Perhaps the problem with the availability of housing is the "real estate development" model you describe, which is capital intensive and therefore will be undertaken by large corporations instead of by the people who will actually live in the area and who therefore have a personal stake in how livable it is. Perhaps if more development was done by "young people just moving there", we would have more livable areas and less competition for housing.
Articles like this confuse me. It doesn't seem like we have a shortage of actual housing, instead, we have a shortage of housing in places where people are willing to live. Perhaps a solution to this "shortage" is to build the community and economics of the area so that people will be willing to live in those areas.
The alternative would seem to need some type of housing regulation such as rent stabilization, or reducing a landlords control of their property.
The problem is that it's a location supply problem, rather than a housing supply problem. People all want to live in the same locations, that are already full of houses.
And the inadequate amount of housing availability is because of government regulation as well. If they would allow more building this would be less of an issue.
Housing shortage, at least in the US, isn’t really a problem of capital availability. It’s mostly due to local zoning regulations that make it very difficult to actually create housing, regardless of capital availability.
This problem is vastly overstated. The real issue is that there simply aren't enough homes being built for all the people who want to live in desirable cities
There is plenty of housing for plenty of people in most parts of North America. The 'problem' is that what people _want_ is cheap housing in urban centers, a.k.a cool spots. Because that doesn't exist, we claim to have a housing shortage.
"Not enough is legal, and not enough is built as a result."
It's a preferences and distribution problem. There are plenty of places with vacancies or where it is legal and practical to build. The problem is people don't want to live there or it has too few jobs. If the market works the way it should, then people should shift out of the tighter areas and into the looser areas, reaching something closer to an equilibrium. The problem is many of the companies that had easy money and extreme growth concentrated it one region and skewed the market. Most of the US does not have a housing issue as nationally housing units exceed "households". We could accommodate everyone, but it's largely a distribution and preferences issue.
And yet we get constantly told that there’s no space for homes and that it’s too expensive to live anywhere. There are plenty of opportunities out there but when everyone wants to live in only the most desirable areas it creates local shortages.
This is precisely the problem. There is too many people, not enough housing, and the housing that is here is too expensive. And from what I've heard its also very hard to get the permits and approvals to build knew housing here. What they really need is to flood the market with housing to help drive costs down.
I won’t argue with you on the developing underclass, but the numbers have shown for a while now that there is a very real housing shortage. Part of the problem here is that we’re not building to keep pace with the population.
I don't think there is any scarcity to housing, there is only a scarcity of housing where people want to live; safe, clean, hip walkable areas. There is an abundance of housing, just not wear people want to live. The irony of that is that if people did buy these homes, they would create over time the kinds of communities they can't afford to buy into.
The issue is 100% that we make it very hard to build in the areas that have highest demand.
It is not short-term rentals, it is not individuals owning too many houses, it is not rich people moving in to a neighborhood, it is not Chinese money fleeing the PRC, and it is not private equity "commodifying" housing.
It is that we suppress the construction of housing through to byzantine permitting, incredibly harsh zoning, vetocracy, and overburdening regulation.
This shortage is at the core of so many of our woes, homelessness being the most visible, but it really underscores _the entire economy_.
The housing we have is in parts of the country with few economic prospects, such that people would rather be rent-burdened than continue living in them. There is not nearly enough walkable, transit-connected housing in major urban centers, because it’s usually illegal to build, and that’s what’s in short supply.
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