We also have a pretty high number of unoccupied dwellings that are left empty, since some investors see the bother of renting them out as not worth the money, since they’ll make so much when they sell that it doesn’t matter!
1. https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/is-population-growth-...
Build, and keep building until it is cheap. Also, you would need to consider the specific places.
It very much looks like the "just build" model is insufficient to explain what's happened in that case.
Anyway they got into the housing market because the margins are so good because everybody refuses to allow new housing to be built. Congratulations, you played yourselves.
There's plausible argument as to network effects (e.g. my neighbor is charging that much, so why can't I?), as well as changing unit types to rentals, limiting owner-occupied supply and hence driving up prices.
I mean, I imagine it can be kind of similar in the stock market, where that you don't actually need to buy all a company's shares in existence to bid up a stock's price... you only need to buy enough of the available float to raise prices (sometimes which can be <0.5% of shares in existence).
Owners played non-owners
The only cure to investors buying housing is to build enough housing to keep it from being a good investment.
In other countries with lax address registration laws like Poland, real estate can be the only investment vehicle without capital gains tax. Yes, if you sell real estate in Poland after 5 years you pay zero capital gains tax and anyone can buy (please invest and make that mofo pop). Opposite to every other investment vehicle from bonds to shares to even currencies where the capital gains tax exists.
It's just pure rectified human greed.
Relaxed zoning requirements for SFH and MFH buildings, relaxed or eliminated height restrictions for high rise density projects in urban areas, eliminating rent control, and a laundry list of other things would help alleviate the upward pressure.
I grew up with 6 family members in a 3/2 house that was 1250sqft. Houses today start at 2000+ square feet in the USA. We DON'T need that. On top of that, there is very limited stock of homes for people who no longer have kids.
Every type of manufacturing in the US has gone toward lower throughput, higher price. Luxury apartments, 2500 square foot houses with no yard, $50k for a car. And it is because we are all comparing ourselves to each other and wanting to appear like we can afford this lifestyle, and its finally breaking. But it was allowed to go this way, because it was working. Pricing out the bottom 25% didn't negatively affect the profitability of the companies making these items, in fact, it made them more profit.
Homes skew larger and more expensive precisely because it's so hard to build them so developers need to make more money from each one. The fixed costs per unit are too high, so the ones that need to be lowered or eliminated should be. That will incentive building more units not just more expensive units. You'd see a lot more 1200sqft new builds if it was more economically viable and developers could make a profit on a $125k home instead of needing $400k.
No. No no no! It's because capitalism rations by price and weights by wealth. Once inequality cooks up enough the whims of the wealthy outweigh the needs of the poor.
It is not the strength of those whims that squishes the poor, it is the strength of those whims multiplied by relative wealth that squishes the poor. The whims did not grow out of control. The multiplier did. Extreme inequality is the problem.
And then ask the next "why".
And I don't just mean in this thread, I mean ever. It's always hand-wavey "it doesn't work like that" when the evidence suggests that it does.
Some quick Googling for number of housing units in the US in 2006 and 2026 says 128 million then and 149 million.
Population then was 299 million and is 334 million now.
That's 16.4% more housing units and 15.4% more population. In terms of housing units per capita that's 0.45 now, and 0.43 in 2006.
Looking farther back it as 0.34 in the 1970 census, 0.39 in the 1980 census, and 0.41 in the 2000 census.
There was a dip from 2008 to 2016 from 0.428 to 0.419 then it resumed going up [1].
Fancy it up a bit (mostly nicer appliances) beyond that and you take a $300k house to a $1M house.
Developers make about 20% on the total ( https://www.nahb.org/news-and-economics/press-releases/2025/... ). They'd rather make 20% of $1M than 20% of $300k. Same work crew either way.
Next question then becomes "is it better to sell 3 houses at $1M each ($600k for the developer) out of 10, or all 10 houses at $300k ($600k for the developer)?"
This also applies to apartments. Do you build 200 "luxury" units? or 200 affordable ones?
I bet you actually can find affordable housing in the middle of nowhere / towns where people are actually leaving.
This is not to say there isn't low hanging fruit that market rate housing can help with, and some areas have more room for improvement that way than others, but there's a limit to where that takes you that reveals a deeper problem: we treat housing as an asset that "should" continue to appreciate indefinitely, and we even subsidize people using extensive leveraging to acquire it.
