Data is Beautiful

I'm surprised no one has identified the core issue here: local restrictions - NIMBYs. A National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) / NMHC study found that government regulations across all levels (fees, permitting, compliance) account for 40.6% of multifamily development costs on average nationally.

Once a person owns a home in a location, restricting supply means their home goes up in value, and their neighbourhood stays as cozy as it is today. This is why Georgism (championed by every notable economist for more than a century) is the only way we solve this. A land value tax aligns individual incentives with best social outcomes. People are much more reluctant to sit on unused land if they're being charged 5% per year in tax. They build up. They aggressively lobby their local politicians to make it as easy as possible to build. Supply booms.

This is a solved problem. It's not complicated. Austin did it. They cut regulation, developers went crazy building apartments, and rents keep dropping. Landlords have to compete to get tenants now, offering everything from 3 months free rent to gym membership and gift certificates.

A median house price and median salary should also be calculated, those datas aren't very useful without understanding the economic condition of the people

Same reason we can't build high speed rail, have to get approval by every property owner rich enough to hire a lawyer to build anything here.

It's not that they can't build housing. It's that housing is bought up by private equity and Monopoly prices are set by the algorithm. There are no many vacant homes and apartments being kept vacant to drive up the cost.

Saying 'we need to build more houses and deregulation is the key' only serves the oligarchy

The source article:

https://www.ft.com/content/dca3f034-bfe8-4f21-bcdc-2b274053f0b5

Archived:

https://web.archive.org/web/20241002175430/https://www.ft.com/content/dca3f034-bfe8-4f21-bcdc-2b274053f0b5

Three distinct factors are at work here...

...a shared culture that values the privacy of one’s own home

...the planning regimes in all six anglophone countries are united in facilitating objections to individual applications

...Anglophone planning frameworks give huge weight to environmental conservation, yet the preference for low-density developments fuels car-dependent sprawl and eats up more of that cherished green and pleasant land.

The author's conclusion:

Ultimately, whether the goal is tackling the housing crisis, protecting the environme or boosting productivity, the answer to so many woes in the English-speaking world is to unburden ourselves of our anti-apartment exceptionalism.

This completely and utterly ignores the capitalist pressures that also hit building materials. Just look at wood prices in the US. Prices have skyrocketed outside of the housing supply as well.

TL;DR: Capitalism is cancer on anything required to live, including the vast supply chain for such goods.

One reason is that people want houses and it's not sustainable. Large cities need to go up and living in apartment in a high rise should be a norm.

The problem in the word itself even - housing.

I’d blame Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and their disciples on both sides of the Atlantic. Not sure if a legal system based on Roman civil law/the Napoleonic code would have slowed neoliberalism or whether it’s merely correlated with the cultural divide between the former British Empire and continental Europe.

Also, isn’t Singapore a common law jurisdiction with a solid state-backed programme of building housing?

So the supply has gone up, and the price has gone up. 🤔 Sounds like a gatekept bubble.

Or... These are very different places with different constraints.

For example, the US is comprised of 50 states - construction has to meant federal, state, county, municipality codes, and then any federal or state agencies that have a say on construction possibly affecting water ways, natural habitat, etc.

The bureaucratic process is staggering.

I've went down the YouTube rabbit hole on this.

My favorites have been dirt-inspired builds utilizing technology found in the animal Kingdom beyond humans. Termites are often cited.

Buildings that have natural AC regardless of the season and mostly passively. Ventilation structure that encourages heat sink/release.

And many are made of just dirt, which seems pretty smart. Enormous insulation values. Endless supply.

Interesting. It's weird how all over the place civil law jurisdictions are in the right graph - some have seen the same price increase anyway, while Italy has seen them actually go down.

Does it have to do with how those dwellings are being used in different cultures, maybe?

Edit: They're on totally different scales, d'oh. So it actually means nothing.

Tbf in the US at least, we don't actually need to build any homes. We have more than enough vacant homes to house everyone

I'm choosing to believe this is just a weird expression of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Pros of English: cool words like petrichor Cons: cognitive bias against construction