"Increasing housing supply will absolutely decrease housing prices." True if it's the government building the houses, otherwise you hit a point where construction margins tank well before market saturation is reached. In practice new housing developments have a tendency to drag local real estate prices up (see also: gentrification).
That may be true in a very local area, but if you build something really nice in an area that wasn't very nice, the units that used to be mid are now near the bottom and have to lower their prices.
> In practice new housing developments have a tendency to drag local real estate prices up (see also: gentrification).
This is absolutely false, not true, disproven, and made up.
Social housing builders are good for many reasons, 1) they provide competition to the public market, and when efficient don't need to return profit to shareholders so provide a very good competitor in places like Finland and Singapore, 2) social housing builders smooth out the business cycle, because new housing is needed just as much when at the downturn of the business cycle as at the top, so it greatly helps provide stable employment and a stable workforce for housing construction, greatly improving housing.
But the idea that new idea drives up housing prices in any way is, at best, a fiction. It's mostly a lie from landlords and homeowners to try to justify their continued extraction of profits from their idleness.
"This is absolutely false, not true, disproven, and made up."
Someone should tell the local housing market that then, because this pattern has consistently manifest over the last 20 years here. Without exception everyone I've seen make this claim isn't invested in residential real estate and hasn't closely watched how prices shift in response to new construction. In any event if you're trying to advance the claim that gentrification is a myth you're going to need to bring some serious proof to back that.
> But there’s a long way to go between current property prices and raw construction costs.
How much? Searching a bit suggests that net profit margin in housing industry is about 8.7%
Consindering an investor can get ~3.75% in zero risk T-bills without lifting a shovel, that's about an extra 5% net profit to get involved in building housing.
Which isn't nothing, it's a decent profit. But I also wouldn't call extra 5% a huge difference.
The mistake you're making here is in the assumption that voters have any meaningful input on policy. Given the overwhelming majority of policy at both the state and federal level is drafted by lobbyists this assumption seems questionable at best.
You may be the worst real estate investor I've ever heard of. If housing was actually a lousy investment Blackrock and Berkshire Hathaway wouldn't have real estate holdings and they're both in the residential market in a big way.
> You may be the worst real estate investor I've ever heard of.
You may very well be right. However, everyone I hear saying how much money they made off of their house neglects to mention any of the expenses I listed.
Sure, I've seen all manner of goofy talking points (both pro and con) around the financials of home ownership. Conversely everyone I've heard say lost their ass on residential real estate either bought too much house in a market overrun with speculation (Hi Florida) or move frequently.
As popular as this narrative is it's all revisionist propaganda intended to distract from the actual culprits. "We" never stopped building houses. What we stopped building is 1k sq ft starter homes and made manufactured housing uneconomical, thereby effectively removing the bottom rung on the ladder of home ownership. These weren't consensus-based decisions made by older generations. They are changes to the real estate landscape that were intentionally engineered by a handful of massive developer firms. Even this ignores that a large part of the rise in housing demand is due to a flood of economic refugees from rural communities that have been gutted by a combination of pro-corporate neoliberal economic policies and the corporatization of the AG industry.
You correctly indicate that all of this is a transfer of wealth to those individuals who are already wealthy. Where you're mistaken is in suggesting this is a generational transfer when it is corporations and by extension the 0.01% of the wealthiest individuals in our society that are the clear beneficiaries.
Yes. A lot of this is down to environmental restrictions and building codes. Every rule a good idea in isolation, but taken together they mean you can no longer build an inexpensive house.
I have a builder friend who told me in the SF East Bay he can't make money building houses except for 4000 sq ft luxury homes on tiny lots.
For me the "oh shit" moment is when I realized that otherwise sane professionals, frequently in positions of authority, insist on taking these tools seriously. Zero thought put into any of the implications around unchecked anthropomorphism, security issues, employee knowledge retention, liability and other legal concerns, etc.
"You trade good salary for your name in the credits"
When did that become a thing? When Gears of War bonus checks started hitting Epic's parking lot went from a random collection of reasonable vehicles to looking like an exotic car show. I'm fairly certain every dev that worked on Gears or Unreal could have retired off the bonus payouts.
I love comments like this, mostly for the unbridled optimism and historical ignorance they embody. If you truly believe that a loose collection of small arms is the kryptonite that the command and control apparatus of the US is vulnerable to I recommend familiarizing yourself with what happened at Waco and Ruby Ridge. Both cases vividly display what a few Suburbans full of motivated feds can do to an entire compound of well-armed civilians over the course of a long weekend.
It doesn't. If it did there'd be massive unmet demand for labor in $sector. There is no value for $sector that is currently reporting being short roughly 100 million headcount. So unless you're counting currently non-existence social safety programs or CCC-style government make-work programs that light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.
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