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Comment by belter | Hacker News Reader

Housing is a huge problem in other countries also. Low interest rates being the main cause for it. Large pension funds and other investors gobble up properties looking for yield they can't get in other investments.

"Why is there a housing shortage in the Netherlands?" https://dutchreview.com/expat/housing/why-is-there-a-housing...

"Germany's next government aims to tackle housing crisis" https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-next-government-aims-to-tackl...

"The History of the UK's Housing Crisis" https://www.vice.com/en/article/k78mm3/the-history-of-the-uk...

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I wish we could all just agree that some things just aren't meant to be for investors and that not all things are meant to have a laissez faire capitalist approach..

I've been looking at properties in LCOL & remote areas of the US and prices shot straight up in 2020/2021 to the point where even having high salary fo an HCOL they become unaffordable. Those places haven't seen wild growths in population and the people are purely speculating as a result of the artificial inflation caused by Zillow and friends.

Looking yesterday those properties are on the market still, some for 6+ months now with little to no drop in price... the sellers are delusional

I think the main problem with housing is that it's not laissez faire at least from the production side. With homeowners everywhere fighting tooth and nail against any uptick in housing supply, it's not surprising there's a shortage. Which only serves to make it even more attractive to investors, it's like bitcoin without all the complicated tech.

Absolutely, but there is some laissez faire'ness on the producers side as well. A few of the publicly traded builders in earning calls by their own admittance have touted restricting supply of already built inventory purely to protect their high profit margin.

We definitely need to build more, though the producer "market" is failing a bit also

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