The UK had a decades long phase where they built a ton of affordable housing (council housing). This program was largely dismantled under Thatcher. Also over time, building regulations became more restrictive in the wrong ways, which makes supply more expensive.
Regulation plays a large role. But the right keyword is "reform". The right outcomes don't just happen magically if you deregulate.
There are places where housing got drastically increased in recent years, like in Paris under Hidalgo (7000 units/year).
That says far more about official inflation numbers than it does commodity markets.
those with cash bleed out purchasing power
Rapid growth of cheaper housing in a town is a financial challenge for the town because it creates a larger student base without creating a meaningfully larger tax base. In towns with a commercial tax base, the costs increase more than the tax base; in towns without a commercial tax base, taxes typically increase on the oldest / most established residents - which drives fixed-income people from the homes and towns they supported for decades.
In my suburban area, there are two main arguments to anti-growth zoning: (1) people don't want the density increase; they built lives in a less-dense area by choice and want to see that choice preserved. (2) There are legitimate school funding issues and tax base issues that encourage controlling the rate of growth.
I'm dubious of _any_ argument that finds a singular cause for housing prices. It's an extremely tangled and complex issue that touches on taxation, local control vs. state control, education, property rights, politics, a cyclical capital-intensive industry, immigration and labor supply, interest rates...
Personally, I vote for denser housing and more liberal residential zoning. But I also understand and respect the opinions of my neighbors who disagree. Looser zoning gives control of land-use to capital and takes that control away from the people who built and sustained the town for, sometimes, generations.
I'd be interested to see whose opinion this is.
Did you find any intelligent criticism you can point out? I'm too lazy to trawl through endless stupidity to try and find a nugget of truth! :)
There is no shortage of land in the US. There are huge, huge empty spaces. There is only a shortage of housing in places where people want to live because local governments won’t let anyone build new housing.
Edit: Looked this up, and Bill Gates owns farmland, which is producing food, so this also wouldn't be available for people to live on anyway.
I doubt there is any significant amount of housing that is just bought and left vacant. Why would you do that? It’s a stupid and expensive place to park money. You have to pay taxes, possibly condo/co-op/HOA fees, pay someone to do maintenance and keep out squatters, pay transaction costs both buying and selling, it can’t be sold quickly.
Why would you do all that instead of just buying treasuries or some other liquid instrument that actually earns money?
There may be some of this from foreign investors that don’t have easy access to financial markets, but again, some Russian oligarch buying a $50M penthouse in Manhattan is not the reason an average 3 bed 2 bath suburban home is $700k. They are not remotely in the same market.
[0] https://www.jpmorgan.com/wealth-management/wealth-partners/l...
In high-demand areas property value often increases in value over time. You can literally “buy and hold” property, keeping it empty, doing nothing with it and expecting to sell it for a profit at some point in the future. It’s relatively safe and the rate of return can be significantly greater than inflation.
This ignores property taxes and costs of doing business of course. But there are also situations where you might want a reported tax loss on a profitable asset.
If I were extremely rich and had a lot of properties to rent in California, I’d look at relaxed zoning laws as an opportunity to buy even more properties.