[SequoiaHope]

I think quantity is a valid concern but I also think treating housing as a speculative asset is an issue. Housing serves as a valuable speculative asset precisely because quantity is restricted by a variety of factors, but actually using it as a speculative asset raises prices significantly.

[friend_Fernando]

Relative scarcity is the necessary and sufficient condition. Either there's enough housing or there isn't (there's a bit of slack with relocations, house sharing and spare bedrooms but it's largely inconsequential.) That means that supply (i.e. quantity) is enough.

It's true that if it was impossible to speculate on housing, there would be less incentive to create artificial scarcity by e.g. lobbying for restrictive land use policies.

[SequoiaHope]

> Relative scarcity is the necessary and sufficient condition. Either there's enough housing or there isn't

This seems like an oversimplification. Speculation affects demand, so the amount of speculation is hidden within “relative scarcity”. If there is no speculation then demand is directly related to the needs and finances of potential occupants. If there is speculation then demand becomes connected to the buying power of the wealthy, and thus demand and prices are likely to be higher.

In particular, the wealthy investing class collectively have way, way more money than the renting class, so the finances of the wealthy class distort housing prices upward in ways which dwarf the supply and demand effects from actual renters moving in and out of an area.

[mlsu]

Yes, but this speculation is grounded on the possibility of extracting future rents. Which is an assumption about future relative scarcity.

We’ve all decided that it’s totally fine to artificially limit the supply of real estate. Speculation is the market (correctly, in most cases) betting that that will continue.

[SequoiaHope]

I kept rewriting my reply until I started just looking up research. I should go do something else with my day hah but it seems the affect of speculation on price is unsurprisingly complex.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S24058...

[seanmcdirmid]

That isn’t quite right. Speculators look for good deals, meaning they look at prices N years from now and try to make money on that. They aren’t pushing prices up just for existing, they are predicting higher prices and acting to take advantage of that. They are looking for second hand property that is undervalued for the horizon they are looking at.

But yes, wealthy people have more capital and leverage to participate in time-displaced arbitrage. Gentrification is a bit more productive, since investors work at making their properties more valuable at least.

[SequoiaHope]

> That isn’t quite right. Speculators look for good deals, meaning they look at prices N years from now and try to make money on that. They aren’t pushing prices up just for existing

It’s that correct? Consider NFTs. They are a speculative asset with no recurring revenue attached. The natural price, I think, is zero, but speculators push that price up based on the expected return from future buyers based on predictions of how the market will move. There are no other supply and demand effects, just speculation on sale. Of course there was a bubble but housing is more grounded in reality and real value. Still, it may demonstrate that speculation alone can raise prices.

> Gentrification is a bit more productive

In the dry economic sense of “production” yes, but at the expense of dismantling communities. Perhaps more productive and less destructive would be the approach to housing taken in Vienna. The government buys land and builds affordable housing complexes on it, and once residents stabilize and their income goes up they get to stay in the housing so the buildings become mixed income and they’re pretty nice. Near where I live West Oakland is gentrifying with a wall of corporate owned housing that is replacing the front stoops and back yards of local residents with parking garages and Teslas. It seems almost as though the community is being slowly eaten alive.

[seanmcdirmid]

> Consider NFTs. They are a speculative asset with no recurring revenue attached.

Housing isn't comparable to NFTs, all logic goes out the door when something doesn't have intrinsic value.

> In the dry economic sense of “production” yes, but at the expense of dismantling communities.

Yes: whenever cities devote resources to "clean up" a neighborhood, they are also doing this. Slums are ugly, but they are also a source of cheap housing; old buildings might not use land very effectively, but they are also a source of cheap housing (and that new dense apartment building that they knocked down the old housing to build is no longer as affordable on a unit basis).

> The government buys land and builds affordable housing complexes on it

This isn't a bad approach, though I'm not sure how it would scale to the USA. The problem with the US is that "affordable" is often a term that is applied to a few hot cities rather than in general. If all the affordable housing is in Mississippi, no one would be interested in taking it, if it is where people want to live, then we will have lots of lopsided unsustainable population movements, if we just somehow even it out affordable housing, then some people are still going to be left out of their preferred location for housing.

[SequoiaHope]

Yeah I was trying to reason about the affects of speculation but it turns out that of course there’s plenty of research on the topic, and the affects are broad and complex. Unfortunately I don’t have time to read this right now but you may find it interesting:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S24058...

For public housing, there is also the approach taken by Singapore. This article discusses both and may interest you. What I think matters most is we understand that it is possible to have more people in stable affordable housing, and we accept nothing less.

https://www.shareable.net/public-housing-works-lessons-from-...

[bobthepanda]

While this is true you can’t really speculate on something with ample abundance. Speculation requires scarcity to work.

[wat10000]

Which is why it gets such a bad rap. Some of it is deserved: speculation can involve taking a scarce resource and making it even scarcer. But even milder forms can look bad, because they show up alongside scarcity, and that whole correlation/causation thing gets people thinking. M

[nikitaga]

Just saying "speculation" doesn't really paint the picture of what's going on. In 2010-s everyone here blamed foreign speculators hiding in the shadows, but we live in a different, worse, world now.

This country's housing and immigration & temp. resident policies are absolutely out of sync, intentionally. In 2021 they've changed the rules to add hundreds of thousands of people overnight, but did not build anywhere close to the corresponding amount of housing. Then they did it next year again, and again, and again, and they're still doing it, and the next government plans to continue doing it.

This isn't mere speculation. This is deliberate policy to manufacture a housing crisis. To not only keep the pre-existing crisis going, but to deliberately and methodically escalate it. Politicians profit both from their own investment properties and from bribes (ahem campaign contributions, speaking fees, board positions, ...) paid to them by all kinds of businesses who profit from oversupply of labour and undersupply of housing.

"Speculation" implies taking significant risk, often in an under-regulated market. But the current situation is nothing like that – there is barely any risk, when both the supply (zoning & construction) and demand (population growth) sides of the market are heavily regulated with the intent to raise prices. Capital is all you need to reap the profits, pretty much.

[gottorf]

> the next government plans to continue doing it

Asking as someone not that familiar with Canadian politics, is this "the next government" as in the Liberal one that would replace Trudeau after his resignation, or the (likely) Conservative one that would be in power after the general election?

[willhslade]

Conservative. What is likely to happen is that the Liberal party picks a new leader and that leader calls an election.

[nikitaga]

The latter. Conservatives have shown no serious interest in reducing immigration. Their politicians get all the same profits from the crisis, plus the votes of socially conservative immigrants on top. Canadian politics is full of weird alliances.