No great way out of this mess.
Health I can understand cause it takes a long time to produce a Doc, and there is a high demand and low supply dynamic.
But we can easily build housing cheap. Even if the real estate/investment lobby is busy buying up all the "prime" land, its not like the US is a small country to work around them somewhere.
Even the US being a big country doesn't help much. The value of land for the purpose of living on it is largely defined by the infrastructure around a particular piece of land: are there schools, shops, doctors, ... nearby, or do you have to drive through an empty desert for hours to reach them? And unless faster forms of individual travel are invented, this will limit the amount of "usable" land even in an imaginary country with unlimited boundaries.
I'm not going to build a doctors office, or a train, or a corner store next to 10 people. I'm gonna build it next to 100,000 people. And now here we are, where we have space but not really because most of the space is worthless.
Very, very few. Rural areas are disproportionately impoverished. It's just statistical, not personal, and it makes complete sense once you consider what an economy is.
> But I'd never live in a major metro area, that's nuts
Those major metro areas make up the vast majority of the US' economic prowess. You don't have to live in them of course, but you should be aware that the American suburbs and rural areas are essentially on the welfare of more economically successful areas.
Lowering costs to build should, in theory, increase supply.
High demand should, in theory, increase supply.
But other things influence the balance, regulations, interest rates, etc, that are either keeping supply low or demand high, inflating prices.
40% of the US population lives in a coastal county:
* https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/population.html
Two-thirds of the US population lives with-in one hundred miles (160km) of the border:
* https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone
The US population is fairly concentrated, and it seems that many people like living next to other people (for personal and/or economic reasons).
On top of all the above, you have teh general populace, of which a significant portion own housing they want to see go up so you won't ever get to the point where everyone sees the light and overwhelmingly supports you like uber got to, there will always be significant push back from the populace who want to abuse supply constraint to increase their personal benefit at the severe cost to all of us.
The simple fact is homeowners are a large voting block often with the most ability to vote. Gotta keep them happy or its electoral suicide.
- remove the exemption (or reduction) for Capital Gains Tax
- remove Income Tax relief for mortgage interest
- remove any exemption (or reduction) for Inheritance Tax
Not all these advantages exist in all jurisdictions.
Then there are other changes that could mitigate distortions, inequality and volatility:
- separate interest rates for residential mortgages, commercial property, consumption and productive investments (industry, infrastructure, education)
- separate institutions for these different credit markets, with different reserve ratios and other regulations
- promote sound(er) money, to reduce inflation, and reduce the necessity to protect wealth by asset investment
- break cartels of real estate agents and aggregators to reduce transaction costs
- streamline the planning process to enable more houses to be built, without delay and costs of excessive eco/nimby appeals
- level the playing field between landlords and renters (means different things in different local jurisdictions)
Finally, there are more radical combinations of these things, such as removing the claim of mortgage interest as a business cost for landlords, which would raise their corporate taxes and deter high leverage.
- enforce security and building standards to old buildings, this pushing new ones to be built
Japan has this and it is used to enforce new civil engineering tech for earthquake/tsunami/disaster prevention, but it also makes old not up to standard buildings becomes less valuable
I think our homes are not as technological as they should be because we see them as investments to be preserved
How do you propose to do that? If I have money to lend, I'm pretty sure I'll lend it wherever I like the return I get. So interest rates are all related to each other - they should be risk-adjusted equal, because the lenders don't care about anything else.
Something like 2/3 of people in the US are homeowners, your idea of the masses are may not be entirely accurate.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/black-wealth-is-increasin...
Most people get very worried about “death tax”, until they do the numbers on their own estate and realise either it mostly doesn’t apply to them or it’s marginal.
In the UK this is often used as a major campaign point but the number of estates actually subject to it is quite small.
And spousal transfers are hardly generational (most of the time).
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/inheritance-tax-lia...
1. https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
If you mean "the cost of end of life health care", sure, but anyone inheriting more than $12M can afford the taxes.
> Just over 7,100 estate tax returns will be filed for people who die in 2023, of which only about 4,000 will be taxable—less than 0.2 percent of the 2.8 million people expected to die in the year.
Source: https://taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-many-people-pa...