Wait so you’re telling me that increasing real estate supply can help control rent inflation!? SF take note
You are partially right here, people do not control the means of production, way too many greedy foreign companies do. That Mr. Huang mentioned in the article is another good example, why should he be paid only $1,000 USD when the same Ford car he built is being sold way more expensive in China than in the US?
Because otherwise he'd be paid $0 since it'd be cheaper to manufacture the car somewhere other than China. Also, Chinese politicians are perfectly free to require such things so it's odd that you're blaming western companies which only have power in China because politicians let them have power. Of course, massive unemployment rates tend to cause more issues so it's clear why they don't.
I asked the exact same question to my then boss many many years ago on why Chinese software engineers are paid far less than American engineers. His answer was almost identical to yours above and we all know what happened in the last 10 years.
The current ruling class in China is very aware that people need to be happy with basic necessities or else.... That's all.
Housing isn't like manufactured goods where the marginal cost decrease the more you make. Since the more you build in one area the less available space there is. If you want to decrease cost you have to supply more space.
Still that is only the supply side. As long as there are people, or even an increase of people, that are willing to pay it never becomes affordable even if there are comparable.
This was probably true in 1750, but today you can build up. A 2000 SQ foot home can become a 40,000 SQ foot tower.
My unit has a construction cost that's significantly less than half of my unit's total value. The tiny one story ramblers across the street all sold for over a million a pop, but the houses were worth ~negative to the purchaser and got torn down and replaced.
Its purely cultural, but its burning trillions of dollars a year in maintenance, wasted time, and wasted potential.
You can shift supply by e.g. changing zoning. Now you have more resources. But it doesn't change the equation, so eventually you might end up in an even worse situation were it is even harder do the same thing again. The even bigger problem however is that you don't necessarily get choose what should happen. Or maybe something is already shifting demand, like demographics.
You build for density until you hit the actual physical limits on density, and then you have a claim to the infeasibility of housing everyone where they want to be. We are so radically far away from such a threshold it is laughable, in much the same way some purport our understanding of the universe is nearly complete, or that we have near total mastery of our planet - neither are remotely close to happening and are just hubris on the part of those who can't comprehend how much more there is left to do.
We could have cities hundreds of stories high, entire populations housed in glass pyramids taller than Everest, population densities in excess of a hundred thousand per mile. And that doesn't need to imply poverty, squalor, or suffering - we are fully capable of building dense well. It is an independent knob of consideration that only shows correlation today because of cultural motivations and social pressure to make dense housing suck to punish the poor because only the poor live in dense housing because dense housing sucks.