> The reasons we don’t have enough homes is because governments have made it illegal to build enough new homes to meet demand. > You are essentially say that t

> The reasons we don’t have enough homes is because governments have made it illegal to build enough new homes to meet demand. > You are essentially say that the presence of car collectors leads to car shortages. The price of a old car, a new car, a cheap car, and an expensive luxuary car, all vary greatly. Cars are more or less open for purchase by everyone. Houses a fixed in a location, you cannot pick it up and move it. Let's look at each point. 1) If a house in a street costs $200,000. And you have a ton of money and go online and find the house and for you it doesn't even tickle your bank account. But you want to get some money out of your own country and into another country as a safty net or investment. Or maybe you move to said country and your buying power is much greater than the locals. "Oh, its ONLY 200k? Heres cash" The house next door is like "huh, the market value of this street is 170k and he sold his house for 200k? I'm gonna list mine for 220k" "Oh, it's ONLY 220k? Heres cash" The house next door is like "huh, the market value of this street is 170k and he sold his house for 220k? I'm gonna list mine for 300k" "Oh, it's ONLY 300k? Heres cash" Mean while the locals are like "oh I only needed a 20k deposit, now I need 30, 40... 100... 200k deposit" Locals are getting priced out of their own country. This happened in NZ and Australia. 2) This I don't know how you can dispute. It's a fact that 100 years ago, houses were an asset, not an investment. Why do people need to own more than 2 houses? There are people who own, 5, 10, 30, and even more. There are businsses setup around buying property to rent it out. What has happened is people got into the market early, with houses that cost 100k, 200k, maybe even close to 1 million dollars. And each time they buy and remortgage the house to leverage buying another property, to rent it out, use that to pay the mortgage payments, which in alot of cases rent is MORE than the mortgage. Yet the people PAYING Rent are not in a position to get a loan to buy the same house. You often here "oh just buy a house, because renting you're paying someone elses mortgage". How to you do that when you cannot get a loan to buy the same house? How is it fair? 3) Housing Shortage. 100 years ago, people would buy property, and pay a builder to build a house on it. At some point this more or less got flipped and its builders and property developers who buy property, build a house, then sell it. You do not need governments to build houses to solve the problem. People are simply priced out of being able to build houses. It's MUCH harder to buy an empty lot, and get a loan from a bank to build a house on that lot now. Can governments assist with housing shortages, ABSOLUTELY. But you cannot simply blame the government on the housing shortage aspect because they aren't building enough. There are much bigger issues causing the problem.