I live alone in my house. It was built in the late 1940s. This house likely housed couples with children, 3-5 people, instead of the 1 it holds today.
Coupling up would reduce housing demand, and should in turn lower prices as availability increases.
In the circles I run in, most people who don't live with a romantic partner have at least two long-term roommates, mostly friends from college or made in adulthood. Several of these three to five person groups own detached homes together that no pair of them could possibly afford.
Famously, Shawnee, KS banned "co-living" a few years back, because (in the city council's opinion) too many people were living with others.
But it doesn't seem to be enough. The median age of first time marriage keeps creeping up and up. It's over 30 now in the US and higher in the EU.
Not sure what real tax breaks there is if both people make similar income. Otherwise if only one works, they’ll definitely see lower taxes thanks to the doubling of the standard deduction (plus exemption for the spouse).
I get the population will still grow, and we will likely still need some amount of housing growth over time, but we don't need nearly as much as we think we do.
We also don't need to avoid the middle of the country. The population has been moving to the coasts, while the Midwest has lost a ton of people since the manufacturing moved elsewhere. With a lot of companies, there is no reason they can't be in the midwest where there are a lot more affordable homes, and a lot of space. We should be looking to draw people from these HCOL areas to help bring back these cities. It seems like a win-win situation.
This is one of the arguments for high-speed rail. The primary reason to move to a HCOL city is employment opportunities. The rapid growth of rail, both street cars and commuter trains, early last century allowed metropolitan regions to expand by allowing people to work downtown but live further away, dramatically easing housing pressure. The advent of the interstate highway system originally had a similar effect, though later also a fracturing effect, especially outside the few cities capable of holding their core.
High-speed rail promises to achieve the same thing, just as it has elsewhere around the world. Certainly it's a promise CAHSR is selling, and a major reason we should strongly support it. And it's one of the primary justifications it runs through the Central Valley rather than taking the shortest route between SF and LA. It puts Central Valley cities squarely into the SF and LA metro regions, not only creating opportunities for existing Central Valley residents, but allowing people to move further out, reducing housing pressure. You simply can't achieve the same thing with bigger airports and more flights, not until flying cars become ubiquitous.
https://hsr.ca.gov/communications-outreach/maps/
What we ought to do is encourage more economic development and business growth in the Central Valley instead of trying to cram more and more stuff into the Bay Area. The infrastructure there is already overloaded, and it's geographically constrained by water and mountains.
Paralleling I-5 seems like a much stronger argument, though I'm not sure that would have been better and it may have never gotten off the ground at all. For one thing, Stockton, Fresno, and Bakersfield might not have supported CAHSR if it bypassed them. But also, AFAIU, Federal funding was contingent on following the routes laid out in the national high-speed rail plan drawn up in the 1990s, and the recommended California line went through the big Central Valley cities.
What's really held back CAHSR has been the law suits and related dithering (e.g. environmental reviews more prolonged because of the expected law suits). That sapped momentum, and momentum is everything; time is money. That loss of momentum also means CAHSR is having a much harder time getting over the humps, literally (tunneling through the mountains) and figuratively (financial support for the tunneling). If construction had proceeded as fast as it has in most other countries, people wouldn't be perennially debating the chosen CAHSR route.
I would argue that if they aren’t there now, there probably is a reason that you are overlooking.
If you need non-remote employees at all (and if you don’t, where the company is located with regard to housing doesn’t mean anything), then there is a cost to not locating where people with the skills you want currently are, and also a cost to not locating in a place where the people you want to hire would want to be.
> We should be looking to draw people from these HCOL areas to help bring back these cities. It seems like a win-win situation.
I’m sure when you just state it as a goal without a concrete plan or costs, it seems that way: we should just wave a magic wand and make people’s preferences changed so what isn’t in demand is in more demand and what is in demand os in less demand. Simple!
When you try to come up with w concrete plan to do that is when it becomes more problematic.
There are not enough houses, and you are encouraging more long-term demand for houses…
> We also don't need to avoid the middle of the country. The population has been moving to the coasts
Maybe a better question to ask yourself is why people prefer living on the coasts. What government policies draw them from the cheap places to the expensive places? How can you copy those policies to convince people to move back?
The number of houses doubles, but not their volume.