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Comment by dustedcodes | Hacker News Reader

   > World population projected to reach 9.8 billion in 2050, and 11.2 billion in 2100

This to me always stands out as the main reason why house prices in desirable areas across the world (eg. London, Australia, Singapore, etc.) won’t drop any time soon. Quite the opposite, they will continue to go up steeply for another few decades.

Today we’re 8 billion people, add another 50% of today’s population on top of what we already have, in less than the next 80 years, whilst habitable areas decrease due to climate change, and we’re in a perfect scenario where sharp population growth will simply outpace any building efforts we could achieve with the current workforce we have.

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> simply outpace any building efforts we could achieve with the current workforce we have.

Trades are learnable skills, my father built two of his houses (one after the other), I've built a house of my own, worked on a sheep shearing robot and contributed to brick laying robots:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBhcm-kRA68

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s17IAj-XpU

Modern building efforts include lots of prefab and the ability to push up structures fast - pressures in the west that depress housing construction go far deeper than an inability to build; there are financial and zoning factors at play.

Talk to residents of many SE Asian countries, eg: Tokyo and elsewhere and work out how they can build enough to house higher and denser populations whereas "the West" struggles.

> Talk to residents of many SE Asian countries, eg: Tokyo and elsewhere and work out how they can build enough to house higher and denser populations whereas "the West" struggles

Last time I checked was before the pandemic, but from what I remember in Tokyo most flats and housing is way out of the league of normal people and if you are wealthy enough to get on the housing ladder then it’s a tiny flat literally the size of a shipping container where you have to fold your bed away to turn it into a dining table because you’re squeezed into a tiny space like a chicken in a battery and for that “luxury” you’ll have to pay off debt for the best part of your life.

Kind of proves my point, no?

When you have that many people in cities you need either nigh on unlimited surburbia and magical public transport OR a willingness to live in a compact space.

Western housing crisis results from an unwillingness to mostly have dense cities and sensible suburbs with dense multi family blocks interspersed with common parklands.

We can't all have a McMansion with indoor shooting range and swimming pool.

I’m not debating here fictional solutions to how urban areas are being built.

I’m just stating the fact that due to a still very much accelerating population explosion until 2100 combined with a decrease of habitable space it will inevitably create a huge (further) boom in house prices. Wether we start accommodating people in shoe boxes or McMansions has little impact on what I am saying, because the point is, if you buy a nice property today then it will go up in value because there will be market pressure and anyone who will be able to afford a nice home will outbid each other in the free market for the stock of nice housing which we have.

>We can't all have a McMansion with indoor shooting range and swimming pool.

my guess is we will have virtual solutions for that and our bodies will spend most of our time in our broom closet size apartments (or coffin size)

Wow, you know absolutely nothing about Tokyo.

It's not like America, where everyone lives in a McMansion with 40 acres, even in the middle of NYC. I read it on the internet, so it must be true.

> any building efforts we could achieve

Maybe not any building efforts we want to achieve, but there are certainly approaches within the possible envelope, eg something like arrays of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchevka with mod-cons.

(I am continually amazed that the Eichler developments in the Bay Area, which were once considered the epitome of "ticky tacky", are now cool, just because they're no longer the cheap & cheery affordable thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Eichler#Santa_Clara_Cou... )

You contradict yourself.

If you believe in climate change raising sea levels, then property in (half of) London and (most of) Singapore will be literally and financially underwater.

House prices have very little to do with how many people need housing.

Their price is almost entirely defined by the apetites of the rich for the investment vessel.

China currently could house 3 times larger population than they actually have.

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