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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

-1 for abusing the term "Ponzi scheme" but otherwise I'm with you. Ponzi implies this was some elaborate conspiracy with a puppeteer at the top when it reality it's an emergent property of 50 years of misaligned incentives playing out in similar ways across multiple nations in similar ways.

The postwar years saw a huge boom in housing construction which created a few decades of housing availability that may just never exist again nor should it. Housing as a vehicle for building wealth and housing becoming unaffordable for the younger generation are two sides of the same coin.

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>The postwar years saw a huge boom in housing construction which created a few decades of housing availability that may just never exist again nor should it.

More importantly, the proliferation of the personal automobile made suburbs possible and unlocked a one-time dividend of cheap housing that was "close" to the city (in terms of travel time, not distance). That suppressed prices for a while, but now we're returning back to historical trends.

> The postwar years saw a huge boom in housing construction which created a few decades of housing availability that may just never exist again nor should it.

There's plenty of demand for housing. There's no reason we can't build more to meet that need, other than regulation.

This is true and not true. Desirable land aka location is where everyone wants to buy. This drives the price up. Building in the middle of nowhere increases available housing, but doesn't solve the problem really, because no one wants to live there.

In theory remote work could help with this problem, but honestly it's really only available to workers who work in offices. People with physical jobs like Amazon warehouse workers and restaurant staff and construction workers...all have to live somewhere near where they work.

>In theory remote work could help with this problem, but honestly it's really only available to workers who work in offices.

And I daresay that even most of the professional class who could live anywhere in the country they wanted to probably don't want to live in or near some small midwestern city or many of the other places where housing is relatively cheap. (Some of that is preserving future employment options but even if you take that off the table, there's still almost certainly a common preference for at least the general vicinity of large mostly coastal cities--and tons of excuses why this location or that location is a non-starter.)

There's also plenty of relatively inexpensive housing in many areas of the US (can't really speak to Canada) but many people are less inclined to live in those areas for a variety of reasons.

There was in Canada, too, before the pandemic. But it was a fairly small amount in terms of actual housing units, and in 2020-2021 it was almost completely swallowed up by people leaving Toronto and Vancouver for places like the Maritimes and Vancouver Island. They could build more capacity, but the price of land has risen in advance of that.

"Housing as a vehicle for building wealth and housing becoming unaffordable for the younger generation are two sides of the same coin." That's a great insight.

> Housing as a vehicle for building wealth and housing becoming unaffordable for the younger generation are two sides of the same coin.

To be sure, there's a distinct difference between housing as a vehicle for preserving wealth vice building it, where the underlying grift of the real estate industry is in having normalized the country to the perverse idea that the latter is both healthy and sustainable.

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