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by pchristensen
2578 days ago
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It's the 7%/yr for decades that really gets you. There are articles about San Francisco from the 80s about how it will become impossibly expensive and drive out longtime residents if they don't increase housing production. Multiply that shortage in construction by 40 years and you end up hundreds of thousands of units short. Seattle is actually doing fairly well, considering how fast people are moving here. Washington had more people move there than Texas (at 4x the population) and a higher % of the population than Florida. There's no way to build housing fast enough to accommodate that without tons of greenfield, but we'll see how the next 10 years go. https://www.insider.com/us-states-people-are-moving-to-2019-... |
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To make it clearer what I'm saying, my parents bought their house in South Carolina in June of 2009 for about $130,000. Last month it went at just north of $195,000. If you had done exactly the same thing in Seattle and were subject to the median growth in housing prices that home would have sold last month for $205,000.
It's not chump change, but it isn't a night-and-day difference either. What I think it underscores is the difference between the actual problem we face (homes here are expensive) and the symptom we expect to see from theory (demand has skyrocketed -> home prices are skyrocketing). Because we don't see the symptom predicted by theory, I have to question whether the remedy the theory calls for is appropriate.