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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   30207 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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Just remove the artificial restrictions to building new housing and the market will do the rest.

I used to believe that but I'm starting to have second thoughts. Look at square feet of housing per capita in the U.S.. It's never been higher. California is uniquely stupid of course, but there is lots of housing going up all over the country. But prices keep going up too. This despite interest rates which have made housing less affordable than ever.

Population growth? What population growth? California is shrinking and the U.S. has flat-lined. And yet still housing prices go up.

My personal thesis: Housing prices behave like a meme stonk. They go up because they go up. China proves how far this insanity can go before it hits a breaking point.

Housing is hard because no one knows what to do. On the other hand we KNOW how to stop drug use because we have examples from other countries. We don't have those examples.for housing. Until we get examples of what works it's just, like, your opinion man that building more houses will fix affordability.

Population growth? What population growth? California is shrinking and the U.S. has flat-lined. And yet still housing prices go up.

We are allergic to actually counting the number of immigrants in this country. We're probably undercounting the population by around 20 million, which would definitely be enough to put upward pressure on housing costs.

I don't know enough about this area to have any confidence in this, but:

Look at square feet of housing per capita in the U.S.. It's never been higher

One of the effects of something like restrictive zoning and building codes is precisely to increase square feet per capita. Units per capita or something is probably a better measure. Which doesn't look up to me, although that may just be the wrong graph.

Yeah, you're probably right. Although the graph you sent shows their has been no significant reduction in units/capita since the year 2000. So what changed? Why have housing prices outstripped inflation for decades?

My personal answer to this is that inflation has been systematically understated in official figures for political reasons, and that if you use more rigorous and accurate means of calculating inflation things will line up a bit better. An additional factor would be large financial firms having a real estate strategy consisting of buying up huge swathes of housing stocks and then renting them out - Blackstone is the single largest owner of family rental homes in the USA (or at least they were, and there's this vast and purposefully impenetrable web of holding companies designed to obscure this).

Housing is hard because no one knows what to do.

Just be like Houston and don't have zoning or red tape. Housing is affordable and it has an absurdly low homelessness rate, lower than Denmark.

Even Houston isn't immune. Prices have gone up 7.1% per year since 2015 (as far back as I can easily check). Inflation in this period has averaged just 3.1%. https://www.zillow.com/home-values/39051/houston-tx/

But it gets worse. The average mortgage rate right now is around 7%, while in 2015 it was less than 4%.

For a buyer with 20% down, I calculate that the monthly payment to own a home in Houston has increased by 150% since 2015, or a whopping 12% per year. While I'll concede that Houston prices are still quite reasonable, their zoning is not a panacea.

Stonk-bubble mentality can eat any increase in housing supply. We need speculators to feel actual pain to reduce house price increase expectations.

Start by making depreciation not tax deductible unless you can prove that your property actually went down in value. Currently, you can "write down" the value of your investment over 27.5 years. This lets you take a paper loss and pay no taxes all the while your property is actually going up in value.

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