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I have built houses. The amount of labor and material that goes into a house built today vs a house built in 1950 is astounding. If you want a custom home today you're looking at 300 dollars a square foot to start in my area, so if you want even a modest 1500 sq ft home you're out $450k before you buy the land. Buying some land and having someone else build you a house costs a shit ton of money. That is why housing costs are through the roof, not because we got off the gold standard.
Also, houses haven't become just a "bit bigger" They have doubled or tripled in size depending on what starting year you want to use. We have 800sq ft starter homes from that size left over from the 50's in a lot of area towns they kinda suck. Cheap materials, often partially home built. If you're willing to buy the largest Home depot shed and renovate it yourself using coffee cans as shingle underlayment and a toilet you get for free off craigslist, you too can replicate the quality of these builds, and probably the cost as well.
If you want a 1950's house and to pay 1950's prices you can, you would have about 100k to work with. You can do it yourself, with a small amount of hired help and buy cheap land and materials, and get a cheap but livable home. If you want a home 3 times that size and with better workmanship and modern insulation, code standard electrical, plumbing and HVAC, 2 bathrooms, modern fixtures, you're going to pay 3 times as much, you want someone to do it for you and a master bath with rain shower, a second bathroom, a guest powder room, a 3 car garage, gas fireplace, heatpumps, solar panels, a pool and 2 acres, well then you're not even buying the same product.
Your posts are starting to sound like that "what happened in 1971" website that gold bugs like to bang on about. I'm not sure if you're a US citizen but almost all mortgages issued in the USA are 30 year fixed. Which means we're all locked in forever unless we sell, it doesn't matter what the fed rate does, you pay whatever you agreed upon at the time of the loan. So the loans always get cheaper over time because you're paying a low interest rate loan back with money that has had 20 years to inflate by the time you're 20 years into your loan.
You could do all that stuff on one salary because the world had just been wiped out and the USA was the last high tech manufacturing and industrial powerhouse standing. Not because we were on the gold standard. Which we were also on during some very very bad economic times in our history, if you'll recall. The type of money we use doesn't really matter, it is just fake points we use to keep track of and divvy up resources.
Nobody says this for anything else. Nobody says "oh cars in the old days were terrible, fuel-inefficient, slow and unreliable plus you were likely to be mangled if you crashed, there was no GPS or aircon and that's why their price has soared enormously relative to household income." Cars got better and cheaper, electronics got better and cheaper, air travel got better and cheaper, textiles got better and cheaper, everything should get better and cheaper simultaneously. Car prices in the US have risen considerably in the last few years because Americans like buying big trucks but that's a national quirk, not a global trend. We see rapidly rising house prices in nearly all developed countries.
Housing is the anomaly and I blame financialization of housing stock, limiting supply to increase prices. Houses shouldn't be appreciating in value, they shouldn't be used as a store of value or an investment. There have been technological advances like prefabrication that brings production prices down. But prices stay high, in part due to regulations that sustain their use as a store-of-value by constricting supply.
That's it in a nutshell. Control the money supply and you control the resources. Print money, pass it on to banks and then to those favoured by banks, bail out banks if things go wrong, tax via inflation and it's all obfuscated through the complexity of the money printing system.
Suppose Europe and Asia are intensively bombed and hundreds of millions are killed tomorrow, would this be good for the US economy? Or Canada and Australia? No! Prosperity is not derived from the destruction of others, there's not much point trading with desperate and impoverished people. US postwar prosperity stemmed from technological advancement, good regulatory conditions and rapidly increasing capital stock, including housing. Britain and France did well postwar. Japan did well postwar too. Germany did well. All but Japan had baby booms.
People actually do say that about cars...
The countries you mention did well after 10 years of reconstruction and tons of American money and support and governance. Britons were still on rations into 1954, they lost their empire, so did most of the European Powers. You know what was driving a lot of that post war boom?! American exports in all things.
Don't forget these rules of acquisition.
War is good for business
Peace is good for business
Prefab has mostly been a bust for housing because you still need to transport and assemble the thing on site and do all the trade work involved. Mass production simply doesn't work for the kind of housing that people want. Every home is basically a custom job hand assembled by 20 different kinds of trades and independent contractors all trying to semi-coordinate, even the planned burbs built by companies like Lenar. Every house lot and location has its own quirks, every warped wall stud needs to be held straight enough to nail gun into place. It is hugly labor and capital intensive.
Regulation is never about "keeping home prices high" Property values won't go down if you build more, the demand is essentially unlimited. This is a common refrain you hear on reddit that people are being selfish and "protecting their property values", what people are really "protecting" is their current vision of the city/town and they just don't want more people, or certain types of people, or cars. Most of them don't think stopping growth is protecting their investment, and it also doesn't. The more dense a place is usually the more expensive it is. Manhattan vs North Dakota.
If there were really such radical ways to make lots of housing and sell it cheaply, someone would be doing it and making billions. You're welcome to be the first. It isn't a conspiracy.
Until we have a much cheaper way to make quality housing we are always going to be in a "housing crisis". That being said, 75% of the people in my state own their own homes, I think the "housing crisis" is overblown. Shit is just expensive now, there are too many people, and they all want to live in the same places. If people want cheaper homes encourage your kids to become carpenters/plumbers/electricians willing to work for low wages. Getting a door replaced is like 3k these days. Everyone wants a freestanding home next to mountains, the ocean, lakes and a major metro with good weather, they can't all live there.
Again. It costs more to build new than to buy a used house. So it isn't using houses as an investment that is driving up costs, they do go down in value compared to a new build. the price you see is literally the cost to make the product. Land appreciates if population goes up and if everyone wants to live in the same place, that has nothing to do with building costs, except that developers may build higher end models of homes on expensive land since the home will be out of reach for people looking for starter homes because of the cost of acquiring the building lot.
If you can do it cheaper. You'll be a billionaire in a few years.
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