And in many cities breakneck construction activity is happening still real estate is getting very expensive.
This seems rather simplistic reason to me.
Colleges pay rent. Colleges pay salaries to people who pay rent. All those go up with high real estate prices. Further, even if the college owns a land, the money they earn on that land has to compete with what a developer who is willing to tear it down and put up a residential building which now earns higher rent or sale price.
I don’t think all the increase comes down to high real estate costs but it’s clear that high real estate costs can easily raise prices downstream across nearly every area.
Positional goods cease to be so if you substantially increase their supply - this is why Rolex, Gucci, etc are constantly worried about knockoffs.
That's difficult, for all sorts of reasons. NIMBYs protecting their investment is one aspect, but the maths of density, transport infrastructure and travel times is another big deal.
Walkable, interesting downtowns AND big floorplans AND low taxes AND abundant supply within a short travel time is a tough set of constraints.
Since second job is sold as "freedom from household drudgery" and GDP booster it can't really be challenged.
Because of government subsidies. (If you were willing to pay $100k for college and the government will give you $50k, now the college can charge $150k. Yes that's simplistic but it's the crux.)
> healthcare getting expensive
Healthcare is doubly removed from price feedbacks - patients don't pay for doctors, insurance companies do. Patients don't even pay for insurance, employers do.
Not too mention that the number of new doctors in the US is artificially constrained.
> day care getting expensive
can't help you on this one
> streaming services getting expensive
Streaming services started out undercutting cable prices. That's no longer necessary so the price is stabilizing. Plus now they are expected to produce their own content.
Expecting everything to have the same root cause is unrealistic.
> In economics, the Baumol effect, also known as Baumol's cost disease, first described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s, is the tendency for wages in jobs that have experienced little or no increase in labor productivity to rise in response to rising wages in other jobs that did experience high productivity growth.
Stuff that's made in China gets relatively cheap, so stuff that's not made in China gets relatively more expensive.
and
https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/household-size-and-the-h... which goes into more detail
Nope. It becomes slightly further from the record high numbers, but still better than at any time before 90-s.
At this point, the misery caucus is just grasping at straws. In a couple of years, the housing inventory will make even that metric irrelevant, but the price of housing will still be going up.
> The solution is to remove the very much existent density and other supply restrictions
Nope. The solution is the opposite: preserve the SFH at all costs and shut down the misery caucus. Build new cities, not new density. Create jobs outside of dense hellscapes.
Because the reality is that NOT A SINGLE CITY has lowered the housing sale prices by increasing the density of existing areas. Not a single one in the US, Europe, or Japan.
Yeah, can you then point out an example of a city where densification worked to decrease the housing sale prices?
Tokyo? Nope. Seattle? Definitely nope, even though its housing inventory grew by 25% within 12 years. Moscow? Nope.
If it's so "round Earth", then there must be some early metrics that can indicate the success of densification railroading in places where it's been tried?
For example, Minneapolis went full cookoo nuts by abolishing parking requirements and the SFH zoning in 2019. They gave out the city to be screwed up by developers. How's it faring now? Oh, the price growth not only not slowed down, it ACCELERATED: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS33460Q
Do you know Mark Twain's definition of "insanity"?
You point at few absolute price decreases which is true but don't take into account multiple variables (like population increases, inflation, tax policy) or understand higher order derivatives. In which case you've got no business arguing in these threads.
Can you point out the shortage on this graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1koDH ?
We do NOT have a housing crisis. Not even close. Housing is more affordable and of better quality than ever.
We have a DENSITY crisis. People are forced by economic forces to move to relatively few unaffordable locations.
> You point at few absolute price decreases which is true but don't take into account multiple variables (like population increases, inflation, tax policy) or understand higher order derivatives. In which case you've got no business arguing in these threads.
What "higher order derivatives"? I read most of the new research on urbanist policy. And so far everything I've seen confirms what I said.
Just stop. I’m not gonna “research” 1+1 for you.
And it's not like I'm saying anything controversial. Even urbanists admit that density increases don't lead to lower prices: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-might...