So what happened to the owners of those three houses? Well, their land, which before could only had 3 dwellings, has 24. So while the value of the built houses they had dropped to zero, the value of the land they were built on went up spectacularly, so their investment paid off anyway.
Barring the craziest of regulatory situations, no house is ever a good investment. They degrade and get worse! But most homeowners end up ahead, because they own the land, and it appreciated faster than the house depreciated. And as a city gets bigger and more prosperous all land near it gets more valuable.
So all in all, in cities that aren't shinking, it's likely most homeowners end up way ahead, and the closer to downtown, the more they gain. It's only when a city shrinks that the homeowner really loses money.
The other side of the equation is that wages could increase relative to the price of housing.
> The other side of the equation is that wages could increase relative to the price of housing.
It's a system problem with various feedback loops, and people absolutely aren't getting paid enough and don't appreciate how little money they're making relative to what it can buy. In my city we're at a point where a new studio condo with no walls along a major thoroughfare outside the downtown area starts at ~$600k CAD, and older one bedrooms in the same range will still have asbestos and coin-op laundry in the basement. My landlords recently moved out and our living circumstances long-term are being considered. I had a conversation with one of them and she was seemingly clueless about how vulnerable it might have made us, and that's a bit humiliating; "but you guys have been here a while and surely you're making good money since moving in 5 years ago", to which I actually laughed and didn't elaborate, since we now depend on them putting in a good worth with our new overlords. We don't have the job security, we don't have the proportional increase in earning potential. Any decent money made gets erased in the next round of layoffs. Burn it all down.
You're assuming a definition of "crisis". 2/3 of households own their own homes, and a big chunk of those that don't aren't looking to buy in any circumstances. As much as we hear about the high cost of housing, it's only an issue for an extremely vocal minority. That's not to say I don't view it as a problem (clearly it is) but I'm skeptical it's going to win any political battles.
1. "Household" is not the right unit of analysis, since a household is defined as the set of people in an existing home. Some of these include adults who would like to move out, creating a new household not accounted for in your denominator.
2. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average American moves approximately 11.7 times throughout their lifetime. In other words, current homeowners generate demand for housing just as non-homeowners do.
If I lost my job and was unable to find something reasonable in my relatively non-existent local job market, I would be looking to move to somewhere with a larger employer base and barely be able to make a down payment on entry level housing.
They have to buy another at a higher interest rate. It's not a wash, I think it's a loss for most. If I sold my house, then bought another at the same size, the gains would not cover the monthly mortgage increase for very long.
No one is going to purposfully crash the single largest market in the world. Hyperinflation is comming.
By the way, hyperinflation doesn't just mean "large inflation". It's defined as 50% increase in prices per month. Yes, governments often (not always) choose to inflate the money supply rather than pay their debts. No, nobody deliberately chooses hyperinflation.
Mind you, you could be right this time. It could be that the next government will overspend enough (no matter who wins) and Congress will be irresponsible enough that we do in fact wind up in a hyperinflation. But so far, naysayers have predicted ten of the last zero hyperinflations.
Entire foreign countries (read: most of the world worth caring about) invest in and hold the US, whether that's stocks or bonds (Treasury bonds especially) or literal USD. The only way the US crashes at this point is if the entirety of humanity has shit the bed, it's otherwise a force of nature only going up up up.
My fear for 10+ years has been that another county or block will start a gold, commody or electronic based currency and the world will flood to the backed currency dumping USD as fast as possible. Bitcoin ALMOST became that black hole of USD before Adam Back's Blockstream was able to sucessfully hijack the BTC GitHub repo and inject hacks like SegWit and RBF that essentially killed BTC as a currency.
USD doesn't have to die, just something slightly better has to come along.
(Or, we could in most cities. A few, like New York and San Francisco, are very limited in terms of available land.)
There are zoning codes in Tokyo, but they're quite flexible compared to what people in the US are used to. In addition, perhaps most importantly, it's not possible to oppose construction, as opposed to the the US, where literally anyone can halt a construction project indefinitely for literally any bogus reason. "It might cast shade on 1 square foot of the street!"
zoning, absolutely. however, in a lot of places we have homeowners' associations as well.
random density doesn't help much, need to build density near existing and planned infrastructure.
Care to explain more? I hard disagree, and I think the research is on my side.
"Just build more" is not a solution on its own, at all.