's present in multiple countries, often for the same reasons. For example, the costs are high in the UK for similar reasons as in the US. But many of the comparisons just don't apply.

If you look at a country with a very low median income, of course housing costs a lot compared to the median income -- everything costs a lot compared to the median income. And housing in particular requires skilled labor and global commodities like timber and steel, which put a floor on the cost regardless of what local incomes are.

So housing in India or Vietnam costs a lot relative to local incomes because wood costs a lot relative to local incomes, even though housing there doesn't cost a lot in absolute terms. Which is not the problem in San Francisco, is it?

There is more to it than just "anglo countries don't build enough".

For example, suppose you don't have artificial supply constraints and then you lower interest rates. No problem, more people can get a loan to buy a house which causes more houses to be built and them more people get to be homeowners. But long-term prices stay the same, because it's easy to add supply, so it keeps getting added until prices fall to the construction costs, which acts as a long-term ceiling on prices.

Now suppose you do have artificial supply constraints. Prices are at $200,000 but you've made it cost $1,000,000 to create a new housing unit. Now if you lower interest rates, prices are going to go up, because you can't increase supply at the current price so people just end up having to outbid each other on the existing supply. And the same thing if local demand increases or anything else like that, because you've prevented supply from responding to demand until prices hit a million dollars.

But the problem isn't low interest rates or growing cities or anything like that, because the only reason those things are a problem is that supply can't increase until prices are unaffordable.

There are only 5 states with federally owned land over 50% (Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Alaska and Oregon). Other states west of the Mississippi don’t necessarily have a large percentage of federal land. For instance, Texas only has 1.78% that is federally owned, Arkansas at 9.38%, Oklahoma at 1.59%, Kansas at 0.52%, and the Dakotas at 3.91% and 5.41%. In fact, there are only ten states with over 30% of federally owned land in the Union, granted they are all in the Western part of the States.

2024 https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/federal-lan...

These have a cleaner interface but are from 2018

https://wisevoter.com/state-rankings/federal-land-by-state/

https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_land_ownership_by_state

When people say the issue is land, that usually implies a very particular smaller subset of land which is in proximity other populations, economic centers, and with certain features and infrastructure.

The problem is multi-faceted.

Is there asset price inflation due to cheap money? Yes.

Have foreign nationals been parking their cash in real estate in certain western countries? Yes.

Has restrictive zoning and NIMBY-ism reduced the incoming supply of new homes? Yes.

Multiple things can be true at the same time, all contributing to the current state of affairs.

Without any external influencing factors, a house would not typically depreciate. So a depreciating house isn't normal, there is something external causing it (like the city is going broke, lost most jobs, or environmental factors make the area bad to live in, etc).

But if all is well, a house will not depreciate if it is lived in and maintained. A house can last centuries and inflation means building an equivalent house is always more expensive later than it was to build this one.

So it is not natural to expect a house to depreciate.

Fixing the issue has been stymied for too long by each pointing at the others and saying "They're the real problem!" to justify inaction / rolling back fixes on their pet interest.

All need to be addressed.

That's going to be the biggest contributer as time goes on (not right now though), as eventually all desired land will have been bought by what amounts to an oligarchy.

Honestly, land/homes should never be inheritable, and companies should never be able to own land altogether. Not that this would ever happen. The status quo is too profitable for the land/home owners.

Eh, nah. But, there should be inheritance taxes set at a level which prevents the formation of a "landed gentry". Unfortunately, the issue has been demogogued to the point that middle-class people (who won't have anywhere near the assets to be taxed, as in not by an order of magnitude) treat the idea as anathema.

Your list can be easily sorted this way (Notably, foreign nationals with money are just an instance of asset price inflation, in no way an instance of "nuance" or something).

I see the chain of causation thus - a flood of printed money has increased the value of all capital assets (some of that money appears as the money of foreigners and some of domestic investors, some as hedge funds, etc). Housing has been a focus and areas with restricted supply are where the money has been most attracted (it's spread more and more as the scale increases - a key point of the gp).

Is there any discussion in the scaling/proportion of a given facet when these get brought up?

> Ask yourself, do Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US, Britain, Ireland, etc, all have the same inability to build or is there maybe some other common cause?

This is something I've wondered, and I'm of the opinion there's two reasons that are rarely discussed. One is the great recession/sub-prime crisis, which, at least in the US, caused a collapse in housing construction - I'm not sure how much this is true for other countries. The other is the coming of age of millennials, leading to a "bump" of people in their 20-30s trying to get their first home - I'd expect this to apply to most of the countries listed.

Properties are made up of a building and a plot of land that it's attached to. Whilst we can nake more buildings, we can't make more land, so the land in a given location is by definition going to be in a permanent state of shortage. If more poeple want to live in that location OR (the main driver of this crisis) if more money is chasing the same fixed supply, then the prices rise. The land component is the part that has become more expensive recently, not the buildings.

It pretty much is - everything else is window dressing. Pretty much every single city in China is 3-10x more dense than any area in the US, so lack of land is a reason I find continually uncompelling. Our lack of density, zoning practices, NIMBY attitudes and car dependency all contribute to this, with the result being a lack of construction.

Tokyo has been and continues to be affordable for anyone who wants to live there by building: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/opinion/editorials/tokyo-...

Here's a grad student on tiktok who does good, well-sourced analysis on this front (he has an entire playlist on the issue of vacancy rates given how frequently it comes up): https://www.tiktok.com/@divasunglasses?lang=en

Article on zoning law changes in CA and how municipalities have put out estimates for how much they should build and then consistently, for decades, not even come close to meeting them: https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/ca-cities-to-lose-all-zo...

There's endless amounts of info on this front - look up strongtowns, YIMBY, parking minimums and associated issues (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNXFHpUhu8), japanese vs. american zoning policy (https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.htm...)...

Land that you can develop into multifamily that still has capacity is getting ever rarer. If you poll Americans the preference split is 60-40 suburbia for suburbs vs dense walkability, and yet in metropolitan regions the residential land allocation looks more like 93-7. This shows up in square footage prices, where dense walkability is priced much higher per square foot.

crafting a "i owe you a house" and giving it to the investor while squatting the real estate seems much more efficient

This is where discussing the housing problem becomes challenging. Half of us want to burn the whole system down and take housing back to the basic human need it is, while the other half want to work with the system we have.

Its tough

This might be one of those things where the obvious bit (built more!) is both true, and reductively incomplete. We do have a sense that just building more housing in the presence of lots of liquid capital and easy credit seems to create a speculator market -- even down to retail investors. (e.g. The China real estate bubble bursting seems to be strong evidence that this can happen.)

We also have some evidence that building a single type of housing leads to another kind of speculator bubble (e.g. the subprime mortgage crisis of the early 2000s was proceeded by a massive wave of construction of primarily giant single family homes for example). Even if somebody was interesting in buying something smaller at that time, there wasn't inventory anyways - yet those smaller housing units were not where prices increased the most (note: I'm aware I'm not providing specific evidence of this, but if memory serves it's basically correct) yet they often saw large increases in rental prices.

So from those two examples we can likely say that a market that:

1. Speculation causes housing prices to rise, even when millions of units are being built.

2. Lack of diversity in housing construction can lead to both high prices for some types of stock and lack of availability for others.

So how can we solve this beyond the trivial "build more"?

I'm starting to believe a few things are needed for a healthier housing market:

* We need to limit housing speculation, or at least make it less interesting as an investment option. In South Korea, they've introduced various taxation schemes that limit the appeal of owning multiple properties after decades of housing speculation. The idea there is that housing does exist, but occupancy rates are lower than desired. The result seems to have been an explosion in new housing starts with entire districts in Seoul being razed and rebuilt.

* We also need to find ways to ensure diversity in housing. Now that interest rates have gone up and single family homes seemed to have softened as a market, it seems that developers are concentrating on building "luxury" units of various other types. It's a good start, but if these units are still outpricing need, then they'll sit empty or end up speculated on. Many areas have dealt with this by mandating a certain amount of "affordable" housing, but that has turned into a joke in these areas.

There needs to be other ways for developers to build lower budget units, perhaps tax incentives, or changing zoning to allow for more types of housing.

Here's an example of the problem: The D.C. Metro recently added an entire new line to the system intended to connect the major international airport into the city. The areas around the new stations along the line have all been subject of new rezoning plans, higher density, urban fabric, etc. However, the construction that's happening along that line, while adding tens of thousands of new housing units, is almost all "luxury" (e.g. high price). One of the areas along the line is among the largest reurbanization projects on the planet (Tysons), and Reston/Herndon could grow into a contiguous "city" as large as many other "name recognized" cities in the U.S. like Providence, or Salt Lake City. Average housing unit prices in that area have been rising double digit percent per year (quarter over quarter) with the average home price (not just single family, but condos, town homes, etc.) is at around $700k USD. People who bought in this region even just a few years ago would be unable to afford their own homes today given pricing and interest rates.

So we see another example of "build more" and even "build more types" but aren't being met with "limit speculation" and "build more diversity" - and even in the presence of harder to get credit, the prices are spiraling.

Above the median, buyers (and therefore developers building) start incurring increasing transaction costs.

Part of the issue is that builders can dump luxury properties into the market, then wash their hands of future responsibility as soon as it's sold.

And many of those "luxury" units don't cater to families, but single people. You'll find 1 or 2 bedroom units with bedrooms where you can barely fit a queen sized bed. So these are units that are not only more expensive than, say prewar or midcentury units, but more expensive per unit area than those units.

We have lots of secondary and tertiary homes, parked empty RVs, vacant investment properties, and lots of floor space per occupant, empty spare bedrooms, dedicated social entertainment rooms that are only used for parties, etc.

As per the usual government mouthpieces, it was a roaring success -

"NAMA's overall contribution of €10.5 billion to the State, comprising its projected surplus €4.9 billion and recoupment of the €5.6 billion of state aid it paid to the participating institutions, represents a significant outperformance relative to expectations at inception in late 2009" https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2024/0306/1436280-nama-ibrc...

Sadly it has resulted in arguably the worst housing crisis in the EU. 68 per cent of people aged between 25-29 in Ireland still live at home. This figure is nearly 26 per cent higher than the EU average of 42.1.

The Irish housing crisis has very simply and abruptly come about because of the massive growth in population that has occurred here over the last nine or ten years. Due to the catastrophic implosion that occurred in the indigenous building industry after 2008, speedily ramping homebuilding up to a level that can keep pace with inward migration is essentially impossible.

We may eventually be able to build fifty thousand dwellings a year, but the shortages will persist until then. There are other factors that exacerbate the problem, most notably our sclerotic planning system, but the fundamental issue is the hollowing out of the private construction sector that occurred at the start of the last decade.

You can think back a decade as you say, but your recollection isn't in accordance with the recorded protests at the time https://www.independent.ie/news/protesters-call-for-nama-fun...

Dr Rory Hearne's research from Maynooth sums it up brilliantly

"The housing crisis has also been caused by wider government policy from 2010 to encourage the entry of global investors and vulture funds (via various tax incentives, lobbying and fire sale of assets) into Ireland in order to offload toxic loans from NAMA and the banks. Rising house prices and rents post 2013 were also viewed positively and were promoted as an enticement to investors, while rising prices and rents were also viewed positively for rehabilitating the balance sheets of the banks, a core aim of all policy post 2008. The impact on the housing system was not considered an issue, despite myself and others highlighting the potential problems.

We can see now that these policies have contributed directly to the crisis with vulture funds hoarding land purchased from NAMA. Vulture funds are more likely to repossess houses in mortgage arrears and raise rents on buy to let properties (for example, Ireland's biggest landlord Ires Reit has raised rents substantially). The increase in investors purchasing homes means they are competing with potential home owners. We need to cool off this speculative inflow of investors into our housing system (investors bought up to a fifth of all homes in 2017) and extend the vacant sites tax to derelict property and increase it further to force either sale or development." https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/research/spotlight-researc...

This is a quadruple whammy for people who just want somewhere to live. It means people who only have budget for an older home need to be hasty with purchases so they can get ahead of the speculators. It directly reduces the supply of homes by extending the period in which they aren't occupied. It reduces the supply of more affordable housing by quickly converting it all into more expensive housing. And it robs people who might want to fix up their own home of the opportunity to choose their own decor.

It's not actually front running, but it still feels like a similar kind of problem.

One thing that has definitely not helped is hostile building codes that prevent density. In some cities in the US, building height is constrained by the nearest single family home. Then there’s the parking minimums for buildings that allocate more space for parking than for building space for people.

In Austin, TX (USA), you frequently see buildings with massive amounts of multilayered parking but a smaller fraction of the building used for residential or commercial space. Some “clever” developers have tried to disguise the parking structures as part of the building itself to hide this fact from public view.

Problem with America is that we think this is 1950 and we can scale by building more deadass suburbs, expensive regional highways, and further strain our limited pool of resources (water, sewage, electrical infra) to support suburban living without any consequences.

That doesn’t explain why it’s so hard and expensive to build things. We built those suburbs in the first place when we were much less rich as an economy. Indeed, we built all the water and sewage and electrical infrastructure all over the place too.

In the 50’s these were mostly empty range land, or timberland, or farms, or swamp, or whatever. One (or just a few) owners, low property values, little to no political/environmental resistance - relatively easy to buy someone out and develop.

Now? HOAs, tons of urban zoning rules and environmental rules, thousands of stakeholders for any sizable project.

Which also now means more stakeholders, more political resistance, more BS if you want to increase density there. Or building in not-so-easy places, like steep hillsides, more remote locations, etc.

Most of the existing folks don’t want change. In 1950, especially out west, there essentially were no ‘existing folks’. Even the natives had been wiped out.

And as an economy, we were used to building things at a war economy pace, and had reasons to continue to want to do so.

Now everyone would rather blame someone else (or ensure they get their sizable cut) rather than do anything about it.

As the boomers slowly die out and assets change hands, the momentum will change. Eventually. But we’re talking about a decade plus.

Then it will be the millennials turn to be the ‘bad guys’.

Ultimately, these empty homes are investments and sometimes investments fail, and if they're big enough sometimes those failed investments cause people to lose a lot more than what they invested. That's literally the definition of investment risk. We can't keep doing status quo with this shit while the market continues to sail further and further out of reach of all the people who actually need what it's selling.

It won't fix everything, of course, but it will give us a much more normalized market to then attempt further reform on, rather than the current one which has more in common with a casino floor than a market.

For one, the city did not "ban housing investors," they banned some investors from purchasing a subset of homes, which is already weak, and only made weaker by the fact that the first study analyzes only a few months of market activity under that new restriction.

That being said, both studies do indeed conclude that a link cannot be established with certainty between the policy and house price reduction.

> Results from the difference in difference analysis show that the null hypothesis that the policy effect on home prices and days on the market is not significantly different from zero cannot be rejected. This means that it cannot be concluded that the buy-to-let restriction reduced housing prices or increased the days on the market.

However, this is one city, not in America notably where the problem is at it's worst, and they did not restrict lower income housing which is the most liable to be outbid on by private investors and rented, so I would hardly say these two studies by themselves utterly disprove anything in the way your dismissive comment implies they do. I don't think a partial restriction on a housing market in one metropolitan area out of the roughly ten-thousand currently on the planet is definitive proof.

The problem is that the private housing production system responds to increased credit availability only at the margins and does not over produce. That’s largely because houses are still hand built and not really substitutable like a vehicle. You don’t generally have a choice of two houses on the same site.

However if you produce houses publicly then you can force private housing to compete outside the margins. At which point you get excess supply, as we see with cars and then house prices start to stabilise and even depreciate. At which point the “investment” hoards would start to liquidate.

We need the housing market to behave like the production car market, not the classic car market.

The fix is public policy producing housing in order to force a situation of excess supply.

Hopefully they will be thrown out soon. The really fun note is that these boards are almost entirely made up of architects who are getting the chance to single-handedly destroy a competitor’s work.

I'm curious what makes you think this.

Suppose you built twice as many housing units as you had residents. Rents wouldn't decrease? Why not?

Or do you think that a sufficient amount of housing wouldn't fit? For reference, the San Francisco metro area has ~7.5M people in an area of ~3500 square miles. With housing at the population density of Manhattan, the number of people who could be housed in that area is approximately 250M people, i.e. three quarters of the entire US population. Obviously you wouldn't do this, but you could, so that can't be the constraint.

However, we don't live in a world of perfectly spherical cows and because we don't live in a world where we can double housing units overnight, realistically the reasons we're in this problem is because we can't build enough housing units. Given than, we're not going to be able to double the number of housing units, so realistically we can't build enough to lower rents.

The reasons we can't build enough housing aren't going away overnight, so even pretending they did, it would still take many months, if not years, before new housing units were being sold. Given the time it would take to double housing supply, the natural increase in demand over time because the population is increasing means it would rise to meet supply to keep rents at the current level. Lets say demand increases by 9% each year and it takes 10 years for double the housing stock to come online. Demand is basically doubled by the end of 10 years if that 9% remains constant.

With those problems not disappearing, new housing units are going to be slow to come online, so realistically, again, realistically, because we're not going to double the housing supply, so the best (and my bias is that of being in the SF Bay Area) we can hope for is for rents to increase at a slower rate. (Aka the derivative of rents goes down.)

I just don't seeing the rents themselves decreasing, relative to inflation of money, as well as inflation of the population.

> when you build you just fuel the vicious cycle of people -> opportunities -> people

So long as a place is desirable to live, people will keep moving there. Obviously there's a logical limit to the argument- things get weird when you build more housing than there are people- but then so too do the logistical issues of sewer, water, electricity, and geology (some locations simply aren't economical to build high rise buildings on).

The underlying premise being that they're moving to this place from some other place. But that has an obvious solution: Build more housing everywhere. People can't increase the population of everywhere by moving from everywhere to everywhere.

It also implies that building it in one place still helps to reduce the cost somewhere else. If you make San Jose more attractive and people move from San Francisco to San Jose then you're reducing demand in San Francisco and lowering the prices there.

> Obviously there's a logical limit to the argument- things get weird when you build more housing than there are people- but then so too do the logistical issues of sewer, water, electricity, and geology (some locations simply aren't economical to build high rise buildings on).

The constraints at the physical limit are irrelevant because you don't need to get anywhere close to it. The point is that you could if you had to, not that you actually have to.

> I'm curious what makes you think this.

> Suppose you built twice as many housing units as you had residents. Rents wouldn't decrease? Why not?

It seems entirely logical that rents should decrease.

Not the OP but I do always question this, despite sounding logical. Why? Because it has never worked that way in practice. Can you think of a city that built so much housing that rents became cheap (relative to local income)?

It's easy to say "built twice as many housing units as you had residents" and I agree if you could do that overnight, rents would free-fall. But in practice it would take years to build so much housing. Meanwhile, more and more people and jobs are moving in, attracted by all that new housing. The area becomes ever more popular and more expensive. So you end up with a city that is more vibrant, with a lot more people and a lot more jobs and economic activity. All good things, but rents don't go down, given all this success rents go up.

Most cities with a declining population. They built more housing than they needed, then people moved out, so now housing costs there are low.

It's hard to find other examples of places that have built too much housing, because there is no market incentive to do that. In practice the best you can do is prevent there from being too little.

But the areas with less restrictive zoning do have lower housing costs.

Houston metro, not very restrictive zoning:

  Per capita income: $68,344
  Median home price: $192,500

  Per capita income: $50,407
  Median home price: $393,000

It isn't the housing that attracts them, it's jobs etc. The housing is then needed to give them somewhere to live, or you get California.

In some ways having more people will create more jobs and attract more people, but the idea that it's not possible to keep up with demand is just defeatism. You can't build a million new units overnight but neither do a million new people move in overnight, and even if they did, you would then be better off to build a million new units over five or ten years than to not do this.

Whereas the argument is simply that building the units should not be prohibited. You obviously don't need a law against it if your actual problem was people not doing it fast enough, right?

People make the same specious arguments about gpu production during mining booms etc. Surely producing more gpus will lower the price, or reduce the profit per gpu at least? Are you saying prices don’t fall with increased supply!?!? that’s a counterintuitive statement, Mr Bear!

it just also turns out to be a true one. Getting more people into the bubble etc, or building more hype around the bubble, often only drives the bubble higher even with increased supply. Macro and micro are different things and the forces can work very differently!

now, ponder the way we’ve turned housing into a bitcoin-style money machine full of people who never want the number to go down… yeah there actually is all sorts of counterintuitive and hazardous second-order effects involved in housing, why would you ever think there aren’t?

(The American housing market is basically the exact same kind of “deflationary asset” as bitcoin by design, in fact - if the system is built around the idea the number can never go down (can never be allowed to go down, in fact) that’s what you’ve got, regardless of any actual utility delivered in the process. We have turned housing into bitcoin instead of a place to live and that’s the overarching problem here.)

Maybe increasing the supply only increases the supply of luxury condos, which if they are all consumed by wealthy individuals might push housing prices upwards etc. Such activity could, similar to bitcoin, actually stimulate enough economic activity in an area itself to sustain upwards trajectory on pricing, or merely crowd everyone else out without prices actually dropping “on older condos” as everyone blithely handwaves. These effects are observable in real towns - Colorado mountain towns have a massive worker shortage yet no workers able to afford housing, so the area has been wracked with crippling labor shortages for multiple decades now! Markets are weird and inefficient in all kinds of exciting ways!

https://www.rmpbs.org/blogs/news/breckenridge-historic-home-...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna17970

Basically economics 101 is barely sufficient for economics 101, and frankly every assertion you can pull from such content is somewhat incorrect and massively oversimplified, even one as simple as “prices will decline if production volume increases”. No, not always - and that’s not the only case I can think of where that simple, confident assertion is completely wrong, it’s not true of giffen goods either for example.

But that is what happens. The issue with GPUs is that a) there are only a small number of companies that make them b) fab capacity has to be booked in advance, and c) they know it's a bubble, so they're not going to commit to buying a large amount of future fab capacity when it could pop at any time. So then they don't actually increase supply, and prices don't go down.

> Maybe increasing the supply only increases the supply of luxury condos, which if they are all consumed by wealthy individuals might push housing prices upwards etc.

Only in the sense that the average cost might increase because the average unit is now larger, not in the sense that the existing smaller units would cost more rather than less. After all, their occupants no longer have to outbid the wealthy individuals who have put their money into the new luxury units instead.

> Such activity could, similar to bitcoin, actually stimulate enough economic activity in an area itself to sustain upwards trajectory on pricing

The premise here is that if you make an area more attractive then more people may want to live there. But that's fine. Suppose building 10 units increases demand by 5 units. So if you need 10 more units, build 20 more units.

In some kind of hypothetical edge case or rare circumstance, building 10 units might increase demand by 11 units, but that is obviously not sustainable -- if you built 50 million units, there aren't 50 million people in the region to live in the city, so at some point it stops being true, if it even ever was.

> Markets are weird and inefficient in all kinds of exciting ways!

This isn't markets being weird. If prices are high then construction companies want that money, which they get by building new housing. Weirdness only occurs when regulations interfere with their natural market incentive.

Especially for nvidia, who have been badly burned by crypto bubbles going from 100->0 very rapidly in the past and ending up with massive oversupply of both used and new GPUs.

Especially given the AI people are buying dedicated business GPUs and not gaming ones like the crypto miners were, that's probably good news for gamers that nvidia haven't gone full bore AI only. If they were, it wouldn't make sense to spend fab time on a new series of gaming GPUs as they have leaked they're doing.

That is not the argument. In your example, demand is increasing more than supply, so obviously prices would not fall.

Supply has to increase at a rate greater than demand (including higher property taxes to incentivize sellers to increase supply of properties for sale).

Traffic lanes work this way, notoriously. It’s also fundamentally one of the mechanisms underlying Jevons Paradox.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

Again, the practical example in real estate is Colorado mountain towns. Demand, supply, and prices all accelerate together, and this is particularly amplified because of the customer base in question not having any real price sensitivity etc, and then driving out the portions of the market which do have price sensitivity.

Like it or not, induced demand is a very real phenomenon, and in real estate and similar markets it observably does not always occur at a lesser price due to other positive feedback loops being induced. And you cannot “peel away” those effects separately - the price increase will not necessarily occur exogenously without the demand induction and vice versa.

Again, you’re trying to pick apart the “but that’s separate from the supply increase!” and unfortunately that’s not really severable. The demand increase wouldn’t have occurred without the supply increase. Jevons Paradox being real doesn’t mean gas prices will never go up, so to speak.

Induced demand is a specious argument because the demand is not actually induced by the new construction, it's suppressed by its absence.

If you have traffic congestion, or a housing shortage, then people who would have used the road or moved to the city instead do something else. The normal amount of demand that would exist in a functioning system is suppressed.

If you then alleviate some of the shortfall, that demand comes back. But you haven't induced it, you've just stopped suppressing it through congestion or high prices.

The most important thing about this is that the amount of demand at the lower cost isn't infinite. It's just more than there is at the higher cost. What this means is that you thought you had a shortfall of 100,000 units but you actually had a shortfall of 250,000 units. What it doesn't mean is that you can't solve the problem by building more units -- you just have to build 250,000 rather than 100,000.

And what would happen to prices in the new area if you kept building, instead of stopping? Finding an inflection point in the curve and passing legislation forcing everybody to live inside it is no proof that there isn't a point higher on the curve where more supply reduces prices again.

This is not a practical example because Colorado mountain towns are not fungible or reproducible. This applies to much of the western US that features amenities in very limited supply that cannot be increased, such as low humidity, tall mountains, surfing, and vast expanses of public land. So the US west will always be expensive, especially if you have an airport/Costco/Apple/Trader Joes nearby.

NYC has a similar dynamic, since no other US city will come close to having a comparable subway transit system.

But this would not apply to places that are relatively fungible and in greater supply, which include many metros in the southeast/midwest/northeast.

Induced demand is a thing, but the population of people is limited hence total demand is limited.

I don't think that's the fundamental/underlying dysfunction of the real-estate market, because the same induced-demand effects clearly exist in other areas. Again, things like Bitcoin pretty clearly demonstrate that supply can induce its own demand and then build a positive-feedback loop that would not have existed exogenously.

But regardless, it's equally true of the real-estate that both grandparent and I were talking about. If induced demand doesn't count because every real-estate parcel is a unique good, then you also can't ever compute a curve for price, because supply will never exceed n=1 either. Therefore the Law Of Supply and Law Of Demand do not exist in this universe and GP's assertions are still false.

I'm not sure that's a useful way to think about the world, clearly real-estate is at least somewhat fungible (people don't not buy an apartment because they lost a single bid) but if you want to use that model, grandparent's arguments are equally broken, for whatever value of broken you are asserting here.

The more useful analysis imo is that real estate is mostly actually not about real estate - it’s about community, economy, etc. And those are clearly things that are highly susceptible to induced demand. There is a near-infinite supply of beautiful mountain slopes, but that’s not really what people are buying homes in Vale or Breckenridge for. They are buying it for the social factors, which is effectively 100% pure induced demand in this context.

It would seem to me that more supply = more construction + more maintenance + more taxes = more costs. And these costs must go somewhere. Obviously, they would fall under the landlords responsibility, but they probably would try to pass on these costs as much as possible.

Now this is where it gets iffy...

Vacancies don't earn revenue, and so obviously would be costly to landlords. If there is more supply than renters, landlords would be competing with each other for the renters (or risk having vacancy and the costs falling on them), so they would have to compete (such as by lowering rents) in order to attract the renters. Rents therefore decrease.

However...

Let's assume again that there is more supply than renters, but this time there is few landlords (for hyperbole one landlord). Competition for the renters is thus low, (in the case of one landlord - none), and so there is less need to lower rents to attract renters. In fact, in the case of one landlord, he can raise prices despite there being more apartment supply than renters, and have them pay for all the units, including the vacancies. Rents therefore increase, despite there being more supply.

More total costs divided by more total units is just the same cost per unit, if not lower because of economies of scale.

> Rents therefore increase, despite there being more supply.

If there is a monopoly landlord then rents will be at the monopoly rent whether you increase supply or not. Even then increasing supply could lower rents, because the monopoly landlord could capture more rents by charging $9000/month on twice as many units than $10,000/month on half as many units, and can't charge $10,000/month on twice as many units because there aren't enough tenants who can afford that.

Also, the premise here is that you're increasing supply. The monopoly landlord would have to outbid everybody else for the new supply or they'd lose their monopoly, and have to pay the monopoly price or else the new units would be cheaper than their existing ones. But then the construction companies would be receiving the monopoly price and become flush with cash to build even more housing until the monopoly landlord ran out of money.

There is a reason landlords collude through zoning boards: It's otherwise quite easy for someone new to enter the market.

All of which presumes the risk here is all on the monopoly landlord, when this isn't the case. Even disregarding zoning, construction companies have to compete for bidders, and the monopoly landlord may not have to compete with bidders. Additionally, if insufficient housing is really a problem because more people and businesses are moving into the neighborhood, then the monopoly landlord isn't likely to have problems running out of money. If that isn't the case, and there is sufficient housing (or renters are struggling to afford rent), then they have market advantage over new entrants to the market in the appropriate pricing of bids. This increases risk and pressures margins for new entrants, limiting their ability to compete, which puts risk onto construction companies in bids. In other words: it is quite possible the new entrants or construction companies fold before the monopoly landlord does.

Again, it's all iffy, but, fact is, every new supply constructed comes with a cost, and it falls on someone, even if cost/unit goes down. The assumption that that cost won't fall on renters, isn't a certainty, nor is the assumption that renters will be the ones to benefit from a decreased cost/unit.

What?

The premise is that there is a monopoly landlord but it's possible for others to create housing, e.g. the landlord owns all of the existing rental properties but anybody can buy an empty lot or single-family home and build a multi-unit building there instead.

Obviously if the monopoly landlord owns all of the land then you have a different problem, but that isn't even close to the case in any metro area in the US. (Though neither is anyone owning all of the rental properties for that matter.)

> Additionally, if insufficient housing is really a problem because more people and businesses are moving into the neighborhood, then the monopoly landlord isn't likely to have problems running out of money.

Won't they?

Suppose it costs $200,000 to build a new housing unit, but because of the existing monopoly they sell for $1,000,000, whether it's to the monopolist to sustain their monopoly or to someone else who would break it. To sustain the monopoly the monopolist has to remain the high bidder.

But now the construction company has a million dollars, and it still costs $200,000 to build a housing unit. So they build five new housing units, and now they have five million dollars. So they hire more guys and start training new apprentices because in the next round they're going to have 25 million dollars and build 125 new units which the landlord will still have to buy for a million dollars each.

It doesn't matter how much money the landlord has, the landlord is going to run out of money, because now the construction company has its own R&D division dedicated to construction automation it's only five more rounds before the landlord is paying the entire US GDP to the construction company.

> In other words: it is quite possible the new entrants or construction companies fold before the monopoly landlord does.

It costs them $200,000 to build something the monopoly landlord has to buy from them for a million dollars, or someone else will buy it from them for $999,999 which then happens again and again and destroys the monopoly.

Anybody can buy and build? Yeah... only if they have the funds for it!

That's what you're ignoring: running out of funds isn't just a possibility for the monopoly landlord, it's possible for new entrants to the market, as well as the construction companies. The new entrants and construction companies are facing that risk, just as the monopoly landlord is.

For example, a new entrant to the market may have to go into debt to fund his bid or construction in order to compete with the landlord. The monopoly landlord on the other hand, might not have debt and instead has large capital reserves. Depending on the circumstances, it is even possible for the new entrant needing to rent ABOVE what the monopoly landlord already does to just to break even on costs that the monopoly landlord doesn't have (e.g. because of debt, and/or they overbid for the risk in the market, higher land costs, and other reasons). If done in a market where there is already more supply than renters, it would be a very risky venture for the new entrant.

And again, it's also entirely possible that there are 0 bidders showing up to compete with the monopoly landlord (due to shear lack of other participants willing to step in to compete). In which case, the monopoly landlord doesn't have just a monopoly on rents, but bids, and the construction companies would have tough time running the monopoly landlord out of business, no matter how much they build.

> It costs them $200,000 to build something the monopoly landlord has to buy from them for a million dollars, or someone else will buy it from them for $999,999 which then happens again and again and destroys the monopoly

Look... we can make a bunch of "what if" scenarios, but the scenario you made doesn't necessarily have to be the case (nor any of my examples). But, you had inquired about:

    >> You cannot realistically build enough so that the rents decrease.

    >I'm curious what makes you think this.

The construction costs are much lower than property values, so construction would be highly profitable. Every wealthy person in the world would be lining up to invest in a hundred construction companies because they would be yielding a 400% year-over-year return until the monopoly is broken.

> All I need is one possible example to demonstrate how that can be.

You need a real example, not a contrived one. "What if the emperor of the world declared that rents have to stay high?" Then you don't have a market anymore and we're no longer talking about what happens in markets at all.

You have purchase property to construct something on. So high property values works against your own argument.

> You need a real example, not a contrived one

No I don't, as I did not make the original argument you inquired on. That poster needs a real example, I however, only need to entertain how that possibly could be.

The issue here is that demand shifts regionally over time. Dwelling units in Detroit don't satisfy demand in San Francisco. The result is that you continually have to increase supply in the places demand currently is. To keep prices flat, the number of units per thousand inhabitants has to increase over time, because the number of empty units in areas that have fallen out of demand will increase, but the high prices you're trying to avoid will be somewhere else.

> By definition, only investment properties can be underutilised - owner occupied homes are occupied!

This is also not true. You can have e.g. a 3-bedroom home with one occupant, even if the occupant is the owner. You can also certainly have underutilized land -- any single family home in an area where there is demand for more housing but zoning prevents it from being constructed on that piece of land. Because then you have that acre of land providing housing for one family when it could have been two or twenty.

> global asset price inflation driven by a broken financial system (i.e. a system being artificially pumped up with cheap credit).

This can only happen when supply is artificially constrained. If it cost $200,000 to add a housing unit and suddenly everyone can get a bigger loan than before, the instantaneous effect would be for housing prices to increase -- but once they're above the construction cost, construction occurs until they no longer are, i.e. until they fall back below $200,000.

At that point cheap credit might cause people to buy bigger houses, or use the loan money to buy things other than housing, but long-term you can't get the price of the same housing unit to increase above the cost of creating more of them, or supply would just increase until it fell back to that cost.

What you can do is increase the cost of creating supply, e.g. by restricting where it can be done, so that the cost of doing it goes up and with it the price of a given housing unit. Which is what has happened.

They do help though. Individuals need to realize they can’t afford to live in a place like California and have to give up that luxury if they want more affordable housing arrangements.

But this is no solution at all because everybody knows that. People want to live in California because there are jobs in California and not in Mississippi. In Mississippi you pay $100 less for a house and then make $200 less in income, so who is going to do that?

To fix this you either need to make housing cost less in California or make jobs pay more in Mississippi. But if anybody knew how to do the second one they'd be doing it already, whereas we do know how to do the first one -- build more housing.

That's not 1/3 of Vancouver's condo supply. Not by a long shot.

Still, it doesn't sound like that'd make much of a dent in Vancouver's housing supply. (Razing them and building higher density buildings might, though.)

Did you misread something? Maybe from this post:

> https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/vancouver-empty-homes-tax-st...

> Empty Homes Tax has reduced Vancouver's number of vacant homes by 36%

> After five years of the EHT being in effect, the total number of vacant properties within Vancouver has fallen to 1,398 homes or 36% fewer properties compared to 2017, when the tax regime first launched.

The statement about 36% is a relative percentage, not absolute percentage points. What happened is that ~2184 homes were vacant in 2017, and fell by 36% to 1398 in 2022.

It's saying that of the homes that were originally vacant, there is 36% less of that now. It is not saying that of all homes that exist, the vacancy rate decreased by 36%.

The entire city and all of the NIMBYs cried about their "neighborhood character" and tried every legal trick they could to block the development: threatening to not connect it to utilities.

Vancouver literally has single family homes within half a mile of downtown! Clearly there is room for growth.

Vancouver is full of a population which kicked out the ladder after they got theirs. We moved away a few years ago and haven’t regretted it since.

1. People have mortgages with very low interest rates. If they sell the home, they give up that cheap mortgage for a much higher mortgage interest rate with the next home. So, they stay.

2. The capital gains tax exemption of $500,000 has not risen with inflation. Selling your appreciated home will result in a large tax bill. It makes sense to sit in the home until you die, then it gets a basis boost when transferred to the heirs.

This may be true only in the US. In Canada, for example, the maximum term a mortgage rate is fixed for is 5 years, after which you have to "renew" your mortgage and renegotiate the rate. So a lot of people are already being forced into higher interest mortgages here.

The people who suffer are those who bought 5 years ago -- prices going down means negative equity so you can't sell and move to a cheaper place, and you reach the end of your 5 year fix.

That said, wages have increased a lot over the last 5 years, so higher rates aren't the end of the world. My mortgage increased last year by about 25%, but as average wages are up at least that much that's not devestating.

For (2), absolutely. Tax advantages play their part (adding to investment demand relative to other investment options). Is it not also the case that interest payments on a residential mortgage are tax deductible in the US?

They are only if you itemize your taxes nowadays. During the Trump administration the tax law changed so that the vast majority of Americans now take the Standard Deduction. I received the mortgage interest deduction for about 15 years but haven’t received it for 5-6 years now.

It seems difficult to believe all the medical treatment advances and insane amounts of money spent are having zero effect on postponing date of death (Or even the date of loss of ability to live independently including death).

Of 100,000 people born in a nation 80 years prior, how many still alive and living independently in that nation. Compare with the same metric in 2004. This is to net out immigration, which can be considered separately.

Do we know if older people are living unassisted in their homes longer? That’s all we really care about in this context. Or not even unassisted, but family members moving in and taking care too.

I wish there were a $500k capital gains exemption for turning my ETFs into a house.

Yet another way in which real estate receives massive privilege.

Why wouldn't they? They are relatively similar countries in many ways, any problem that one has could easily be replicated in others. For example I imagine zoning laws are all somewhat similar, favoring suburbs and strictly zoned areas vs market driven mixed use areas.

I also suspect they all have significant migration, high labor costs and high building standards.

The UK, Ireland, Canada, and New Zealand are at the bottom of % vacant dwellings indicating the opposite of underutilization.

Add to that, things that might be desirable for other reasons, like garden space, rooms for use as offices, large kitchens, etc. all tend to scale with bedroom count too.

It's basically a tax that punishes labour mobility and not oversizing property.

Of course, you have to pay to heat and maintain that bigger house and pay higher council tax on it, so your saved stamp duty will probably be used after a few years, so in an ultra-rational way, it comes out in the wash, but it certainly doesn't feel like it at the time.

Equally, houses in Cornwall are of little use when the jobs are in London.

Nothing in the ONS link says otherwise, they just ask

"How many bedrooms are available for use only by this household?"

They are not dead spaces, and they wouldn't somehow become more useful if I knocked a wall or two through to reduce the room count or reclassified them.

I don't have any statistics to hand but, based on experience, there are a lot of houses in the UK like this. Particularly among middle class couples in their 60s, whose children have left home. In fact, my parents have two spare bedrooms that are only used a handful of times each year.

I'll never understand how someone could think that completely normal things like a house, garden, car, etc are somehow "too much". But they do. It's baffling.

I can understand, though not agree, with being angry with someone who owns say, tens of thousands of houses, millions of acres of land, and leaves it all empty.

But the idea that a house is underutilized if it doesn't have as many people as could possibly live in it? All I can say is, Hong Kong exists, Manhattan exists, feel free, I'm not in for that.

This is true. The problem tends to be that people become settled in an area, and would prefer to downsize there so they don't need to uproot themselves. This is often very difficult, as there may not be availability in that area for a suitable smaller property.

I don’t know if I’m just misunderstanding your point, or misreading the material, but that is also not an example of underutilization.

What I am suggesting is that incentives to invest in property have led to an increase in the number of properties that are not being used as a primary residence (i.e. are underutilised) and that that is the most significant factor causing the shortage of available homes.

Given a market like NZ’s size, growth/prices, and attractiveness I can see demand like speculation, STRs, and 2nd homes possibly affecting utilization more than supply.

Given US markets that are larger, cheaper, and less attractive where investment properties fueled on cheap credit were rented out or to a much smaller degree flipped, it’s truly, significantly more difficult to imagine vs simple lack of supply (especially given historically low US rental & homeowner vacancy rates).

I hear this argument a lot and always wonder if the causal direction is flipped: people use housing as an investment because it’s scarce, not that it’s scarce because it’s used as an investment. If there weren’t so many restrictions on building, the supply would grow to meet the demand and parking your money in property wouldn’t be such a hot idea.

Now, why dont governments better fund those departments and emphasize faster throughput? Well, let's ask their main constituents - who are largely homeowners and companies in the industry - whether they'd like to dedicate more taxes to a service that would speed up construction and drop their housing prices.

I don't believe this to be true. If someone wants to build a single multi-story building in an area, no additional infrastructure should be required. It's one building, the existing infrastructure shouldn't have so little slack in it that this could be a problem.

If lots of people are building lots of buildings, the city government can notice this taking place and while the buildings are going up they expand the capacity of the infrastructure in that area. It's no excuse to refuse the construction, it's just something the city has to do as a result, because that is a city's job.

Their job is not to decide what can be built, it's to allocate the property tax on the new buildings to paying for the things the new buildings need.

Then why is that the level at which the decision is made?

> But you can't make rules just for a single building (what are you going to do for the next building... And the next).

The point is that you can respond to demand rather than legislating it. If four high rises are going up in a neighborhood, the city officials can notice this and use the new tax revenue to build infrastructure those new buildings need, and then go on the MLS and find a local property for sale in the area which is in a good location to turn into a park etc. None of this requires restricting the construction.

> There are plenty of examples where local governments have removed lots of restrictions and essentially created Airbnb wastelands

This is really the opposite problem. If you have restrictions that heavily constrain where you can put short-term rentals, and then you set aside an area where they're permitted, of course that area is going to be saturated with them -- you're still prohibiting them from being anywhere else, so they all end up there.

This is the fatal flaw in the zoning board. "You can build anything here" should be the default, and then if you want to set aside 20% of the land in the area to be exclusive for e.g. single-family homes for the people who want that, that's fine. But we do the opposite -- 80+% of the land is required to be single-family homes and not even the entire remainder is allowed to be multi-unit buildings.

Monocultures are shitholes. Nobody wants to live in a place which is exclusively short-term rentals, or exclusively office towers. It even sucks to live in a place which is exclusively single-family homes, because then you're isolated from the community and have to spend half your day sitting in traffic to get anywhere.

What you need is the majority of the land area to be mixed-use zoning. Which is the opposite of having an area set aside which is predominantly short-term rentals.

It obviously doesn't work as housing, but even its value as an investment is at least nominally tied to the fact that someone, somewhere could value it as a house. Otherwise, eventually it's found the emperor has no clothes and it comes tumbling down.

For example a single floor dwelling that is the socle of a giant statue depicting a person appropriate for that street. Each must come with a plaque describing who they are and a qr code to a website about them that lives up to some high standard. Think what you will, it is considerably more interesting than "buying" a picture on some blockchain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNUNR2NZvFM

It posits that the high prices are caused by rich people parking their money in houses. It explains many problems with a few variables.

While it's not the whole picture, it explains why the middle class is getting squeezed out of house ownership. And why stimulus package didn't much help.

The main thing is that the US has been printing dollars for several decades - primarily to deal with or prevent periodic financial crises. Ben Bernacke's "Helicopter Dollars" speech was infamous but nothing has changed but the (increasing) scale (and, yes, all the central banks of the developed world are doing it too).

Effectively, the modern order has come to involve an endless hand-out to those who already have money while "market discipline" prevails against those who don't. Of course, this has long term problems aside from its immorality.

Do they all have zoning, urban planning requirements, and restrictions on what landowners can do with their property? Yes?

This isn't a complicated issue, this is 100% a self inflicted "problem" that can be solved with the stroke of a pen.

Pro-tip: abolish all restrictions on what landowners can build in the property. No licensing requirements, no filings, no nothing.

The sum total requirement for someone to build something anywhere should be them asking themselves "do I have permission from the landowner to do this?" And getting to work.

Secondly, I’ve done a lot of engagement with policy makers and builders and you are not going to get affordable housing being built if you relax zoning laws (which I’m in favor of across the whole city). Instead, what is supposed to happen is that the older properties become less attractive and hence their prices (or rent) are supposed to fall. That’s the theory anyhow. Anyway, the builders all say there is no financial incentive for them to build affordable housing, they make so much more on luxury buildings. You’ll only get it if the local government does it themselves and most in America are reluctant to get involved (it’s why they like saying 15% of a complex should be ‘affordable’ because they don’t have to do anything about it, the builders do, and it’s too small an impact to fix the issue).

This is only really a problem insofar as building luxury homes reduces the throughput of new supply because they take longer to build than affordable housing. In terms of overall market effect, as long as you're not allowing places to sit empty, it doesn't particularly matter if you're adding new homes at the top or the bottom of the market.

Is this increase in absolute number of sales, or increase in the percentage? Because, if the house affordability due to high interest rates goes down, one of the only buyers with money that remain are hedge funds. So, in the past you had 1000 homes selling per year, 100 of those going to hedge funds, now you have 400 total sales, with 100 going to hedge funds. The relative percentage of houses bought by hedge funds increases from 10% to 25%, even though the absolute number remains flat.

(This is where investments in risky things like flipping various cities' "downtown' commercial real estate into additional consumer real estate are starting to look really interesting, especially in some of the cities that had massive corporate tower investments just pre-2020. It's also where you see some cities directly and indirectly pressuring major corporations into RTO policies in the hopes of it releasing some of the pressure on the consumer real estate market in those cities by encouraging hedge funds to reinvest in corporate real estate. It's hard not to feel those pressures are somewhat futile long term, but to feel sympathy for why they seem like necessary short term sandbagging projects.)

Yes, everybody does. The population exploded everywhere, and rent-seekers enriching themselves out of land price increases popped out everywhere. All at about the same time.

Dubai is expanding like there is no tomorrow, and the price of down town and marina just keeps increasing, regardless of how many new high rise areas the emirate undertakes.

China has hundreds of literally empty cities, yet people are being priced out of living in Beijing.

The question is not about a lack of new buildings, or under utilization of current buildings but simply you cannot built _dense_ enough to follow demand.

Can confirm that as interest rates went up, people just can't afford the enormous loans anymore and prices of houses (and apartments to a lesser extent as they're a bit cheaper overall) fell, up to 20% at the worst, I believe. But as soon as interest rates are expected to go down, prices already shoot up again (even while interests are still high as people and banks estimate how much they may expect to spend in the near future).

It’s a pretty simple problem: existing owners have an interest in restricting new supply, and there aren’t many costs associated with being a nimby. Housing stops being a good investment when supply is responsive.

I've been looking at getting a house built, and that starts at about €200k*, but the land in Berlin is at least another €200k on top of that (and usually more).

If I was willing to live in the back end of nowhere, I can get the land for almost nothing, halving the total cost.

But then I'd be living in the back end of nowhere, and turning that into an interesting town (let alone city) would need some very expensive infrastructure to be built, just to support that many residents.

Make the infrastructure cheap, and you can build New Towns.

Most of the developed world seems to struggle with infrastructure during my lifetime, be it major roads, railways, sewage, electricity networks, or anything else.

* list price €100k but that's a cheat as it's the outer shell only, no plumbing or interior plastering

Houses, like other goods, decrease in value over time. A new house should be significantly more expensive than a 50 year old house - just like a car.

I was picking the absolute lowest cost for an example, so on one hand it should have.

On the other hand, what's that in "years of average income", and does it seem reasonable that half of this is the land itself?

I know that the salaries in Berlin are in the lower end, but 100k EUR a year in household income seems like a reasonable expectation for people wanting to live in attractive areas.

But even if the median income were €100k, the €400k level was around the cheapest I could find that you could actually live in and wasn't a weekend house, or a reverse-mortgage you'd only get to use when the seller died, or a building opportunity with no land, or they're rented out and as Germany has fantastic protection for tenants you are not going to move in etc.

If the standard is 4 years, even then you'd be excluding 50% of the households from ownership at €100k/year and €400k minimum prices. As is, €43k/year is closer to 9.5 years income still not being enough for 50% of households.

Not everyone gets to live the most popular places.

> The median pre-tax household income in Berlin is €43,572

Seems like Germany can not afford to not allow mothers into the work place.

Edit: At a median household income of EUR 43k the issue is not housing prices. in Denmark the median salary (not household) is 73.000 EUR a year. I think Germans need to negotiate their salaries.

Definitionally, everyone who actually lives in a place must be able to afford that place. If people suddenly can't, they leave, it's now less popular.

Right now, it's rent controls which allow most Berliners to live in Berlin. Without that, many would be forced to leave, making the city less popular, and thus less expensive.

(Perverse incentives, yay!)

> Edit: At a median household income of EUR 43k the issue is not housing prices. in Denmark the median salary (not household) is 73.000 EUR a year. I think Germans need to negotiate their salaries.

Negotiate with whom? Where would the extra money come from? https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=germany+gdp+per+capita+...

Making a country richer isn't as easy as printing more money. They tried that, it didn't end well.

Anecdotally, Tesla Berlin pays in the range 50-60k/year in Berlin (for SWE roles) - I am quite sure they are able to pay muuuch more.

So either are workers in Berlin less than half as effective as Tesla's other offices or Berliners accepts a much lower pay.

GDP is a number - If the Berliner kebab was priced at 12 EUR instead of 6 EUR, then they could afford paying double the salary - The rest of the world is about to add zeroes to everything. Why wouldn't Berlin?

My thinking is that this is Europeans focussing on "budget rather than profitting".

And then the houses and the land also double, or house builder's salaries real term wages halve and the workers leave and stop building stuff. Land prices are harder to draw conclusions about, but the owners have to want to sell at the price being asked, which is ultimately what the market will bear.

> The rest of the world is about to add zeroes to everything. Why wouldn't Berlin?

Fear:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_R...

This is roughly 1/3 of the Danish household income. If I were German I would riot for higher salaries - we simply can not accept such disparities in a modern world with movement of labor and remote work.

It seems like German fear is what forces the ECB to lower the interest rates causing severe asset price inflation in Denmark.

Please - negotiate your salaries in Germany.

IMO it's yet another network effect caused by fewer people being willing to work in these kinds of fields, and a decreasing birth rate. Infrastructure inherently requires maintenance, so as it increases, so does the amount of people required to maintain it. Yet we have fewer and fewer people to do it, so adding new stuff just becomes unreasonably expensive.

Working people are perfectly willing to purchase homes they can afford. In fact, it is safe to assume that it is one of their top priorities. If affordable housing isn't being created, something is amiss. See above!

Of course. Remember, homebuilding continues to be incredibly labour intensive. Meanwhile, all of those countries have enjoyed "full employment" for many, many years. Which means that workers have all kinds of job options.

In other words, you can't build without people. Ask yourself, why would the people choose construction? Wouldn't sitting at a comfy desk programming computers all day be more desirable? The small few who enjoy it can’t keep up.

Do you work in construction as a career? If no, why not? What would it take to get you to start building houses? Higher compensation than other jobs, perhaps? But guess what high compensation brings...

An important nitpick: cheap credit intensifies the search for returns. You need to consider why those races end in real estate. In the US, at least, the answer is that the American single family house is the single most privileged asset class in the history of the world. The entire economy assumes that housing prices will grow at a rate that outpaces inflation. You cannot, in that system, be a person who calmly watches to evaluate the correctness of the hypothesis.

No, you shut up and push. Whether you're the President or the Fed or some affordable housing commission, you shut up and push for housing as an appreciating asset.

Personally, I think we should lean into that -- make single family homes completely unattractive as an investment.

Rental units are more debatable, because of the density argument, but I think we should probably disincentize it as an asset class too. In favor of offering townhomes for sale.

There's probably a lot to be said about the secondary market for conforming mortgages, but I'm not the knowledgeable person to do so.

Also there is a shift from people living in families to living single or just with one person which is more inefficient and requires more space.

One thing that's surprised me is that I'd expected this situation to lead to building being relatively cheap compared to buying. But land + labor + materials price increases seem to have left building less competitive in most areas meaning new supply can't actually undercut the market much, if at all. Or seemingly won't. It really feels like there's nothing that can give at the moment, like it's some kind of doom loop.

When properties are being used as an investment, they are rented out. If that's true, it should show up as higher rental vacancy rate and low/stagnant rent. That's not the case in Vancouver, BC as we have low vacancy rate and rising rent.

Homes could be left as left empty as well, but we have multiple annual taxes, ranging from 0.5% to 3% of the total property value targeting these underutilized home, and that hasn't driven price down. In additions, these taxes essentially provide an one-time only increase in the number of homes available. They can be easily absorbed by population growth.

With the population increase in Canada, building more is the only way out.

The person with the second vacation home isn't a priority but the fund with hundreds or thousands (or 10s of thousands as is the case in the US) should be a focus.

Yes they do. This is exactly the problem. Specifically in big cities. Zoning and nimby-ism holds back building. Even Toronto which builds a lot doesn’t build enough housing units to keep up with growth. And they only build as much as they do because the province is constantly overruling the city.

Every western major city is blocking building on any meaningful scale. This leaves cities at effectively net 0 increase in supply. In major US cities, new builds are more expensive to own due to changing property taxes. And California is just a huge F U to young people by making new owners have to pay higher taxes than the old ones.

The statistics are skewed because the demand varies a lot between different regions .e.g there are towns in Italy selling houses for $1 (well sort off...) that doesn't mean that housing is affordable in Milan or other major cities. Same Applies to US, Canada, Ireland etc.

1. Asset price inflation generally

2. Population growth (incl. immigration)

3. A lack of building (housing stock is inflexible, e.g.: if we need more two beds, then no number of 1 beds or 4+ beds is sufficient, really).

4. We are changing our ways of living (see 3), that’s partly social norms and partly demographic

5. Working from home changed the market. If the economic hub of your country is priced well above the national average excl. the hub, then WFH will see prices move towards the average incl. the hub, if not higher.

I've been told that immigration isn't a driver for the housing problems in the USA though, interestingly.

The reason why we didn't see rampant consumer product inflation in the wave of irresponsible money-printing meant to soften the 2008 crisis was that the stimulus targeted at the wealthy and went into assets, such as the housing you just mentioned. However, COVID-19 stimulus checks were given to normal people, so inflation now hits normal people's daily purchases.

There are problems which feed into there not being enough building; the biggest one is definitely that property represents a major portion of Americans' investment portfolios, and thus our democratic system is filled with people (and companies) (and their representatives) who are heavily biased toward any decision that will raise property values. But its not that low building causes this; its just NIMBYism. This causes low building; it causes weird municipal rules about density; it causes expensive permitting; etc.

People also say "well, there's not enough land in the place people want to live so of course house prices are insane". Also bullshit. The "place people want to live" changes and expands all the time. Exurbs that were forests 15 years ago are now extremely hot. Why? BECAUSE WE BUILT. That's it. That's all it takes. Build housing. Build parks and sidewalks. Allow cool businesses to open.

Everyone, including and especially local governments, has made this so freakin complicated when its seriously not. Its freakin MBA prediction brain all over again. They're so afraid they don't understand the full problem, or the implications of their decision, that they refuse to act (build) and instead blame the lack of action (building) on intractably large problems like "interest rates" or "blackrock".

A parallel problem is immigration and, as the top comment pointed out, cheap credit encouraging vacancy.

But where will this end for a lot of investors (which in Canada seems like a lot of the influential population) ?

Its really just building.

I grew up in a somewhat rural part of the US, basically just farm land and forests, but a few dozen miles from a city of ~100,000 people. The amount of NIMBYist "we gotta protect the farm" "we'd never sell to some big developer (spits on the ground)" you hear day to day was extreme, to say the least.

Ten years later, that city of 100,000 people is 115,000 people, a half-dozen miles closer to the rural farming community, and they just opened a strip mall outside of town. In another ten years they'll likely have a Starbucks and a luxury apartment complex. In thirty years that small community won't really exist; it'll be called an "exurb" of a city of 250,000 people.

My point in saying this in response to your comment is: Density brings money; and money trumps everything else. It trumps NIMBYism. It trumps Good Ole American Values. It can also trump inequality, weirdly enough; because density (aka money) increases the efficiency of our land use. The issue is: We aren't building enough.

> where will this end for a lot of investors

Constant-ish property asset values relative to baseline inflation. Its really not the end of the world. There's so many places to park money in the US economic system, its weird that we're so caught up in something so real and ugly as residential real estate. Go park your money in Nvidia.

Here's my take: the government should back low interest rate and high eligibility loans specifically for the purchase of housing which has never been lived in before. There should be some provision which allows the loans to be used in the case of initial development, or redevelopment if the new development has a higher density than the previous development on that lot (e.g. the lot had 1 unit before, now it has 4 units, you're good). These loans should be made available to individuals; two per person, some reasonable market-dependent limit per loan. That's it. If the specifics are correct, a program like this would fix an extreme number of problems the US housing system has. It would create a few problems, for sure, but critically: a program like this would create liquidity in the housing system, and its far, far easier to fix problems in a liquid system versus an illiquid one.

Housing more people in a concentrated area creates more demand for services, which creates more demand for housing which jacks up prices. Packing 1,000 people into an apartment build creates extremely high demand for plumbing, house cleaning etc, services, which jack up housing prices. But if cities were low-density with commerce centers decenteralized across many neighbhorhoods or towns, you don't create location demand hotspots (e.g. cities) that jack up prices.

Property taxes and interest rates are a forcing function to keep unoccupied properties in check, as long as the appreciation doesn't dramatically exceed the risks of being a LL. For Tier 1-3 markets in the USA, you can't cash flow properties as rent is drastically lags property ownership costs.

Hong Kong has all sorts of crazy building restrictions and is a different story

Taxes, Transportation and food costs are cheap, but property is not.

Almost any other Asian city from Bangkok to Ha Noi has room to expand. In fact speaking of Bangkok buying a condo there is widely considered a bad investment because there is so much supply.

I hear Shanghai is much worse, but never lived there before.

It seems more likely that costs are higher in cities because there are valuable opportunities for skilled people who demand high salaries, simultaneously encouraging dense living to maximize access and increasing cost of living through the Baumol effect. High prices causing density, not the other way around.

I think we are starting a conversation about gentrification: Rich white-collar/coat workers move into an area creating demand for service work. There is some price competition for their service work labor, raising wages, but typically housing costs are too high for these workers, so they leave (lowering supply, pushing up wages).

So it's a feedback loop, but one which is prevented by keeping supply enough to meet demand, because then lower paid workers aren't priced out and cost of living doesn't increase.

Increasing building and increasing density are different things. Singapore and Hong Kong are dense because they have a very limited geographic area to build in. You can’t point to their density and conclude that adding housing doesn’t help lower housing costs. They would be even more expensive if they weren’t so dense.

Note that Trump's tariffs on Canadian lumber increased the cost of new construction by 20% over a period of a few months (the article mentions the cost of materials, but not the root cause, which was this tariff, and some climate disasters, like when the Texas storms took out 20% of global PVC production for a year or so). Biden has been aggressively increasing tariffs, so they are both directly to blame.

The interest rate spike and high inflation were predicted by pretty much all economists when Trump decided to needlessly keep rates low during his first term, so blaming Biden never made much sense to me

Anyway, lots of studies have been done looking for root causes for homelessness and unaffordable housing. Every theory I've heard (drugs, mental health, nice weather for tent encampments, joblessness, etc, etc) has been shot down by such studies except the idea that if you have fewer houses per capita, then you will have more homeless people and more expensive houses.

Assuming global financial stuff changed radically but we didn't build more houses, where would these people with lots of money in the bank live, exactly? Also, wouldn't that cause the price of housing to increase (increased demand, constrained supply, and inflation from the increased money supply)?

The graph you cite says the US has 0.4 houses per person. That means that, on average, we don't have enough houses for people that are single, couples without a live-in kid, or single parents.

It goes on to say that 7% of US houses are vacant, but that wouldn't make up the gap. Also, many houses in the US are vacant because there are in places where the economy has dried up, and there aren't adequate utilities, schools, groceries, etc. Even if those houses were somehow renovated, many people would still be better off financially if they chose to live on the street instead of in those places.

Being able to obtain assets, when you don't have any is a relatively new thing, historically speaking. One could also say that we were living in a brave new world of opportunities and growth for a few centuries. And now we are returning to the historical norm. One thing that all the examples you listed is that they could be seen as "late game" economies.

I might be totally wrong, though. This is just another angle.

Yes, it is. It’s everything.

It’s inflation.

It’s that none of the countries you mentioned built anything during the covid craze (word selected specifically).

It’s regulation and complexity and permitting and zoning.

It’s AirBNB.

It’s remote work.

It’s manipulated stock markets and poor returns on other investments.

It’s blackrock and VCs and MBAs.

It’s out of country investors.

It’s everything.

So why these reductionist “well, I know it isn’t X” posts are supposed to be insightful, I have no idea.

Who told you it needs to be one thing, or can be disproven as one thing?

Take Australia for example. People in NZ often say a CGT won't help because AU has one and it doesn't seem to make a difference. What they forget is that there is 50% discount on CGT there, so the relative advantage of property investment remains. Also negative gearing.

In the US I believe there are two obvious advantages given to residential property investment - 30 year fixed mortgages and tax deductions on interest payments.

I think it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to guess that all of those countries I mentioned earlier have different reasons for residential property investment being favoured relative to more productive investments.

They all do though, for various reasons.

Following this logic it would be a net positive to buy an apartment building, move everyone out, and live in it as a single family home.

You need to increase carrying costs. Land value tax is the best way but it's about as far as you can get from what's implemented anywhere

The past few decades (coinciding with the property price boom) have been all about ever decreasing interest rates. What is happening now looks a lot like a paradigm shift. I wouldn't bet on rates falling substantially anytime soon.

See my earlier comment regarding NZ. The number of homes per 1000 people changed very little between 2011 and 2022. At the same time prices went from NZD350k to NZD900k.

I think my suggestion that finance is the most significant factor here is a stronger argument than a supply shortage.

>I think my suggestion that finance is the most significant factor here is a stronger argument than a supply shortage.

You have zero evidence for this claim and cited zero sources.

>The number of homes per 1000 people changed very little between 2011 and 2022. At the same time prices went from NZD350k to NZD900k.

You cannot look at an entire country's housing/population ratio and think that explains everything. New homes in Queenstown don't reduce housing costs for people in Auckland or Christchurch. You need to look at the supply of housing in an area where it is a substitutable good: where you can switch housing without switching your job, school, friends, and life.

A new house 6 hours from me does not lower the price of housing in my neighborhood.

I don't think anyone would disagree that finance has an impact, but these are only indirect evidence.

It seems to me that increasing urbanisation and desire to live in cities could easily have pushed city prices up much faster than anything else, while less populated areas stagnate.

The number is irrelevant - people want to live in desirable areas where's there are jobs, and are constrained as such. Rebuilding high density in towns and cities is an issue, as well as maintaining decent services ( hospitals, roads, public transport, post office etc).

You say that houses are being treated as investments, that's why these crises happen; but then why are building materials and tradespeople also at sky-high prices (in Ireland)? Is it all competition on investment building?

Similar issue in NZ. Cost of building materials was getting extreme. There's an argument to be made that these are linked to profitability of building and so increased during the speculative boom. Helped along by the fact that many suppliers are monopolies. Cost of building materials has however started falling considerably since the property market crashed here. Likewise the cost of labour and building quotes overall.

In the UK, we have an issue with immigration that nobody wants to speak about. The birth rate in the UK is 1.49 in 2022 [1], meaning that housing demand should be going down. We build houses to last, and yet there is a massive shortage - why? In 2023 the ONS reported we had a net migration of 685k people [2], where 9% of the population do not have a British nationality at all.

The demand for housing in the UK (and related infrastructure) can be entirely explained by net migration. The reason the housing market is bubbling is because the demand is so insanely high. We need to build 340k houses a year to keep up with demand [3].

The fundamental issue in the UK is that we borrowed too much from the future, in terms of loans, but also pensions. They think that increasing the population dramatically will solve the problem, but it's actually destroying the UK. We are building on farmland, the infrastructure (water, gas, electric, roads, schools, etc, etc) is failing under the weight of the new housing. The interest on the debt owed [5] I believe is projected to exceed spending on the NHS (national healthcare system) by 2035.

The question we need to ask is whether large net migration is worth it, or whether we should largely reduce it. It seems clear to me that the UK is currently trying to grow too fast. It'll be a bitter pill to swallow, but at some point you need to deal with the spiralling situation.

> This is a problem of underutilisation in my view. Too many properties are being used as investments and not as a primary residence.

In NZ and many other Countries they put bans on foreign buyers exactly to stop this investment [4]. I know many, many professionals living in NZ that cannot afford to buy a home. They are all stuck renting, despite all earning in the top 25%.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/feb/23/birthrate-in...

[2] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06...

[3] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

[4] https://www.pittandmoore.co.nz/publications/foreign-buyer-ba...

[5] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50504151

That doesn't necessarily reflect a shortage, it also reflects availability of money - and therefore the market bearing higher prices. It also reflects the unevenness of the UK economy: the expensive and unaffordable housing is mostly in and around London (where ~all the economic activity is), and in the most scenic of rural areas which is retirees, second-home owners and AirBnB investors. There's plenty of the UK which has affordable housing, but it's too far from anywhere with decent jobs.

The boom in house prices began when it became the norm for educated women to have lifelong progessional careers. All of a sudden there was a huge amount more discretionary income in the educated class. If you consider that, circa 1970, perhaps 20-30% of one male earner's income went on housing and the rest on life's essentials, all of a sudden the potential amount of cash to spend on housing goes from 30% of one income to 130%, a more than 4x increase. It took a while to filter through, sure, but in the end, it has - to the point where most families are now obligated to have two full-time earners.

Housing is a positional good (think about an auction where demand of the most desirable items will always exceed supply), the prices bear almost no relation to rational economic utility and every relation to how much cost people are able to bear. Which is one reason they're so responsive to interest rates i.e. debt affordability.

A 1.49 birth rate and 685k net migration isn't a desirable situation for any country, but the other issue here is the health and productivity of our own population, we're using migrants to prop it up and provide much of the labour needed by the NHS, childcare and elderly care. Our government is massively anti-immigration, and yet immigration remains high, the country can't and won't go cold-turkey on that: it's not practical to do so without further increasing the retirement age, cutting pensions and increasing "sin taxes" to keep a greater proportion of the population healthy enough to work til 70. And that'd be even less popular, politically, than mass immigration.

The reforms the UK needs are to get the economy functioning better in the regions, and to make it much easier to build higher density housing close to where the jobs are. The current system where they can't build apartment blocks on train-station car parks because a bunch of pensioners complain that it spoils their view is massively counterproductive.

Other than very undesirable areas, the house prices are pretty bad. I have friends living nowhere near London in remote Scotland noticing the house price increase. I've seen a local property double in price after ~11 years.

> That doesn't necessarily reflect a shortage, it also reflects availability of money [..]

It's not clear who has an availability of money. I'm aware of zero people within recent years buying a home without a mortgage. Availability of money has never been worse.

> It took a while to filter through, sure, but in the end, it has - to the point where most families are now obligated to have two full-time earners.

I don't think we're seeing 4x the living standard of 1970. It also doesn't explain that we see house prices increase by more than 4x relative to wages [1].

> Housing is a positional good (think about an auction where demand of the most desirable items will always exceed supply), the prices bear almost no relation to rational economic utility and every relation to how much cost people are able to bear. Which is one reason they're so responsive to interest rates i.e. debt affordability.

It's didn't used to be like that. A house would feasibly cost between 4-10 years of one man's wage. But this would defend what I said, that demand outstrips supply. There is a saying at auctions: "it's only worth what somebody else is willing to pay for it."

> we're using migrants to prop it up and provide much of the labour needed by the NHS, childcare and elderly care.

It's not working, the NHS is failing. Where I live I cannot get an appointment any more. If I am lucky the doctor calls me and essentially prescribes anything I ask for. I recently saw a similar situation with midwifery.

I generally don't find myself convinced that migration is a net good. They typically have dependants and create massive burdens on our infrastructure and systems. We are now at the state where children are deferred from starting school because there just are no palce

> Our government is massively anti-immigration, and yet immigration remains high, the country can't and won't go cold-turkey on that: [..]

I suspect not. If I am right in saying that immigration increases demand for housing and therefore the price, it would make sense that the Conservative party would keep this in place as their largest donors are property developers [2].

> The current system where they can't build apartment blocks on train-station car parks because a bunch of pensioners complain that it spoils their view is massively counterproductive.

I don't think that is fair, the answer isn't to build on every square metre of the UK until it's gone. Besides, if they get rid of the train station car park, where will all the commuters park? (I've seen this one play out, they park everywhere else.)

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/guides/456900/456991/h...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/mar/14/who-are-the...

"Availability of money" includes the ability to apply for, and service the debt on, a mortgage.

> I don't think we're seeing 4x the living standard of 1970. It also doesn't explain that we see house prices increase by more than 4x relative to wages [1].

I don't remember 1970, but there's no particular reason we should expect to have 4x living standard.. competition for housing can eat up a much bigger slice of the overall pie, as long as people are willing to compete.

> But this would defend what I said, that demand outstrips supply. There is a saying at auctions: "it's only worth what somebody else is willing to pay for it."

100% - but if nobody CAN pay (the asking price), nobody will be willing to pay it. And that's where positional goods matter, because effectively people are jostling for a place in a ranked queue. The prices are a function of "how much money are the people in the queue able and willing to raise and deploy". And so it's natural to have situations where incomes might only go up by 50%, but house prices can rise MUCH more if interest rates are low and the bulk of that extra income is discretionary.

> It's not working, the NHS is failing. Where I live I cannot get an appointment any more. If I am lucky the doctor calls me and essentially prescribes anything I ask for. I recently saw a similar situation with midwifery.

Bad here too, but most of the staff are immigrants or of immigrant background so I find it hard to blame that on migration, it'd be a lot worse if they turned the taps off. It's more to do with our population (native Brits and 1960s/70s immigrants) being elderly, unhealthy and generally decrepit, and a health service that tries to do too much. It excels at keeping people alive, but it sucks at keeping them healthy.

> We are now at the state where children are deferred from starting school because there just are no place

Not the case here, in a high-immigration area: they're actually closing primary schools because there aren't enough kids to fill them.

> I don't think that is fair, the answer isn't to build on every square metre of the UK until it's gone. Besides, if they get rid of the train station car park, where will all the commuters park? (I've seen this one play out, they park everywhere else.)

They should walk or take the bus. I'm talking about stations that are at most a mile or so spread out and usually served by half a dozen bus routes, suburban zone 3 & 4 London. Wouldn't work further out where distances are longer.

Immigration. It's not that immigrants buy up the houses (opposites, we tend to live cramped up in flat shares). It's that they support landlords profits (with cream on top of not knowing your rights) and have overall pressure on market.

Building should at least match immigration/population growth.

Also not building dense enough. Kiwis always tout "I wouldn't wanna live in a house without a backyard" - well I don't wanna rent forever either. Given choice of no housing and shitty housing I choose shitty housing.

Somebody has to do this work: it's essential, as well as hard, unglamorous and badly paid, and societies must take their pick from:

- Family members, almost always women, who have to give up paid work.

- Paid labour from less educated parts of their existing/indigenous population.

- Migrant labour, whether temporary or permanent.

The great mistake of Brexit is that the UK has now replaced temporary migrant labour (Poles and so on, who'd mostly come here in their early/mid 20s, stay for ten/fifteen years and then go home to raise families and be closer to their elders) with permanent migrants from much poorer countries who won't want to go back if they can at all avoid it.

It's my view that this implosion will happen, just later, with less control and with more devastation.

Thing with politicians is (depending on party) something like 90-100% of them are property owners and 30-70% are also property investors [0] so I just can't see how they would be willingly taking a haircut.

(Cherry on top - most of them couldn't even afford to buy their homes now on MP salary)

0: https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2021/12/the-full-lis...

Flats tend to be horrible here. Townhouses are ok and are growing, albeit too slow and too far from public transport.

There was some news yesterday about new row of townhouses around Auckland being classified as rural and unable to receive mail (rural mailboxes must be grouped in one spot, not on each house).

I think a lot of people in the market are still holding on with a strong expectation that the interest rates will go down.

Personally, I think high interest rate environments are better for most people - it compresses asset prices and adds more value to a salary. But it will take some years for that compressions to kick in again.

You claim that these countries do not have the same system of building but they do have the same financial system. That is a large claim to make. You should try to offer at least some kind of argument for why you feel the variations in the financial systems are less significant than the variations in their systems of construction.

Yes! Yes they all do! None of them are producing housing at anywhere near the rate required.

Maybe? 2008 happened. At that point, there was a policy choice: allow a deflationary collapse, or prevent it. If we allowed it, there would be a lot of ruined businesses and ruined people. There would have been a lot of people who lost their houses. Instead, we chose to prevent the collapse, and we wound up here, where people can't afford houses. That's almost the same place, except that 1) the numbers are higher, and 2) it happened gradually rather than in a shock. That is, people didn't lose their existing houses, but new families can't buy their first homes.

So is this better or worse? My impression is that, for all the problems, it's still better than a collapse in 2008 would have been. But given the situation in 2008, some damage was inevitable. This amount of damage 16 years later is actually pretty good, considering.

Another one is the hyper-concentration of high paying jobs and other opportunities in a small number of cities.

There's always been a power law distribution for cities and opportunity with larger cities tending to win out, but since roughly 2000 it seems like it's greatly intensified. I've asked this question to many older people and have looked up some stats and both back up the sense that this has gotten significantly worse in the last 2-3 decades.

In the USA if you are not in one of maybe six cities you are second-tier, and it's much harder to find high paying and upwardly mobile jobs. The very top tier cities of SF Bay, NYC, Seattle, and LA are of course fantastically expensive.

Telework helps a bit but generally you still have to do time in one of those cities to establish yourself enough to get good high-paying telework jobs. Telework is often a senior-level thing or something you need a strong network to land.

I've been crowing on this since the 2008 crash. The cycle is this:

1. A person has a job, but can't afford things

2. They get credit to buy the things they want, in lieu of demanding better pay

3. Everyone does this, so demand goes up and prices go up

4. The value of their dollar goes down

5. Go to 1.

Consumer credit has _broken_ money. Broken it. We've seen this in housing prices and student loans, and now that we have online checkout buttons that say "you can have this for $17/mo!", we're starting to see it in stock-and-trade consumer goods even more now.

We have to -- have to -- eliminate consumer credit if we ever want to give people a fair shake at maintaining the value of their money and purchasing things. Otherwise, prices will be determined by people who are dumbest with their money.

[...]

2. They demand a better pay

3. Everyone does this, so the cost of everything goes up and prices go up.

[...]

Unless that better pay is somehow tied to higher productivity and overall GDP increase it would not solve the problem.

Not only does the pump of money increase housing purchases (it's a short against the currency), but unstable currencies also cause real estate to go up as wealth looks for safety.

Half of my city and many other cities around my country were built during the communist 70s and 80s... and then we stopped building and maybe built 5, 6 apartment buildings in the last 30 years.

Then urbanization came, centralization, everyone wants to live in a city.. but we're not building more housing.

We can look around europe.. how many apartment projects were done in the 70s and 80s, and how many are being built now.... we built whole new neighbourhoods back then, and now we have 4 people sharing a two bedroom apartment.

I think this part is what kills the anti-investment argument. If we hypothetically got rid of all the property investors we’d have only owner-occupied units. So then where do you find a vacant house when you want to move out of your folks’ place? Everyone has to find land, buy it, and build? (I won’t even get into the fact that single family homes aren’t really a sustainable use of land)

As long as there are enough vacant units investors will lower rent enough to fill them to an equilibrium. Nobody makes money on apartment buildings that are 50% empty.

Let’s not forget that low financing rates allows companies like homebuilders to build homes and subdivisions on credit that are intended to be owner-occupied. These developments are never intended to be rentals.

I think it’s a little funky that, especially in the US, nobody really had a problem with apartment buildings being apartments until landlords started owning single family homes. Now everyone has pitchforks over it and want to ban investors from owning homes - which seems kind of insane when you think about how cities with skyscrapers work. It would make condo and apartment buildings impossible. There’s nothing different about a single family home compared to an apartment besides form factor.

The thing that all those countries have in common is low supply in the tradespeople. Those are all countries where you’re better off learning to do a desk job rather than working for a construction company. In addition, a bunch of home builders went bust in 2008 in the United States.

In the case of Canada and the US they also have some horrible bad habits when it comes to city planning. Single family home building causes the growth Ponzi scheme raising the cost of city services per capita and pushes affordable housing crazy far from the city center and strains single occupant car highway infrastructure. You’ve got to own one car per person in the US in Canada in addition to your mortgage. Then load up student loans on top of that.

But yeah, the root of the problem is because governments are subsidizing housing/costs, and the problem with subsidies, is that the money for them has to come from somewhere, meaning they come with a burden (ie cost) placed elsewhere.

In the US this is primarily done via the government backing mortgage debt. It creates a vicious circle where homeowners raise their prices, the Fed ensures the funds for the mortgages, and the buyer is on the hook for paying it.

This is also why college prices are high. The government offers student loans to help people afford college, but colleges see this and raise their prices to capture that additional funding, and the student ends up on the hook for paying the price. Rinse and repeat...

Why would the law of supply and demand fall apart under captive/uncompetitive markets? A captive or uncompetitive market may impact the quantity of a good or service available and/or the quantity of a good or service willing to be purchased at a given point in time, but that doesn't change the law.

> Many also assume trade volume is necessarily representative of a supply shortage, when that isn't always the case, as "supply" and "supply for sale" are two different things.

Huh? Supply is characterized by being "for sale". Of course, a shortage occurs when price is prevented from rising. Housing certainly doesn't have that problem. The so-called "housing shortage" is really an issue of latent demand – people desire homeownership but can't afford it.

For the law to hold perfectly and describe prices, everyone in the market (both buyers and sellers) must be a "price taker". That is, the amount anyone supplies(sells)/demands(buys) is entirely a function of the going market price of whats being traded, and no one believes they will influence prices. (If anyone isn't a "price taker", then supply/demand of the good being traded are no longer the only variables in the function of price). So, typically under competitive market conditions (that is there are many buyers/sellers), as prices rise demand from buyers will drop and selling increases from sellers, whereas the opposite happens when prices fall.

However, in captive markets such as one consisting of a monopoly seller, the seller can test demand to find the most profitable price for them specifically. At which point the seller is no longer operating as a "price taker", as they will reduce selling as prices rise to find that optimal price point for themselves (as they have input costs which have their own price curves that buyers don't know or care about). Remember, a "price taker" cannot influence the price, but must take or leave it depending on price. Thus price is no longer determined purely by the market supply/demand of the good, but also profit margin of the monopolist.

> Huh? Supply is characterized by being "for sale".

It often is, and there is nothing wrong with it being defined that way. But the idea which is being expressed here is what is important. For hyperbole, if I hoarded all of the worlds water, but only listed 2 liters of it for sale (much less than the population needs), would that indicate the world has a water shortage? One would argue yes, if you defined supply as "for sale", but no if differentiated in the way I did.

In fact, the price is "purely determined" by supply/demand in the scenario you gave. The monopolist is using their monopoly position to create artificial scarcity, thus driving up prices. This is consistent with the law of supply and demand.

> would that indicate the world has a water shortage?

Impossible to say without more information. What is happening around the 2L for sale? Are you rejecting the highest offer (i.e. preventing price from rising), instead selecting who gets it using some non-priced-based mechanism, such as a lottery or first-come, first-served? If yes, then that indicates that there is a shortage. If it is sold to the highest bidder, then no, there would clearly not be a shortage. That is a "normally functioning" market.

Once the water is all used up and there is no remaining water supply, where no amount of money can buy more (i.e. preventing from rising), then perhaps you might say that there is a shortage. However, in the real world, absent of some other factor (e.g. price gouging laws), price will keep rising until you are compelled to make more of that water available, so that still wouldn't be a shortage situation.

I don't know about the others, but we're building about 50% of what we need for Australia's population growth. Neo-liberalism has resulted in decades of de-funding of public education, which trains tradespeople, and now we have a shortage of tradespeople. And we're getting another tax cut in a few weeks so I guess that problem, plus all the others with same cause, is just going to get worse.

Prior to covid, the global economy was booming. US and UK had low unemployment rates. the US especially was remarkably doing well, with lowest unemployment rate for minority communities.

There is a price to pay for completely disregarding long-term economic costs of reckless responses to a what was a moderately severe flu epidemic. We went nuts and shut ourselves down. And on top of that, we helicopter dropped 4-6 trillion dollars of freshly printed cash.

And the reckless governance continues in the name of flaming conflicts in Europe and ME. A lot of what happened in the recent years is attributable to just atrocious governance.

I've believed for a long time that heavily taxing income from second+ properties, similar to capital gains, would help reduce rent-seeker hoarding, to help free up and reduce the cost of properties for primary-residence owners.

Personally, I think LVT would be the best approach.

Vacation homes are in beautiful tourist areas. That can be a problem for local workers but I doubt this is much of a problem for most markets.

These sorts of suggestions generally seem hugely biased towards buyers at the expense of everyone else.

Yes, the investor makes less, but the expected result is less supply so rents are higher, not the same supply but with strictly lower rents.

Higherand higher marginal property taxes for owners of non primary residences disincentivizes owning secondary residences, hence disincentivizes renting, hence decreasing supply of buyers wanting to buy homes.

There will still be first time buyers or people moving, so builders should still have incentivize to build homes, hence supply should not cease to come online just because there are fewer landlords.

The reason "not building" is not the issue, is because even brand new homes are being scooped up in investments.

Raise property taxes for all non-occupied, airbnbs, and fuck even rentals, and while it might cause rentals to temporarily go up, housing prices will drop like a brick. Make it unreasonable to rent out a home. Heck make it unreasonable to own a second home unless you're Bill Gates.

The only way I see out of this mess is to ban ownership of SFH by anyone other than…single families as primary owners. Corporations, foreign owners, secondary homes, etc.

But we need to address other issues too: zoning (make Houston’s approach nationwide) and construction costs.

Maybe a home owners break, and a second weaker first rental/vacation home break would match the current approach (and dodge more of the individuals who'd kill the legislation for for your idea. Alternately, a discount for occupied properties.

I was initially thinking corporate owned rentals or anyone with more than 2 properties, but the above seems cleaner.

A few high profile jury nullifications would probably be sufficient, but we gotta be the rational economic agents that the theories think we are and work together on this.

The entire framing of the issue as a false NIMBY/YIMBY dichotomy is a distraction from the reality that there is not and has never been a supply issue. The only issue is artificial demand from speculators who choose to withhold and deny a basic human right in the hope that it might magically raise in value for no reason instead of depreciate like every other asset.

Are you suggesting we deport homeless people from cities with low vacancy rates, to cities with high vacancy rates?

> There is absolutely no barrier to housing every single human being beyond greed.

I suspect your answer to the question above will reveal a barrier.

Homelessness is the most visible sign of a much larger systemic problem. For example, it's quite likely that many homes today are overcrowded, and people don't have as much space to live as they desire. This is bad! Not as bad as homelessness, but depending on the specifics still quite bad. The good news is that building vertically permits more private space per person, so we don't just have to accept things getting worse.

Nobody is going to want homeless people living in it in the meantime.

Houses are also "empty" while they are undergoing renovation.

A thought: Disincentivize having them for sale for too long, tax a % of the listing price every year it's on the market. That way gougers get penalized for crazy asking prices and there's some additional negative price pressure.

Most houses are listed publicly, require it for all of them. Transparency issue solved.

> Or worse people would just hang onto properties and not sell them at all, biasing towards turning houses into rentals.

This is done already? Still an improvement over leaving them empty indefinitley.

How will you do that. Remember: "I wasn't planning to sell my old house at all, but when I got this offer out of the blue I decided to take it".

I'd argue it's not expensive enough since it's frequently done.

EDIT: This has already become a common issue in locations like NYC, big money parked into properties with many commercial and residential units vacant. Better to pass those fees and borrow against artificially inflated value than it is to realize a loss.

EDIT2: I typo'd and meant to say 'pay', not pass those fees. (as a cost of doing business)

Commenting on Walter's comment below:

> I've sold houses before. I hated every day it was sitting there sucking up money.

I understand, my problems are with institutional/large wealth artificially constraining supply.

> As for artificially inflated values, bank lenders are not stupid and are not going to loan against a phony value.

Do correct me if I'm wrong but is it really their problem if they can sell that risk or the gov bails the whole sector out when there's a panic?

> Better to pass those fees

to whom?

> and borrow against artifically inflated value than it is to realize a loss.

Borrowing does nothing to stop one from losing money.

As for artificially inflated values, bank lenders are not stupid and are not going to loan against a phony value.

And with not for profit housing, rent is much cheaper and gives a much greater opportunity to eventually no longer need to rent.

What about people living in an area temporarily? People who just moved?

Honestly, these ideas come across as you personally being ready to buy but wanting a lower price rather than wanting a more sustainable housing market.

To counter this may be impossible; there are limits to how small you can build a SFH, and there is only so much land commuting distance from job centers.

Condos and apartments are generally a very bad investment, have huge disadvantages of high fees and lack of green space, so are a poor substitute. It’s sometimes better than renting, but it can swing wildly based on build quality of building, the maintenance, and competence of the board — very hard to evaluate or hedge against versus a SFH where you have autonomy. And in the US we rarely build family focused condos — so few have playrooms or playgrounds or 3 bed room units (outside NYC)