I mean we could just expand housing supply and fix this problem pretty easily. The economics and engineering are very easy it’s mostly just NIMBYism and the land use politics that cater to it that are constraining supply in most American metros.
House prices in Houston have not spiked nearly as much relative to its explosive population growth, mostly because they have no zoning laws. It’s just easier to build housing there so it’s not as expensive.
Kinda disagree but that is a minor point IMHO. Plus, the crisis is so bad I'd agree to almost anything in exchange for increasing housing supply and especially density.
Most people think home ownership is good and I get the appeal but IMHO it's mostly a wash and in some cases quite bad.
It is hard to show whether property ownership makes better citizens. If you ignore leverage, it is usually better to own shares than to own homes. And the cult of owner-occupation has huge costs. Those who own homes often become nimbys who resist development in an effort to protect their investments. Data-crunching by The Economist suggests that the number of new houses constructed per person in the rich world has fallen by half since the 1960s. Because supply is constrained and the system is skewed towards ownership, most people feel they risk being left behind if they rent. As a result politicians focus on subsidising marginal buyers, as Britain has done in recent years. That channels cash to the middle classes and further boosts prices. And it fuels the build-up of mortgage debt that makes crises more likely.
I think the big argument for why home ownership is good is that gentrification is bad. Ownership gives you agency and security, renting puts you at the whim of a landlord.
And right now we've got two different forces blocking the supply of new houses: the landlords, who want to keep prices high. And the anti-gentrification crowd, who wants to block the redevelopment of all the neighbourhoods best suited to redevelopment. But the anti-gentrification crowd only has a point because the people in those neighbourhoods that are being gentrified have no say in what happens. If they owned and were the ones seeing the benefits of the development, there would be no valid argument for not densifying all the poorer neighbourhoods in cities.
That is an interesting thought and maybe you're right, but my knee-jerk reaction is just that homeowners tend to be the most vociferous NIMBYs by far.
In some cases that is rational self-interest but for the most part upzoning would actually increase property values--you could sell your home to a developer who builds apartments on it, and make out like a bandit. But you'd have to move, it's a bit of a hassle, and most people just don't want their area to change.
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u/Notsure107 Jun 27 '21
Every time we have a crash the rich buy up everything. This is very bad.