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Comment by thagsF | Hacker News Reader

And Henry Ford would reply: "Who is going to buy the cars?"

We have been living in a fake economy for quite some time where money is printed and distributed to the "tech" sector. Which isn't really "tech", but mostly entertainment (YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, ...).

Growth of the economy means nothing. The money that has been printed goes to shareholders. What the common man gets is inflation and job losses.

If you want to grow the real economy, build houses and reduce the cost of living.

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> If you want to grow the real economy, build houses and reduce the cost of living.

Yes, I wonder why it is so hard for Western countries to understand that there's no future in a place where housing is more expensive than your average salary. If may look cool for a few years until most people have left or are living on the streets.

"there's no future in a place where housing is more expensive than your average salary."

don't get me wrong, everyone want cheaper housing but not their house

I for one would love it. If I have to sell housing then I have to buy housing, it's not a benefit to me unless I reduce my quality of life.

Maybe its time we stop seeing housing as an investment and more of a place to shelter oneself from the elements. One of the core pillars of survival

Plenty of housing. The problem is, people want cheap housing in places where everyone wants to live. I don't think that will happen any time soon.

This is a non-sense that spreads because of North American style of housing. If you're talking about sprawling suburban houses then you're right. But big cities have provided reasonable housing for lots of workers for centuries. The only thing you need is to build more apartments in the cities that have an excess of job positions.

No, you can't just "build more apartments". For these new inhabitants you will need more grocery stores, more bus/subway stops and overall transportation, more hospitals, more firefighters, more restaurants, more gyms, more tennis courts, more of everything.

Of course. Big cities with all this infrastructure are nothing new. They existed in the past and are big in alive in Asia and other parts of the world. Only in North America we have this bizarre world where it seems like a strange thing to build cities and provide infrastructure for workers!

There is basically no large city outside of subsaharan African & maybe the subcontinent that has that development style and anything even approaching a sustainable 2.1 total fertility rate

There is no cheap housing anywhere in the entire state of California. In the worst and poorest parts of the state where are basically no jobs or anything the housing is still way more expensive than anyone can afford.

So move out of there. Plenty of cheap housing in the country.

A friend tried to tell me China has a real estate crisis, because the value of houses is dropping due to building to many and people are losing on their investments. I asked him if he is sure cheap and available housing is a crisis.

Everyone in the industry losing their shirts and going out of business is a crisis. It happened 15 years ago in the US and we still haven't made it back to mid 90s level of housing starts.

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