Supply and demand doesn’t just work in terms of raw housing supply, but in terms of housing that is “on the market”, which is a critical distinction that economists’ arguments deliberately ignore.
In my parents’ generation, it used to be that if you moved or stopped living in a house, you would sell the house in location A and buy a house in location B. Today this would be considered a critical wealth-building error / faux pas. Widespread absenteee landlordism is a new phenomenon, and the fact that we allow it to exist is a de novo policy decision constructed to inflate property value (similar to the subsidized mortgages you referenced).
The reason housing is so unaffordable in my city is not because there isn’t enough housing for the people who live here, it’s because I (along with countless other professionals) am given a choice between subsidizing the lifestyle of somebody who literally doesn’t live here if I’m living in old housing stock, or I’m subsidizing the unavoidably high cost of developing new property (and the lifestyle of property developers) if I’m living in new housing stock.
If the balance of households renting vs owning were inverted, housing would be more affordable. I agree that subsidized mortgages helped create this beast. But the superset problem is the financialization of housing, that the American dream stopped being about the picket fence and started being about securing a passive income / rent-seeking on that picket fence. There are many policies that contributed to this problem.
No mainstream economists touch this problem because we’ve become a country of rent-seeking. So right-leaning economists will say we just need to relax regulation (read: increase the profit margin of property developers) and liberal economists will say we need more “affordable housing” (read: remove more housing stock from the market, for the benefit of a few lucky souls), while neither addresses the core problem of putting median housing titles in the hands of median people, which was perfectly normal from the 50s-80s, before our current system crystallized.
In our current system, building marginal housing and reducing regulation more benefits capital (the top 1% of asset holders; the property developers and the people who can afford to subsidize their profits), not the people who actually live here.
Emotionally, I agree that the current system sucks. But how exactly do you "[put] median housing titles in the hands of median people"? Government seizure and redistribution of property titles? That's where I always get stuck: criticizing society ills is much easier than proposing concrete, pass-able policy.
"No mainstream economists touch this problem" because it's a damn hard problem without painless solutions.
I mean the problem will solve itself eventually. As wealth continues to centralize and urbanization continues unchecked, the “renter” voting block will eventually be state-level majorities in places like New York and California.
There are plenty of ways for people to “vote themselves” property, whether it happens peacefully or not is a decision of those in power. The spectrum runs from land value tax to punitive landlord taxes, improving tenant rights, squatter rights, and outright seizure.
I don’t know which path we’ll go down, but some step in that direction feels inevitable within the next 60 years.
In my parents’ generation, it used to be that if you moved or stopped living in a house, you would sell the house in location A and buy a house in location B. Today this would be considered a critical wealth-building error / faux pas. Widespread absenteee landlordism is a new phenomenon, and the fact that we allow it to exist is a de novo policy decision constructed to inflate property value (similar to the subsidized mortgages you referenced).
The reason housing is so unaffordable in my city is not because there isn’t enough housing for the people who live here, it’s because I (along with countless other professionals) am given a choice between subsidizing the lifestyle of somebody who literally doesn’t live here if I’m living in old housing stock, or I’m subsidizing the unavoidably high cost of developing new property (and the lifestyle of property developers) if I’m living in new housing stock.
If the balance of households renting vs owning were inverted, housing would be more affordable. I agree that subsidized mortgages helped create this beast. But the superset problem is the financialization of housing, that the American dream stopped being about the picket fence and started being about securing a passive income / rent-seeking on that picket fence. There are many policies that contributed to this problem.
No mainstream economists touch this problem because we’ve become a country of rent-seeking. So right-leaning economists will say we just need to relax regulation (read: increase the profit margin of property developers) and liberal economists will say we need more “affordable housing” (read: remove more housing stock from the market, for the benefit of a few lucky souls), while neither addresses the core problem of putting median housing titles in the hands of median people, which was perfectly normal from the 50s-80s, before our current system crystallized.
In our current system, building marginal housing and reducing regulation more benefits capital (the top 1% of asset holders; the property developers and the people who can afford to subsidize their profits), not the people who actually live here.