| I tried to go lower on the price of a house once because nobody else was bidding on it during the pandemic. The owners decided to just leave it empty and move to another country. They probably made 400k by leaving the house empty. Every time I look at houses, I hear the same story: There's a lot of people who have been waiting to buy houses from the previous year, so there's a lot of competition now. The problem is this will always be true if there's more people looking for houses than houses. This is not a left-right problem. The right and left will equally say we should not build housing. NIMBYism is common across the political spectrum. The most left places like New York have let the housing situation get so bad that now anyone that arrives there is instantly homeless because there is simply nowhere to live[0]. This is New York, the place everyone thinks of when you say "the land of opportunity" and the location of the statue that everyone cites whenever Trump says something about migrants. A lot of stories I read these days I think about The Housing Theory of Everything. Why is everything so expensive? Why are employees so expensive? Why are these expensive employees not able to pay their bills? It seems like a large part of this is that we have structured our economy to pour all of our money into land. Not landowners, land. When you're working for a faang but paying a 5-10k mortgage for a condo, how rich do you really feel? How would it feel to be the ones that didn't get a place to live? How can there ever be a middle class when those that don't make above a certain amount just end up homeless? When there is more housing than people, then people have freedom to ask for better or cheaper housing. Until then, we will be like crabs in a barrel, pulling other people down for a place to live. [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/nyregion/migrants-homeles... |