[bell-cot]

Ignore the blame-the-Boomers angle. Over the past half-century or so, the ratio of Americans to square feet of residential housing has been falling relentlessly, while the cost per square foot of residential housing has been rising relentlessly. No matter how you try to slice that pie, there's gonna be a grim shortage of housing for the 99%.

[EA-3167]

In that same time the US population has essentially doubled, and while I know how much people like to talk about it, this is what happens when populations explode over short time frames... limited resources become more scarce and more expensive.

Putting aside Malthusian arguments about how many people the world can theoretically support, when it comes to lifestyle the results are clear. It isn't a perfect analogy, but Neal Stephenson got to the heart of it a long time ago:

"...once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity..."

Well that's the trend. A world bloated with people, supported by burning non-renewable resources from energy to agriculture, and which is now connected such that everyone wants access to the top lifestyle... it doesn't work. The obvious reality is that you can't convince people to settle for a worse life, so you need to work on reducing the population.

And yet the story of the age is that falling birth rates are going to doom everywhere from Japan to China, the US to Europe.

[robocat]

> this is what happens when populations explode over short time frames... limited resources become more scarce and more expensive.

New Zealand (similar population and size to Oregon) has an immigrant population[1] of ~1/3 and we are a poorer nation BUT houses are available here - despite our population growth significantly exceeding the USA.

If houses are not available in say Oregon, it isn't due to "population explosion" there. And it isn't due to lack of land or population density (NZ is similar to Oregon for both).

You can skim what you get for your money in NZ by looking at the major online house website (1.6 million NZD is 1 million USD): https://www.trademe.co.nz/a/property/residential/sale

Population growth graphs: NZ: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NZL/new-zealand/popula... US: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/popu...

You can also compare against Australia which also has a high percentage of foreign born naturalized citizens.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...

[wmf]

Nah, this is wrong and cynical. We could have easily built the housing we need but we made it too hard through zoning.

[EA-3167]

People to need to understand that human nature and incentives are easy to talk about changing, and nearly impossible to change. It's why we're slow-walking towards catastrophic climate change.

[bell-cot]

> We could have easily built the housing we need...

If mom, dad, and 4 kids were content to share a 1k square foot "starter" house in 1970, but now all 6 of 'em (parents are divorced) want their own 2.5k square foot McMansion - that's a 15X increase in housing stock requirements. Admitting that the overall demand-side numbers aren't that bad..."no zoning" would still not be anything like a cure for the problem.