> House prices are going up because there aren't enough of them. It's an interesting premise, I'd love to see more data on this. It's a very common claim but a

> House prices are going up because there aren't enough of them. It's an interesting premise, I'd love to see more data on this. It's a very common claim but at least on a macro level there's a lot of indicators that would make me assume otherwise. Typically if there isn't enough, you'd expect that the general trend has been that the availability per person is decreasing over time. Availability can be measured in a few ways: - Number of persons per home - Number of square feet per home Ceteris paribus, if either are going respectively down and up, you'd see increasing availability and would assume decreasing scarcity. The number of persons per home has been decreasing for 150 years, and dropped from 3.4 to 2.5 (-30%) in the past 60 years. The number of square feet per home has more than doubled in that time. In other words, we have 30% fewer people and 100% more space. The square foot per person has increased by 270% in the past 60 years. Of course you can still not have enough if demand has grown much faster. But instead I think there's good indications (and plenty of studies) that price increases are mostly being driven by low interest rates and a culture around seeing homes as a speculative asset instead of just a home that happens to have some of your capital locked up in it. [0] https://fee.org/media/15199/housing1.png?width=600&height=386.0517435320585 https://fee.org/media/15199/housing1.png?width=600&height=38...