The important thing here is that it’s not indexed to inflation, it’s occasionally increased by legislation, so for most of the ~decade between bills, wages are decreasing in purchasing power for those people. I think you can make a much stronger case that it should track productivity than that it should track GDP, as the latter increases just by virtue of a growing population.

Building supplies have grown at an insane rate. A lot of builders went out of business because of 2008. It is still a supply issue, just not a land supply issue.

I'm actually sort-of familiar with this, as I have family that lives all around there.

1) Prices have gone up, but not nearly as much as places where supply is much more constrained (i.e. the bay area or NYC metro area).

2) Even if there is 'unlimited land', the land closest to the city centers where most of the employment is located is still limited. A cheaper house 3 hours away from your job doesn't help someone all that much.

3) Texas absolutely has lots of policies that do things like limit housing density. Many of the huge suburban tracts being developed have home owner's associations that enforce a variety of policies like the ones discussed earlier (enforce uniformity in terms of lot size, minimum house size, parking, etc), as well as limiting your ability to do things like rent or subdivide your property

4) You just need the population to be increasing faster than the housing supply to have a 'supply issue'. This last year has both seen a lot of raw material supply issues (and labor issues) due to the pandemic, and a lot of people also trying to relocate (also due to the pandemic). Sometimes temporary housing prices increases are unavoidable while supply and demand adjust, but long term policy decisions can definitely limit supply and force prices higher.

Another commenter also pointed out that low federal interest rates generally promote asset price inflation (as buyers are frequently bidding based on their ability to carry a 30-year monthly mortgage payment, so lower interest rates can almost directly increase home values when people are bidding against each other).

Lumbar as a whole has minimally doubled during the last year[1]. A lot of people are moving to Texas, which raises demand, which raises prices. There is also a current lumbar shortage, which makes house building unpredictable when you have to plan 1+ years out.

You don't just go from 0 to a house. There is usually about a year of designing/planning which have to be approved and meet national and local code, numerous inspections, approvals and permits before ground is broken. Most people who move buy an existing house because they want to move "now." Out of all of the places you've lived, how many did you have custom built vs moving into an existing structure?

Prices are rising pretty quick in Arizona and Idaho as well. Idaho was the quickest growing state in 2020[2]. Those are also hotbeds of people moving to them. Most are trying to escape California, Chicago and NY. CA and NY lost population and even recently had their US House seats reduced as a result[3].

[1] https://fortune.com/2021/04/27/lumber-prices-are-up-232-and-...

[2] https://www.kxly.com/idaho-leads-country-with-amount-of-peop...

[3] https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/politics/elections/20...

Overpriced houses make construction arbitrage easier. It's easier to build a new house than to buy an existing one.

I see where you're coming from and it would be great if it happened that way. But the deflationary pull is getting ever stronger with technology - the more productive we are, the cheaper things should become. So the Fed's actions are the result of having a mandate that is directly incompatible with the technological goal of working less. If we switched to embracing deflation, then people could retire earlier knowing their savings would definitively appreciate in value, rather than having to hope on faux bubble "investments" that are mainly whims of more centralized government policy.

But that seems to be politically impossible. So another way to approach it would be to drastically reduce the legal definition of full time work. It should be under 20 hours already, considering that women entering the workforce nearly doubled overall hours worked. But instead, all of that overproduction got dumped into the hedonic treadmill and bullshit jobs.

"Manage" inflation means to create it. An economy naturally tends towards price deflation, through optimization and technological progress. Business looking for ways to cut costs to compete is intrinsic to a market.

The Fed mostly wants to decrease unemployment via 2% inflation. The conventional wisdom is that supply side stimulus will create companies that hire workers. So handing out loans should do the trick. Yeah, except building housing which is one of the easiest ways to employ people is illegal.