We do, but clearly the balance right now is far too much in the favour of the naked self interest of shameless home owners. I mean a place to live is not a luxury, it's up there with food and water.
There is plenty of very cheap land to live in. The problem is that no one wants to live there because living in dense cities for whatever reason is extremely appealing now.
The price of a house grows exponentially with the minimum travel time to a metropolis from it.
Blaming home owners for this is very useful scapegoating while ignoring the context.
10 minutes away: $1,000,000
20 minutes away: $2,000,000?
60 minutes away: $32,000,000?
Where P_0 is the price in the heart of the city, d is the effective distance to the heart of the city and k is a factor to get units matching up.
I think you answered the "whatever reason" with your next sentence.
> The price of a house grows exponentially with the minimum travel time to a metropolis from it.
Jobs are in metropolises and people prefer shorter commutes over longer ones.
Having a coffee shop at the bottom of my lift. Having 4 super markets within walking distance. Having 200+ restaurants to pick from. Museums when I get bored, book shops, theaters, cinemas, meetups, hacker spaces the list goes on.
Having to commute for an hour would give me enough time to wake up. My previous job was 5 minutes walking from where I lived, my current one is 8. I take a detour through a park to make it 30 so I can drink a coffee before I get in.
That people are complaining that they can't afford that and making it into an issue on the same level as getting food and drink is ridiculous.
Housing prices are a systemic problem that needs to be addressed. The way to address it is by cutting demand. Build up infrastructure in rural areas so I can actually get decent internet, that bridges don't feel like they will fall down if I drive over them too quickly. Change the regulations so only livable units are built in cities. Change the requirements that non-citizens can't own more than 50% of a dwelling. There is a huge number of tweaks that could solve the housing affordability problem.
Well most people generally want to do better than that, surprisingly enough.
> The problem is that no one wants to live there because living in dense cities for whatever reason is extremely appealing now
People want a better quality of life, is that not obvious? Not only that but its better for the environment as well. You don't need a car in London, but you definitely do in suburbia.
>The price of a house grows exponentially with the minimum travel time to a metropolis from it.
It becomes exponentially more expensive as you get further away from the city? I don't think that's true, and I don't know what the relevance is to the discussion anyway.
>Blaming home owners for this is very useful scapegoating while ignoring the context.
What context? You've provided none. Home owners aren't the problem, home owners who seek to deny people affordable housing are the problem. It's selfishness, plain and simple.
So you've gone from necessities to Veblen goods. This is as daft as expecting the government to build gold toilets for everyone because the quality of toilets is so much higher when they are gold.
As for your point in suburbia: it's easy enough to build a high-rise anywhere. They aren't being build because people don't want them.