It's because housing is very expensive to build, lasts decades, and people absolutely freak-out if you plan to build any amount of housing at all.
Ford Model T cost $260 in 1925 ($4561 in current USD). But today's cars are closer to $40k.
Things don't need to be so expensive, it's not all inflation - it's scope creep and bloat.
I don't think people necessarily want to go back to the 1900s and share a ten square meter apartment with a 3-generation family, and then die in a fire because that's too many people to evacuate out of one door.
What is overkill is parking. When I was looking at buying apartments, each car park cost $80,000 AUD.
> Most people would probably prefer to live in a cheap shack,
Correlates with:
> if it was available and not in a crime-ridden area
In a system where economic advantages agglomerate in a few areas, it would be difficult to create a place that is neither losing to the agglomerating areas, nor is declining itself.
If it is an area where the economy is booming, then it will not be cheap. And if it is not an area that is moving upward, then it is moving downward, and with that comes a host of issues that can cause crime to proliferate.
> Ford Model T cost $260 in 1925 ($4561 in current USD). But today's cars are closer to $40k.
Far more capable and safer vehicles than a ford model T are available for far less than $40k. $20k cars are available, and while not quantifiably true, I think it is easy to say the $20k car of today is easily more than 4x capable and able to provide utility than a $4.5k model T.
This. Europeans voted for this situation, hard, like really, really hard, for years on end. They did everything they could to ensure sky-high property prices. Now they have it. I'm not entirely sure that I see the problem.
How so? What specific voting behaviour did directly lead to increasing housing prices?
Many places have extremely specific rules about building housing. You need 'X' ft around the outside of your house which means lots must be massive to have a house on them. So you require that people need to purchase a large amount of dead space to add character to the home.
We also don't retroactively apply building codes to houses. So you have a house that would cost $500k to replace due to building code, but it doesn't meet code. But you can still sell it for nearly that price because the alternative is the $500k new house. If people were forced to follow building codes in as-built buildings they would be much less likely to press all costs on to other people.
it is dead space if it's just a lawn.
Consumers never have full knowledge of the quality level of whatever they're purchasing, much less in something like a house that is not standard and has to be adapted to the place it's built in.
At least with a law setting minimums, if you're lucky, you can sue if it doesn't meet them.
You could easily describe a moderate house you desire to an architect, hire a GC and have a house built to code for $75k-$150k if it weren't for permits, zoning and regulations.