It’s not the house that’s worth more. It’s the land. If cities and towns develops, land prices should go up. Buildable land near an office, supermarket and bar should be worth more than the same piece in the middle of nowhere.
If labour and material costs are also high that increases the value of houses that are pre-existing. It means the buyer does not have to pay extra for and wait for a house to be built, which has some value. Also, there's a certain tolerance that I'm sure many people, if I may project, have for how crappy of quality a house actually is. They just want a damn place to live and call their own. Especially when the market is not in the buyer's favour.
At least that's how it all seems in Toronto. In the city of Toronto proper, a detached house selling around $1,000,000 is almost guaranteed to be of relatively bad quality right now.
House is often a necessary evil - its never what buyers imagine as ideal, but in comparison with going through the hell of building one's own (or also adding tearing down the old) its an acceptable compromise for many.
Life is too short, and no house is worth destroying a marriage.
So if they offer a policy that covers the market value of the house, that's much less than what it would cost to repair/rebuild (so insured people can't afford to get their house back after a fire), and they don't want to offer full repair/rebuild value, as that incentivizes people to just burn the house down because in that case the insurance payment would be much more than what they can sell the house for.
It's everyone else's vertically built accommodations that attract the hatred.
“jobs”, “good food”, “nightlife”, “dating” and “social opportunities” are all things i hear. the last two are a direct result of density. the first 3 are only possible as indirect results.
anecdotally, the price per sqft of townhomes exceeds that of detached homes in several Seattle neighborhoods. several confounding factors, including the year of the building, but in general that suggests a preference opposite to what you claim. or at least, that, in the face of constricted supply we can’t really tell where the preferences truly lie.
Anecdotally, in Australia, post COVID both rent and real estate in regional areas have gone up dramatically - much more than in cities - rapidly pricing locals out and forcing them to move elsewhere and sometimes find temporary accommodation. Now that WFH is more normalised and either want a quiter lifestyle or straight up can't afford houses in major cities, so they are moving to smaller towns instead.
My own preferences are fairly different but I can't argue with data.
But if you have to decide between an hour commute and living vertically plenty of people would choose to live vertically.
And the experience of high rise social housing from the 60's and 70's shows that that tower blocs do not solve housing problems.
And eventually those people visit friends or see pictures on social media of people similar to them with large back yards, land and big kitchens - and say, shit, maybe we should look into this.
As it happens, just possibly a black swan pandemic event keeps those folks indoors with their kids and dogs, with their nonplussed neighbors, children running around behind Zoom conference calls, and pictures on social media of people with houses and backyards causing massive envy...
And welcome to today.
That's the housing situation in the suburbs and exoburbs. This is BEFORE even even talk about the insanely low interest rates on offer during this time.
They are both worth more over time.
To build a new house just like the old one will cost more since labor went up and materials went up.
https://www.komatsuforest.com/-/media/komatsu-forest/images/...
A machine grabs the tree, cuts it from the ground, rolls it through a thing to remove all the branches all in just a few rapid smooth movements.