International investment and local rules push prices up faster than supply

Housing is globally unaffordable in the entire industrialized world.

Everybody knows why, but people are desperately looking for scapegoats because the truth is too uncomfortable.

The people to blame can easily be found among your own family and friends. It might even be you yourself. It is probably your parents.

Everybody who works for a living has relatives who have become wealthy by real estate value appreciation. If they're your parents or grandparents, they most probably earn as much yearly from real estate appreciation doing nothing as you do by working full time and being fully taxed for your hard labour.

If they're your uncle and aunt who are still working, then they have a completely different life from a renter working full time, even if it's the same job. Your money as a renter is gone into a black hole, while their money goes into paying off their lucrative real estate or into a very comfortable life if it's already paid off. Unless they are ambitious, they will stay working for whatever salary, keeping salaries from growing. Because they need the stable income. They have no reason to put any effort into a career, since that same effort pays much more being put into real estate.

Outside of the USA any full time working expert in his field can never earn as much per hour in wages in any job as he will earn in real estate value increase by doing home renovations - even if he has no skills in home renovations. Even if he is the leading expert in his field in his nation.

People will look for scapegoats; billionaires, foreign investors, expats. There are dozens of countries with no billionaires, no foreign investments and no rich expats who have a housing crisis. You know that billionaires aren't the problem.

If you have a large percentage of your population who do not work, or who work pretend jobs, or who work real jobs but just at part of their capacity, then it's no surprise that the rest of the population has to work hard to compensate for them. Everything around us is the result of hard work, and if somebody is living comfortably without working that means somebody else is providing for them. Food on their plate doesn't come from the job they worked 30 years ago. It comes from somebody working today. The same for everything.

Until people start admitting what's going on, the problem won't be solved. It's a deliberately created problem by tying the money supply to housing as an effort to decrease the population. Now we're seeing population collapse and total destruction of the industrialized world for the limitless greed of the current old generation. The near future will be very different than what people now are used to. We're already seeing changes and should talk about them instead of pretending and telling lies.

Here is the abstract of the paper this article is about(Global Capital and Local Assets: House Prices, Quantities, and Elasticities):

“”” We estimate price elasticities of housing supply for U.S. cities by examining the impact of foreign purchases on housing prices and quantities. After other countries introduced foreign-buyer taxes beginning in 2011, both house prices and quantities increased more in locations with high foreign-born populations. A 1% increase in global capital inflows, instrumented with tax policy changes scaled by immigrant exposure, increased prices and quantities by 3% and 0.5%, respectively, over 2011–2018. We combine these estimates to construct new local supply elasticities. Compared to prior estimates, our elasticities are more inelastic and change cities’ relative rankings. “””

So it would seem the focus of the research was very much foreign investment in housing.

Where do you draw a line? 100 years? 200? 500? Especially if buildings age nicely and they’re still considered good-looking.

I’m in Europe and here if people suggested to tear down some art noveau buildings because they’re just 100-150 years old… I’d be absolutely furious. Don’t get me started on buildings from 200 or 300 years ago.

With US having much less old buildings, I totally get why people want to preserve such buildings.

I'm pretty sure paris looked looked nothing like now 100 years ago. Some other buildings had to come down to put up that art noveau building. I'm pretty sure someone would have been complaining about how that changes the character of the city they grew up in.

To directly answer your question about where to draw the line a simple heuristic is to leave public buildings alone. This can even include a privately owned shop that is accessible to the public. They are part of the cities culture. Private homes in the other hand shouldn't be protected.

Paris looked different 200 years ago. The most of rebuilt happened about 170 years ago. And people are in love with Montmartre which survived the rebuild ended up vastly older than the rest of the city. I’d even dare to say many people think of Montmartre style Paris rather than the rebuild.

Exemptions like you suggest would just open the gates for fancy corruption schemes. Here the public is okay-ish about historical buildings changes hands specifically because of strict rules.

A lot of public institutions are now moving from historical buildings to new buildings in outskirts because old buildings are expensive to maintain and not flexible enough for modern office working. And those historical buildings frequently get renovated (or, sometimes, reverted to) apartments. And the public is fine in general.

Excuse me if I’m wrong, but most of business activity is already not in SF. But people love living in SF for it’s charm. If you destroy the charm for the sake of lowering prices… why would people pick SF-proper instead of same boring buildings outside of the peninsula?