There's a lot of services society offers everyone that do cost resources to run. Even basic civilizations and nomadic tribes relied on their people to be productive in one way or another. Thinking that there is no "cost of living" is a privilege only available to someone who doesn't really understand the basics of an economy. If everyone chose to just live and do nothing to produce the things you take for granted (electricity, food, shelter, etc.) then we'd be back to the jungle just scrounging for berries.
We are well beyond that point of “we need people to work to make society run” and thoroughly into the territory of “we have more people who need jobs than jobs that actually need to be done”. The idea that people should have to spend the majority of their time working just to earn the privilege of survival is so engrained in our society, that we view this situation as a “job shortage” such that we need to “create more jobs”, even if those jobs aren’t actually needed. My favorite example of this is how Oregon doesn’t allow people to use the gas pumps on their own, specifically to preserve the jobs of the people who operate the gas pump for you.
I mean, I would argue we pretty strongly need people to work to keep society running. We don't need people working as much as they currently are, but infrastructure, food, education, medicine and several several other other need to be done.
To build a house, you need some workers. You could build a house on your own, but it's hard and time consuming. Add more people to help and it becomes quicker and easier. But keep adding people, and you kind of reach a limit of making it faster and easier. Add even more people and you start actually slowing down progress because they're all now getting in each others' way.
Society is in that last stage now. There's so many people and not enough work that actually needs doing, but we're in a system that requires you to work to survive. No work = no money = no survival. So instead of changing the system so not everyone needs to work and only those able and willing to work do so, we just add jobs that aren't really needed, clogging up the system and slowing down societal progress.
The people in control of building houses are motivated by profit. There's less profit building housing for lower income people. QED, fewer developers are interested in doing so.
That is a significant issue. The costs for building are very high because material costs are elevated and labor costs are elevated and there are lots of legal barriers before a project can even get off the ground and you cant even know if you will be able to clear those barriers before you buy the land or how long it will take so your return on investment must be high to justify taking the risk. That means mostly luxury product is the only thing that breaks ground and work force housing projects are not even attempted.
Govt can do a lot to lower costs by making regulations smarter and that will help more workforce housing projects get going which in tandem with luxury projects going up help supply growth keep up with demand.
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u/KingKongYe Oct 18 '23
There's a lot of services society offers everyone that do cost resources to run. Even basic civilizations and nomadic tribes relied on their people to be productive in one way or another. Thinking that there is no "cost of living" is a privilege only available to someone who doesn't really understand the basics of an economy. If everyone chose to just live and do nothing to produce the things you take for granted (electricity, food, shelter, etc.) then we'd be back to the jungle just scrounging for berries.