The only way to correct the market is for more supply to exist. Adequate supply would ensure that competition works.
https://twitter.com/cw4emeryville/status/1438862784024891394
Also, Berlin has a lot of land that could be built upon. Land is not a scarce resource in that particular corner of Europe.
Also, existing land use could see some improvements. Does it make sense to have a huge solar electricity park like this:
in the middle of a city with a shortage of housing? That is 150 x 500 m piece of land where at least 5 thousand people could live comfortably even without a need for high-rises. (6 story houses or so). In a walking distance from an existing U-bahn station.
(Not to mention the other factories around.)
There is a discussion in Prague about moving some big shopping centers from the wider center to the outskirts and using the freed land for construction. But everything takes long in our state of bureaucracy.
- Overcrowding
- People being forced to move out of city centers
- Very long commute times to work
- Reduced fertility rates because people want more room for kids
All of these problems are due to insufficient housing and not just too high prices.
Your question is almost non-sensical?
Much better to recognize that "The problem is not that there isn't sufficient housing" is wrong and legalize building more housing.
I am saying "The problem is not that there isn't sufficient housing" is wrong. Very very very wrong. There are massive supply shortages of housing in many many places. Governments need to fix their oppressive zoning policies so they stop preventing people from living where they want to live (either because of $, because of waiting lists, or any other mechanism).
Those people either don't know enough about the system to take advantage of it, or don't have enough time to wait in waiting lists, so they end up paying twice what their native peers pay. But hey, they don't have a vote anyway, so it's all good...
Because there's no shortage of housing in Germany, it's just not hitting all three of those. People want to live in sought-after areas, have large apartments and pay very little. Understandable, but everyone should be able to see why that doesn't work.
Imagine there is one person that owns 99% of the worlds wealth. Now, is there demand for housing? You bet. That guy wants to buy all the houses he can. If they build more, he will buy them too. No matter how much supply you offer, the demand will be there. He will buy anything. Now replace wealthy guy by corporations, REITs and wealthy people (who would own not 99% but ~90% of the world's wealth) and entertain me how increasing supply fixes anything.
Property owners do, in fact, conspire with each other to prevent the construction of new housing (via zoning laws). They do this, as you say, so that they can get richer.
Allowing them to get away with it (by denying the fact that there is a supply problem) plays right into their hands.
What we need to do is thwart their scheme and, through better government, legalize the construction of new housing so that wealthier people who own much of the existing property stop seeing artificial government created gains in the the value of their housing because they've conscripted the government into their cartel.
Also i pondered would adding a law that allows tenants to have an option for purchasing the house at market price for decreased taxation for the landlord help. That should make more people home-owners and thus allow them to generate more wealth in the long run.
Of course the whole topic is so complex it's impossible to invent any rule or law that fixes everything. But preventing useless speculation is what every common sense individual should wish for.
https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2017/03/27/where-mar...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28585422
You're grossly overstating constraints and the absolute and relative quantities of housing which must be added.
Of course if the supply "literally doubled overnight" or pigs started to fly the prices would go down. For a number of years.
Housing (and other construction) is. The key though is to tax the unimproved land value to make low-density, low-intensity utilisation (and unimproved holdings) economically nonviable.
You cannot simply build vertically indefinitely and/or at almost-linear cost. There are a million constraints.
Not to mention the geographic limitations of the market. You cannot buy a house or land in a cheaper country/city and teleport it to your city. Relocating comes with all sort of burdens, from getting visas to leaving friends/partners/family/job behind, to language barrier. All of this makes housing extremely non-fungible.
Finally, people in need of housing are under extreme pressure not to be homeless, while those who own 20 apartments can easily keep 1 unoccupied if that means pushing up the market value of all apartments in the long term.
This asymmetry is what makes the market speculative and exploitative.
- The bias against sufficient provisioning exists regardless of scale or growth rates. Housing tends to be underprovisioned when it serves as an asset, whether at the individual or institutional scales.
- Infinite expansion of housing stock isn't necessary. In mostt cases only a small fraction of existing housing stock need be added. California has a homeless population of roughly 170,000 (https://www.usich.gov/homelessness-statistics/ca/) on a given night.
That's a large number, yes. It's also less than 1/2 of one percent of the total population of the state.
The incremental housing need is small. It's localised. Those constraints of which you write will not be even remotely approached in addressing the housing needs of even 10x or 100x this number of people. Adding a small amount of additional housing at affordable rates in high-demand markets will address the housing problem nearly completely.
(There may also be some additional services for the addicted, mentally ill, disabled, elderly, and young. That's independent of the housing issue itself.)
But adding a few percent to the housing stock will have an immense impact on the very thin trade of that asset, plunging prices, and hence household and family wealth, as well as real estate, mortgage, bank, and financial derivative asset values. Given the utter dismanteling of defined-benefit pensions and the importance of real estate appreciation to family retirement planning, and the role of the financial sector in politics, the resultant political pressure is immense.
That covers your first two points.
For your fourth: yes, I fundamentally agree, that's what I just argued above, and it's a core aspect of the present homelessness crisis. Given that landlords can also drive evictions at will (effectively creating demand), the market is further unbalanced.
The geographic structure of the market is a non-issue when present low densities and low marginal change requirements (as discussed above) are factored in. SF Bay Area housing demand could be addressed with improved transit, increased densities, and stronger tenant protections with only modest increases in total housing stock.