I make 200k and spend >60% on housing in California. Pay ~75k in income taxes,leaving 125k,then another 20k in property taxes, then 60k mortgage. Leaves about 40k for bills and retirement.
Exactly. Regulations have made it so expensive and difficult to build housing in many parts of California (and other major cities in the US), that the demand outstrips the supply and it leads to unaffordable housing.
I keep seeing memes about housing costs in the 1960s being so cheap. I also wonder what the housing regulations were at this time. I'm guessing pretty light compared to now.
There was a lot fewer people back then, in most places the ratio of people to available housing was much lower. The network effects were also far weaker, expensive air travel and worse communications meant that people didn't move to big cities as often.
The most extreme example the world has to offer is not representative of what would happen if the US legalized housing. HK has almost 200x the population density of the US and almost 100x the population density of California.
Slums can be found in nearly every country's history. Housing regulations are important: it's zoning restrictions that cause availability problems, not quality regs, and it's important to make the distinction. (When your community is exempt from zoning regulations, you can do things about the problem: https://macleans.ca/society/sen%CC%93a%E1%B8%B5w-vancouver)
But zoning restrictions on housing maintain the prices of existing real-estate "investments" (see https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/housing-should-be-afford...). We're not going to have change until real-estate owners abandon the idea that housing is supposed to be profitable.
(Btw, I still think "don't build on floodplains"-type restrictions are important, even though those are also zoning restrictions.)
Regulation is the culprit, though. Even if you banned Blackrock, foreign investors, and multiple investment properties, rents would be unchanged because the housing stock is simply deficient near people's workplaces, and it's regulations that prevent that from changing.
