When the balance is not broadly possible, our system seems to favor "home prices must always go up", at least in the short term.
You can first build more homes - prices go down and more people come into the city and prices start going back up because of increased economic activity.
Yes. The entry point to ownership lies within a state of affordability.
> but the end goal is to improve utility of land
For who? If it's anyone other than typical wage earners, this goal competes with home ownership by pressuring ownership costs upward and away from affordability.
For context, home purchases are mostly (if not fully) impossible for typical wage earners.
We shouldn’t mind if home ownership becomes costly if more economic activity results out of it. More economic activity means more money in the hands of wage earners (just that proportionally more money is spent on housing which is okay).
I did not. 25% of US households make under $40/yr.
(based on 2022 data that 25% of all US households make ~$35k/yr or less. +10% for minorities.)
There's no good reason to expect homes to magically appreciate.
If you want prices to drop in popular areas then we have to make it easy for people to actually build houses and increase supply in popular areas. Of course giving homeowners a say about whether housing is allowed to be built near them, of course they are going to vote against it because they have an incentive to keep prices high.
I was in the Midwest recently and it was wild to see a block of high density houses in the middle of farmland. Houses that look exactly the same, shoved onto tiny lots with little gap between them, and surrounded by miles of corn.
These are obviously attractive to developers as they are maximized profit vehicles, but the downsides to everyone else are enormous.
In my opinion, we need to build housing above stores, so communities can actually work. Build a town, not a subdivision. What’s the point of a $50k home if you have to spend two hours a day driving to make it work?
I would really love to see a billionaire tackle this. There's loads of empty, or nearly empty, space in this country. Heck, take over a town if you really want! Sink a few million dollars into kickstarting small-scale urbanism.
I'm not usually much of a billionaire-hater, but today's lot for the most part seems to be uninspired, when it comes to projects like this.
This is why the only solution we see are maximized profit vehicles. The qualities that would make someone want to create a lovely place to live exclude them from making billions of dollars in the first place.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't
This is part of the housing supply mystery. It's not very profitable to build housing when you are punished for building upwards and making good use of the land
I don't think people quite wrap their head around the fact that the US population love their cars and their huge subdivisions. A massive percentage of the US have no desire for walkable cities.
It is a bizarre alien thought to me, too, but it has become very clear to me.
Or the people living in them might be retired, or work from home, or work on local farms. Whatever the case, they're not driving a long way for work.
(1) Make housing easier to build.
(2) Receive sufficient housing supply.
Even if you make it easier to build houses, there is a market for the capital that housing developers access. Currently, that market also assumes that prices will go up (or at least not go down). Thus, once we go far enough past the point where existing prices are higher than the return on new housing, even all of our dream reforms may not lead to a flood of new housing starts.
I want to be clear: loosening zoning, reforming regulations, and so forth, are all still worth doing. It is better than nothing. But if the result is a shock of supply, the financing for new homes from the biggest players will dry up. That doesn't make a solution impossible, but it does complicate it.
You could very easily live in a big city and work a job to save up 50k or a down payment for a 50k mortgage and then buy one of these cheap houses to live in. But most people don’t want to do that. They want nice weather and fun things to do, access to a good job market, and good schools. But the reason why those houses are 50k is just because of simple supply and demand. There is very little demand to live in Louisiana or West Virginia and tons of demand to live in the Bay Area or Seattle. If you increase supply, eventually prices will fall and accessibility will increase.
Also these areas have poor education systems for kids.
https://www.propertyunder50k.com/list_view.php?show_set_aler...