Ugly architecture to blame for housing crisis

I think that rich countries are having their social benefits priced into houses.

Where I am (Canada), house prices in some major metro areas fairly closely follow what school district you are in. So we have "high quality public education" which you then pay for in mortgage interest and principal instead of tuition. This (mostly) still results in people getting what they pay for, but it also leads to strange distortions.

The more the world becomes globalized, the more people will start pricing the social benefits of a location into the cost of living, simply by going there and driving up demand.

Eventually a given government social program dependent will be commoditized to the extent that you can work in a high cost of living centre but with the exact same quality of life as you would in the equivalent low cost of living centre. Just with less zeros on your income and bills.

The video makes a great point about how people want a net benefit to the curb appeal of a given area, but it is also an issue of pricing things into housing that used to be priced into the products themselves.

The narrator on this video is Alain de Botton. It doesn't say so in the video nor the description on the youtube page. It's a shame really, since all his books are great reads.