[bryanlarsen]

> "Too much housing"? What does that even mean?

It means recession, like 2008 in the US and today in China.

Or at least that was the common wisdom post-2008. Today's problems are at least partially because we implicitly discouraged building to prevent 2008 from recurring.

It seems that the 2008 common wisdom was wrong.

[TulliusCicero]

That was caused by financial malfeasance underlying the mortgages that propped up demand beyond the underlying economic strength, not because it was too easy to build things.

The idea I'm proposing isn't building behind what demand truly is or should be, but just matching demand. Right now, prices and vacancy rates tell us that demand eclipses supply.

[bryanlarsen]

And the massive price drops of 2008 signaled that supply exceeded demand and that builders should stop building.

And they did.

Price signals were wrong, we should have kept building.

P.S. Canada did not have massive price drops in 2008, and did not stop building. Canada builds a lot more housing per capita than the US, but Canada also has substantially more immigration per capita than the US so Canada's problems are primarily demand side rather than the primarily supply side problems the US sees.

[TulliusCicero]

It's definitely harder to analyze building for people actually buying homes vs renting, simply because buying property is susceptible to bubbles in a way that doesn't happen for people renting. People don't go irrationally beyond their means for rentals in the hope that the rental will appreciate in value in the long run and they'll be able to "hold onto it", because it's a rental.

Something similar happened to Spain recently, where there was a huge building bubble before (real estate was an insane % of the economy IIRC) and now they're not building enough.

[HDThoreaun]

You have misunderstood china's housing crisis. Its a financial crisis caused by mismanagement by the central government, not an oversupply of housing. The problem is that there are extremely limited investment opportunities in China because most companies are owned by the government. Without the ability to invest in equities the chinese turned to real estate creating a bubble, prices were completely divorced from utility. North america does not have a bubble, prices are high because supply is limited and people want houses, not because buyers think it is an amazing investment.

[bryanlarsen]

2008 was also about financial mismanagement.

[HDThoreaun]

Exactly, neither was because of "too much housing"

[bryanlarsen]

Which is what my original comment said. When a comment says "people say X", it's a statement saying "people are wrong".