Why is the answer always more real estate, and not private ownership of housing? If you don’t live in it you can’t have it.
https://www.bigissue.com/news/housing/britains-homelessness-...
Yes, getting rid of private landlords would be great but our housing crisis is far, far bigger than that.
Secondly, having a small amount of rental accommodation is useful. If I switch jobs and move cities then having somewhere to rent while I get on my feet is a good thing. I would agree that it's now gone too far though. Perhaps just having a small amount of government rental locations could solve this.
House prices are also way up. Lots of people who own them really like this, but it makes it harder to become a home owner in the first place.
If you upgrade you pay the margin, which is higher. Legal/admin/moving costs tend to be a percentage of house value, so costs are higher.
When you retire you might downsize and release a lot of equity, but that's not going to be true for most house owners (happy to be proved wrong) - downsizing is for the wealthy, if I ever downsize it will be to a cardboard box.
Most home owners will have children, prices being high negatively effects them, and finances tend to be somewhat shared (from 0% upwards...) so prices being high is a problem here too.
Maybe I'm missing something about the situation. I guess my kids will be happy for the money when I die, but it'll be easily eaten up by their housing debts.
So people without dependents; people who are very wealthy. Apart from those groups I don't really see how house value changing after purchase helps
Indeed.
But psychology: monkey likes seeing number go up.
Because as the population grows, we need an equivalent amount of new housing. Short of that, we compete for limited inventory and prices rise.
In the UK (but also most elsewhere), population no longer grows. If censuses say differently, it's because immigrants are being imported from overseas, not from any organic growth. To believe that this is righteous is a strange thing, one has to accept that British people should suffer so that immigrants can gain.
Also, any resident is part of the population.
Another issue is that historically low mortgage rates pushed up the maximum price of house that people could afford, and when rates went back up the market stalled out rather than price correct. I don't know how to fix that.