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Priced out of home ownership

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Re: Priced out of home ownership

#601

Post by Qwertious »

Terr_ wrote: post #574
downrightmike wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every state west of the Mississippi has at least 50% of all land owned by the Fed Gov and isn't used at all. We have plenty of land, that isn't a real problem.

Much of that are involves forests far away from where people would want to live anyway. Often without roads. When people say the issue is land, that usually implie s a very particular smaller subset of land which is in proximity other populations, economic centers, and with certain features and infrastructure.

There are also plenty of houses in recently a abandoned ghost towns. The catch is that they were mostly abandoned due to lack of jobs nearby, meaning nobody could afford to live there.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#602

Post by jeffbee »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #576
jeffbee wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you have shifting baseline syndrome. Omaha last year built fewer houses than had built 25 years ago, but the city is a third larger than it was 25 years ago. So in fact it is building slower than it did in the past.

I don't doubt you have the numbers. I've only been here three years. I live on the west end of town where (seemingly) all the new construction is going on.

Sure.

New housing units permitted: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OMAH531BPPRIV

Population Omaha (note: change in statistical area): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OMAPOP

Housing starts per 1000 residents: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OMAPOP

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#603

Post by mym1990 »

tsss wrote: post #241
mym1990 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Land is definitely not cheap in places people actually want to live, and land is the thing that is appreciating over time, not the structure.

The building does appreciate sometimes, at least here in Germany because the increasing absurdity of bureaucracy and regulations make the same class of house more and more expensive to build. At the same time, "lower classes" of houses become outright illegal to erect, leaving only the luxury segment for new buildings. Old buildings have grandfather privilege and thus become more expensive than an equivalent new buil…

Right, I'd figured there are exceptions to my assessment, and my view is only from the US. Many homes in the US are are seemingly being built with lower quality/faster timelines, and I personally would not want to see what they look like in 30 years...

There is also the consideration that "lifestyle" appreciation can also happen. If an area gets really built up, more things are happening in the neighborhood that make it a more appealing place to live in, the allure of that lifestyle will push people to buy homes that are probably not worth much in another location.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#605

Post by __turbobrew__ »

ZoomerCretin wrote: post #458
cgh wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, at one time it was estimated that roughly 1/3 of Vancouver’s condo supply was vacant. So the city implemented an empty homes tax [0] and promptly raised $115,000,000 in tax revenue [1]. However, the tax is still far too low and it contains various loopholes that allows developers to hold condos empty for years until deep-pocketed buyers show up [2]. Vancouver isn’t unique. Housing is being traded like poker chip…

Vancouver has obscene housing prices because the city and the politically connected spend tens of thousands of hours fighting against any new housing, and any new supply. Just look at what happened when the Squamish Nation decided they were going to build high rises on the land they were given: https://reason.com/volokh/2024/03/14/canadian-indigeneous-na... The entire city and all of the NIMBYs cried about their "nei…

British Columbia passed province wide zoning to allow quad plexes on every single family home lot, so hopefully that will help.

Vancouver is full of a population which kicked out the ladder after they got theirs. We moved away a few years ago and haven’t regretted it since.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#606

Post by 3vidence »

Canada in particular has a very strange housing affordability issue... artificial growth!

Our population is currently increasing by over 1 million people each year and it is 98% immigration.

I think an odd effect of very very high immigration is that everyone who arrives is presumably of working age and needs to be housed outside of a family unit. This puts immense pressure on a housing supply that is already decades behind where it should be and as a result prices are exploding.

Canada as a country has a population of about ~40 million people. The main country we are getting our immigration from is India with a population of nearly 2 billion. There is no possible world in which Canada can construct enough housing for the nearly infinite supply of people that it seems to be importing

A recent study showed it currently takes on average 10 years to go from acquiring a piece of land to building an apartment. This is clearly problematic but there is a physical limitation on how fast housing can be constructed.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#607

Post by kazinator »

tmnvix wrote: post #274

People intuitively jump to the conclusion that the problem is caused by a lack of building. While more building would help, a lack of it isn't the main cause of this problem. Ask yourself, do Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US, Britain, Ireland, etc, all have the same inability to build or is there maybe some other common cause? In my view this is symptomatic of a more fundamental issue - global asset price infla…

Speaking of Canada; here the problem is the unwillingness to build, coupled with rampant immigration, fueling a real-estate bubble that is compounded by speculators (foreign and domestic). Cheap money throughout the 2000's didn't help either.

I've been told that immigration isn't a driver for the housing problems in the USA though, interestingly.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#608

Post by aoeusnth1 »

xbar wrote: post #518
roenxi wrote: post #19

I think it is a mistake to write an entire article without talking about supply and demand. Demographics are one of the lest surprising things in statistics, they can sometimes be predicted decades out from an effect arriving. Housing construction is similarly easy to observe. I'd personally bet that there is a gentle imbalance appearing between how much energy the average person can lay claim to vs. how much they ne…

Unfortunately, there is excess demand generated by non-human corporate entities. There is not a supply/demand problem among humans-who-need-a-place-to-live. But there is investor demand for an investment vehicle that has the tax and asset benefits that homes offer. The consequence is that the buying power in the market by humans-who-need-a-place-to-live is relatively weak when they compete against financial investmen…

There was a factual statement buried in there: that there is an equal amount of extra supply to match the demand growth from people who need to live somewhere. This is simply not true — population growth is outstripping meager supply growth in most cities in the US in most other western countries. If you disagree with this statement of fact, please provide citations.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#609

Post by onion2k »

listenallyall wrote: post #356
onion2k wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That definitely wasn't the case in the 1990s through to about 2020. House prices doubled about every 10 years in some areas while interest rates were about 2% on average. Housing has been by far the best small investment open to most people. The problem now is that property buying at scale for the long term is a model private funds are trying, interest rates are going up, and housing supply at the lower end of the sc…

Not disagreeing with the general assessment however let's stick with facts... mortgage rates decreased during much of that period but were still above 6 through most of the 90s and even at the lowest, didn't get all the way down to 2.0% https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US

I didn't say mortgage rates. I wasn't saying it was cheap to buy a house. I was saying that buying a house was a better investment compared to interest rates eg putting the money in the bank. I could have made that clearer.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#610

Post by corimaith »

itake wrote: post #382
tmnvix wrote: post #274

People intuitively jump to the conclusion that the problem is caused by a lack of building. While more building would help, a lack of it isn't the main cause of this problem. Ask yourself, do Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US, Britain, Ireland, etc, all have the same inability to build or is there maybe some other common cause? In my view this is symptomatic of a more fundamental issue - global asset price infla…

While I agree building housing is a symptom, and not the core problem. But I'm skeptical that increasing building or density would actually lower housing costs. If that were true, high dense cities like Beijing, Tokyo, Singapore, or Hong Kong would have much lower cost housing. Housing more people in a concentrated area creates more demand for services, which creates more demand for housing which jacks up prices. Pac…

I don't think looking at density is sufficient enough, what matters if total supply can keep up with demand. Hong Kong and Singapore are very dense, they have to be to sufficiently house the population, but it's still not enough.
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