Link for the curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect Baumol plus zoning and NIMBY driven real estate hyperinflation basically explain the modern economic malaise among especially the young. I’ve also heard this called “in-deflation.” Inflation in everything you need, deflation in everything you make.
so many projects got nerfed by NIMBYs during good economic times and now are infeasible. there's more political will for change now but i'm still skeptical things will change much given the cost of construction in major metros.
Deporting or deterring much of the construction workforce certainly doesn't help either
> derelict, abandoned Italian town in Sicily That sounds like a great place to live. Good weather, quiet, Italian food & culture, safe & stable, public transit to the city…and you can work remotely.
if you can work remotely. And if Italy will let you immigrate. I would bet those two ifs fit a small percentage of the populace, unfortunately.
Yeah, I was going to comment on the remote side of things... Can't manage that at the moment, so it's a no-go for me on that ground.
Again seeing some blaming poor immigrants for this in the very first answers. Meanwhile, where do the money for OpenAI and the SpaceX IPO comes from? Who got hold of so much money? How did they got hold of it? And here's the killer question: would they, and the rules and system supporting them, change in any way if there were less immigrants?
What do you mean? Trillions move through the stock market every day from pensions, mutual funds, foreign governments, 401ks. And professional trading. I’m sure many immigrants had money on the IPO as well?
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.
It’s also a diabolical amount. My friend bought a house in San Jose, and both, the buyers and sellers agent got $50,000 each on a $2M house. They didn’t even help with the house search much.
It's worth being precise about this because it's a really important point. Most people who we call "landlords" are simultaneously a landlord and a property manager. Property management is an important and productive job. But the vast majority of such people's financial outcome is actually from being a landlord , that is doing literally nothing except holding a piece of paper granting them monopoly on a plot of land.…
I'm going to assume ignorance and try to explain why landlords exist. Of course you could already understand this and have this as an ideological stance, in which case my effort is likely wasted. Landlords assume a similar role in economy that banks do, they assume risk on your belalf. We have quantified this to an extent that you can reliably put a dollar amount on how much risk there is. When you are renting and th…
Those same landlords also control many of the levers that might cause their investment to be less profitable.
> One main driver is that there's not being built enough new housing. I recently entertained the idea of building a new house. Not terribly surprising, but worth mentioning that the time and materials to put up the structure was going cost even more than buying a used house. If nobody can afford to buy a less expensive used house then naturally nobody is going to build the much more expensive new house either. Therei…
For builders, they will buy a block of land and build many houses on it. The unit cost of a home drops dramatically when you are building 50 of them at once. The real killer for them is interest rates, as they finance the whole thing and then can pay it off when all the homes are sold. High rates make the finances much more challenging to work.
For what it is worth, said home entertained was a manufactured home, so it is already pushing economies of scale. I'd hate to see a quote for a custom home. We have not truly figured out how to make housing scale very well, though. Even our most efficient methods are very primitive as compared to virtually all other manufacturing we do. Solve that problem and the price of all homes will plummet.
Wages in america are extremely high, its just property prices are even higher.
Go tell that to Oklahomans and others still making a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour
"Basketball players are extremely tall."
"Go tell that to the middle school travel team in my neighborhood."
Why are you even making this comment? The comment you responded to was obviously talking about median wages of the entire US population. Real Wages are near all-time highs - it's just a fact, you can look up the data yourself.
Is it the wages or that shitty one bedroom apartments go for $2000+
Why not both? Wages are too low and rents are too high. The common factor: the capital class screwing over the working class.
> The common factor: the capital class screwing over the working class.
This thought terminating cliche is getting real old. What are your solutions? and what evidence do you have that those solutions will solve the problems? Shaking your fists at "the elites" and regurgitating populist slop is not going to