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This article strongly covers a major SYMPTOM of the problem. https://www.buzzfeed.com/suzystrutner/how-much-you-need-for-rent-7546114 https://www.buzzfeed.com/

This article strongly covers a major SYMPTOM of the problem. https://www.buzzfeed.com/suzystrutner/how-much-you-need-for-rent-7546114 https://www.buzzfeed.com/suzystrutner/how-much-you-need-for-... Housing / land valuation is wildly off from the needs of the people. For more than literally my entire life there has been a chronic shortage of housing, with less built than is necessary for multiple decades of time. The issue has compounded. We are at the point where the solution is to literally build housing non-stop and just do that for years. Edit: The buzzfeed article mentions National Low Income Housing Coalition as the source of it's infographic. Here are some additional links. https://nlihc.org/oor/report-graphics https://nlihc.org/oor/report-graphics One bedroom home in hours worked by county: https://nlihc.org/sites/default/files/oor/2023/2023OOR-ppt-fmr-map.jpg https://nlihc.org/sites/default/files/oor/2023/2023OOR-ppt-f... Two bedroom rental in dollars per hour: https://nlihc.org/sites/default/files/oor/2023/2023OOR-ppt-fig1.jpg https://nlihc.org/sites/default/files/oor/2023/2023OOR-ppt-f...

pauldenton 3y ago
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population The massive growth of the global population is hard for people to grasp, but is a big part of the cost of housing. Even if we've built billions of new homes in the last century that isn't enough to compensate the bigger still population increase.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- cheriot 3y ago
  The limiting factor in population is the ability to construct housing? Growth in the developed countries with housing shortages keeps getting revised down.
- DrReachAround 3y ago
  Since 1968, 77 million housing units have been completed in the US. At 2.5 people per household, that's enough for 190 million people. The US population has increased 133 million over that time. We have plenty of housing.
  - PawgerZ 3y ago
    Just looking at new housing units is only half of the story. I can't and won't speculate on how many homes were torn down during the time it took to build 77 million housing units, but it had to be a significant number. If two single-family houses were torn down to make room for one new-build, single-family house, then it is a loss of housing. Not to mention natural disasters, condemned housing, rural housing being torn down for farmland, urban housing being torn down for new highways. I do wonder how many houses were destroyed in that same timeframe.
cma 3y ago
>with less built than is necessary for multiple decades of time. I thought there was more housing sqft per capita in the US than just about anywhere else? If so it seems more like a distribution problem.
- verdverm 3y ago
  Absolute footage is the wrong metric of the average per household is also larger. You want to look at the number of units. One thing that can happen is a single family home split into multiple units
  - cma 3y ago
    I believe the US is near the top in second homes per capita as well, and near at the top in owning additional homes on wheels (RVs).
    - verdverm 3y ago
      I'd believe that, there's also a trend towards Airbnb over long-term rentals adding to the problems
- KittenInABox 3y ago
  The US contains also huge mcmansion-style houses that are actually only classified to hold a single family. I think if you speculated more for the average person, housing is less and less available to them all the time... Although the above poster attributes it to a lack of housing, the actual cause of housing shortage is likely far more complicated. The crash in real estate in 2008 froze construction for over a decade arguably, and also, real estate is considered a commodity/investment as opposed to something like a car. So people plan their financial futures assuming their assets will go up in value, ignoring that this means their assets will by necessity price out their own economic band.
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    Sweet spot is houses go up by wage inflation. Paying the mortgage off being a big source of the benefit.
hammock 3y ago
>Housing / land valuation is wildly off from the needs of the people. For more than literally my entire life there has been a chronic shortage of housing If there is a housing shortage then the unaffordability is reflective of proper valuation. If people need more housing than they are getting, a free market would indicate valuations to go higher. I would suspect that you’d like to see housing revalued lower, though
- cheriot 3y ago
  > a free market Housing supply is not a free market. At least in the US, there's a committee reviewing each parcel deciding how many sqft of interior space, how many kitchens, how tall, and what uses.
  - smcg 3y ago
    Exactly. Multifamily housing is banned in most parts of the US (by area).
- Moldoteck 3y ago
  1 - market is not free, 2 - some regions have zones, prohibiting building medium to high density buildings, 3 - building materials got more expensive, 4- labor too
ramraj07 3y ago
I came to the same conclusion from another place: the nth time seeing news about some block finding it cheaper to live in a cruise ship than in a retirement home anywhere in the US. This is only possible if all land value is inherently overinflated beyond measure that a floating coal burning ship all expenses paid is cheaper than a retirement home that should have 5x less overhead.
- zelon88 3y ago
  This is because the American home buyer isn't competing with other American home buyers anymore. They're competing with VCs trying to build developments and companies trying to turn a profit. Gone are the days of the "Fixer Upper" that Tim Taylor would buy, drop a reasonable amount in repairs, preform the repairs themselves, and then turn a modest profit. Everyone who buys a house today wants the value to go up. Nobody who can afford a house needs one. They are not commodities that you utilize and repair. They are now investments, vehicles to grow your money. That's great for all the snobbish out of touch retirees. But the middle class needs somewhere to hang their hat so they can rest up and make it to work tomorrow.
  - zeroCalories 3y ago
    This fundamentally misses the problem. Investors are only able to speculate because there is a shortage of housing. They are betting that in the future even more people will want that housing, and they are probably right. The only real solution is to crash the housing market by building more houses in places that people want them. Banning speculation won't solve the problem, and it might actually make the problem worse because we will have even less development that people need. We need to heavily update construction regulations to be more sensible like Tokyo, and we probably need massive amount of direct and indirect public housing investments.
    - zelon88 3y ago
      I would argue we need to put limitations on what entities can purchase residential property. There is no reason a corp needs to own a 2 bedroom house. It is manipulating a critical market and destabilizing everything. Push them out of the market. They should have have no skin in this game. You want to increase the supply. I want to tank the demand. Your method won't work because if regular people could afford to compete, they would be already. The players in the market manipulated the prices once to give themselves an advantage. You're just giving them an opportunity to do it again. Only now they have the market cap to do it right. The price will come down when the demand shifts from mcmansions to regular, affordable housing. It will be funny to see all those $1m+houses sit on the market as the correction unfolds. Nobody asked for them in most places. They were added by developers seeking to gentrify small towns like Rowley MA. And taxes will come down too because towns will have no choice but to tax property owners more reasonably.
DrReachAround 3y ago
This is absolutely false. Since 1968, 77 million housing units have been been built in the US. Assuming 2.5 people per household, today's average, that's enough for 190 million people. US population has increase 133 million since 1968. We have plenty of housing. It may just not be where you want to live and the type of housing want at the price you want. But no one is guaranteed any of those and shouldn't be. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1aeIa https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1aeIa If you want to understand the housing price problem, look no further than the irresponsible monetary policies of the last 20 years. Simply looking at median house prices to median household income we can clearly see the impacts to housing prices from the stimulus following the dotcom bust, the stimulus following the housing bust, and the stimulus from the pandemic. Hint, they're the big upward slopes. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1adYW https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1adYW Take away the irresponsible and unnecessary stimulus and you have a reasonable housing market at 4x income, not 6x.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  New builds never recovered from 08.
- userinanother 3y ago
  But where were they built. Often there is a mismatch between where you need housing and where you get it
PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
move. I live in "flyover country" and we don't have those problems here.

pauldenton 3y ago

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population The massive growth of the global population is hard for people to grasp, but is a big part of the cost of housing. Even if we've built billions of new homes in the last century that isn't enough to compensate the bigger still population increase.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
cheriot 3y ago
The limiting factor in population is the ability to construct housing? Growth in the developed countries with housing shortages keeps getting revised down.
DrReachAround 3y ago
Since 1968, 77 million housing units have been completed in the US. At 2.5 people per household, that's enough for 190 million people. The US population has increased 133 million over that time. We have plenty of housing.
- PawgerZ 3y ago
  Just looking at new housing units is only half of the story. I can't and won't speculate on how many homes were torn down during the time it took to build 77 million housing units, but it had to be a significant number. If two single-family houses were torn down to make room for one new-build, single-family house, then it is a loss of housing. Not to mention natural disasters, condemned housing, rural housing being torn down for farmland, urban housing being torn down for new highways. I do wonder how many houses were destroyed in that same timeframe.

cma 3y ago

>with less built than is necessary for multiple decades of time. I thought there was more housing sqft per capita in the US than just about anywhere else? If so it seems more like a distribution problem.

verdverm 3y ago
Absolute footage is the wrong metric of the average per household is also larger. You want to look at the number of units. One thing that can happen is a single family home split into multiple units
- cma 3y ago
  I believe the US is near the top in second homes per capita as well, and near at the top in owning additional homes on wheels (RVs).
  - verdverm 3y ago
    I'd believe that, there's also a trend towards Airbnb over long-term rentals adding to the problems
KittenInABox 3y ago
The US contains also huge mcmansion-style houses that are actually only classified to hold a single family. I think if you speculated more for the average person, housing is less and less available to them all the time... Although the above poster attributes it to a lack of housing, the actual cause of housing shortage is likely far more complicated. The crash in real estate in 2008 froze construction for over a decade arguably, and also, real estate is considered a commodity/investment as opposed to something like a car. So people plan their financial futures assuming their assets will go up in value, ignoring that this means their assets will by necessity price out their own economic band.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Sweet spot is houses go up by wage inflation. Paying the mortgage off being a big source of the benefit.

hammock 3y ago

>Housing / land valuation is wildly off from the needs of the people. For more than literally my entire life there has been a chronic shortage of housing If there is a housing shortage then the unaffordability is reflective of proper valuation. If people need more housing than they are getting, a free market would indicate valuations to go higher. I would suspect that you’d like to see housing revalued lower, though

cheriot 3y ago
> a free market Housing supply is not a free market. At least in the US, there's a committee reviewing each parcel deciding how many sqft of interior space, how many kitchens, how tall, and what uses.
- smcg 3y ago
  Exactly. Multifamily housing is banned in most parts of the US (by area).
Moldoteck 3y ago
1 - market is not free, 2 - some regions have zones, prohibiting building medium to high density buildings, 3 - building materials got more expensive, 4- labor too

ramraj07 3y ago

I came to the same conclusion from another place: the nth time seeing news about some block finding it cheaper to live in a cruise ship than in a retirement home anywhere in the US. This is only possible if all land value is inherently overinflated beyond measure that a floating coal burning ship all expenses paid is cheaper than a retirement home that should have 5x less overhead.

zelon88 3y ago
This is because the American home buyer isn't competing with other American home buyers anymore. They're competing with VCs trying to build developments and companies trying to turn a profit. Gone are the days of the "Fixer Upper" that Tim Taylor would buy, drop a reasonable amount in repairs, preform the repairs themselves, and then turn a modest profit. Everyone who buys a house today wants the value to go up. Nobody who can afford a house needs one. They are not commodities that you utilize and repair. They are now investments, vehicles to grow your money. That's great for all the snobbish out of touch retirees. But the middle class needs somewhere to hang their hat so they can rest up and make it to work tomorrow.
- zeroCalories 3y ago
  This fundamentally misses the problem. Investors are only able to speculate because there is a shortage of housing. They are betting that in the future even more people will want that housing, and they are probably right. The only real solution is to crash the housing market by building more houses in places that people want them. Banning speculation won't solve the problem, and it might actually make the problem worse because we will have even less development that people need. We need to heavily update construction regulations to be more sensible like Tokyo, and we probably need massive amount of direct and indirect public housing investments.
  - zelon88 3y ago
    I would argue we need to put limitations on what entities can purchase residential property. There is no reason a corp needs to own a 2 bedroom house. It is manipulating a critical market and destabilizing everything. Push them out of the market. They should have have no skin in this game. You want to increase the supply. I want to tank the demand. Your method won't work because if regular people could afford to compete, they would be already. The players in the market manipulated the prices once to give themselves an advantage. You're just giving them an opportunity to do it again. Only now they have the market cap to do it right. The price will come down when the demand shifts from mcmansions to regular, affordable housing. It will be funny to see all those $1m+houses sit on the market as the correction unfolds. Nobody asked for them in most places. They were added by developers seeking to gentrify small towns like Rowley MA. And taxes will come down too because towns will have no choice but to tax property owners more reasonably.

DrReachAround 3y ago

This is absolutely false. Since 1968, 77 million housing units have been been built in the US. Assuming 2.5 people per household, today's average, that's enough for 190 million people. US population has increase 133 million since 1968. We have plenty of housing. It may just not be where you want to live and the type of housing want at the price you want. But no one is guaranteed any of those and shouldn't be. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1aeIa https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1aeIa If you want to understand the housing price problem, look no further than the irresponsible monetary policies of the last 20 years. Simply looking at median house prices to median household income we can clearly see the impacts to housing prices from the stimulus following the dotcom bust, the stimulus following the housing bust, and the stimulus from the pandemic. Hint, they're the big upward slopes. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1adYW https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1adYW Take away the irresponsible and unnecessary stimulus and you have a reasonable housing market at 4x income, not 6x.

HDThoreaun 3y ago
New builds never recovered from 08.
userinanother 3y ago
But where were they built. Often there is a mismatch between where you need housing and where you get it

PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago

move. I live in "flyover country" and we don't have those problems here.