An Airbnb collapse won’t fix America’s housing shortage | Hacker News Reader

An Airbnb collapse won’t fix America’s housing shortage

vox.com

13 pointspg_12347 comments

Is it a shortage of housing, or a shortage of housing clustered around the handful of cities an unsustainable number of people flock to?

Prices have exploded everywhere except truly dead rural communities. Any mid size metro is on the same trajectory as big cities for some reason

I think it will only be moreso this as time wears on. With more digital nomads and WFH available, people will be able to flee the huge metropolis where their industry is headquartered, and they'll be able to live anywhere that the services are decent, like good, reliable, high-speed Internet.

If WFH really stays the course and companies stop digging in their heels about their commercial real estate, we could see a renaissance of repopulating the rural areas and a reversal, in part, of the mass urbanization we've been seeing.

And then The Andy Griffith Show and Petticoat Junction can return to TV!

I am moving out of a small rural city of 50k people to another small rural city. Housing shortages exist in both cities. Right now, people don’t want to sell unless they’re absolutely forced to. Most people would be doubling their mortgage payment due to an increase in interest rates. People moving are desperate.

I generally dislike the law-skirting nature of airbnbs, but I don’t think they’re the current driver of shortages. It’s just too lucrative to not sell a house that you bought at 2% interest.

You could make the same claim about any urban area in the past 100+ years. Prices were always way more than in non-urban areas. What's different now? Why is it just now unsustainable?

Housing is an is an inelastic commodity. Small shifts in supply/demand have a large effect on prices.

Also WFH has decoupled housing prices from local incomes.

Small town workers in desirable locations now have extra competition from AirBnB and WFH.

It’s a combination of things.

Airbnb

A rise in Investors/flippers

Ppp fraud to invest in real estate

Corporations buying real estate

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