On the other hand, if you somehow flooded the market with thousands of homes and there were fewer buyers than that, the price would plummet.
Demand is so much greater than supply almost everywhere in the US.
I’m not familiar with an builders who are interested in holding properties any longer than necessary.
Yes. It would. And we need to build them.
If need to build then we need to build vertically.
The current system is deliberately exclusionary and self preserving, but it will also fail the state in the long run. That, sadly, seems fine to many people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_structures_in_...
Every human and human created thing on the planet undoubtedly takes up a tiny fraction of the earth’s surface, even if you exclude oceans.
I am, of course, open to seeing any facts that you have that demonstrate there is no more room left on the planet for additional housing.
We have plenty of space. Plenty of resources to support some multiple of our current population. We really need to just be more efficient and less impactful on ecosystems. Totally possible, but difficult.
If that isn't addressed, fine, then that means the only solution is to plan and zone for higher density.
If the qualities that make large metros pleasant places to live are distributed more evenly across the whole of a country, such that places in the "middle of nowhere" are desirable, then the current affordability crisis wouldn't be so dire and we wouldn't need to be forced to make drastic changes in policy.
It really isn't.
Demand is so much greater than supply in the places you want to live, not in the places I want to live.
On the other hand, if you want to move to Detroit or Philly…
I think because immigration grows NZ population fast enough to absorb the new housing.
I'm not sure what the solution is at this point. But it seems to be a bit of both...more inventory, and less demand.
You can, especially locally. For instance, if you normalize remote work in society to the extent that a significant portion of people won't feel any strong need to cram into massive metropolises just to be able to get a job with which to support themselves, you'll reduce the housing demand in those metropolises somewhat and distribute that demand over the nearly endless rural areas and small towns of $YOUR_COUNTRY instead, where the supply of land on which to build on massively overshadows that of metropolises.
40 year mortgages? 50 year mortgages? The promise that these make homes more affordable is a lie.
The root problem is, "leadership" (i.e., politicians and financial institutions) have sold people the idea that a home is an investment first, and a place to live second. When you buy into this paradigm - and *many* have - then the system is all but obligated to act in ways to drive up prices. If we *really* want "affordable housing", we're not going to get that from the current lie. What part of this insanity don't people understand?
* More people per house
* People leaving the state
* More homeless
* Long term: lower the birth rate
* Increased death rate
None of which are desirable. The first might be OK because it might bring families together and make people more social.
* Stopping illegal immigration and repatriating all illegal residents within the U.S.
which is highly desirable.
Contrary to what people imagine such individuals both create economic value and create demand for goods. They also render tenable things like social security which work best with a slowly expanding population and completely implode with a collapsing population which we would in fact have at present birth rate.
It's also foolhardy to imagine that America is somehow "full" when our population density is actually a tiny fraction of actually densely populated countries.
Instead of the stereotypical 50s where you worry about one person losing a relatively stable job you now have 4-5 unstable incomes where the lose of one may endanger the economic stability of the household. Like a raid0 with increasing number of drives.
A famous trope in comedic premises is the friction between in-laws and spouse but this has absolutely obvious deep roots in real dynamics. Life is infinitely easier when your family and spouse just have to care about one another not live with each-other day to day.
Furthermore most of the apartment stocks aren't suitable in size for such arrangements and most of the single family housing is presently owner occupied or very expensive and or disinterested in renting to a crowd.
This doesn't seem on net a very tenable direction logistically or culturally in the US.
The market was manipulated and it responded in kind. The current system is leading to sociopolitical situations that are also undesirable. And yet our only answer is, "Thank you sirs and madames, can we have another?" That's not sustainable.
p.s. Prices can also be lowered by building smaller homes. The problem there is, the larger the home the more furnishings, etc. Larger homes help increase consumption which is good for the status quo.
Building smaller homes is good. If you make the small, and put them close together, and sometimes on top of each other you can increase the chance of having a walkable city rather than a drive-only one.