That functioning housing market might have been an anomaly, only lasting a generation or two. Through history it may have been much more common for most people to never be able to afford to own a home.
Anyway, growth is unsustainable: if housing keeps being a good investment for long enough, sooner or later it becomes unaffordable.
I agree it's a real problem, and we may have to get creative looking for solutions.
A possible direction would be smaller apartments in tall buildings. Quicker to build than a house and more affordable. You don’t have a lot of space in them, but when it’s located in a big city, you can spend the time outside enjoying hobbies and entertainments (the pandemic won’t last forever anyways).
Throughout history, hardly anyone owned the kind of home we got used to in the suburbs. Even when the world population was under 1 billion, most people were itinerant and got housing for being hired help, or were some kind of serfs with a tiny plot.
Communal housing was the norm in much of the world, including USSR, and it’s only recently that China built housing for everyone to move into the cities.
Doesn't change the fact that not being able to buy housing when young (whether detached homes or apartments) in the west is not a function of these countries becoming poorer but of low interest rates & municipal politics driving up housing prices.
At the end of the day, prices rise due to demand (and gentrification, or even more extreme, billionaires parking their $ in US real estate and not even living there).
There is lots of cheap housing in the USA, but no one wants to live there. Someone should start a tech hub in Detroit’s abandoned housing regions, it’s a bargain.
> Daniel Gilbert (born January 17, 1962) is an American billionaire businessman, investor, and philanthropist. He is the cofounder of Quicken Loans and founder of Rock Ventures.[3]
Downtown, but to a larger extend Midtown and Corktown changed a lot. People want to live there again.
The cost of housing is only closely coupled to the cost of land to the extent you haven’t the technology to fit more units on the same lot. The value of land should continue increasing indefinitely as it’s a function of local amenity. Who benefits from the value of land is a deep question.
Anyway, growth is unsustainable: if housing keeps being a good investment for long enough, sooner or later it becomes unaffordable.
I agree it's a real problem, and we may have to get creative looking for solutions.