There has just never been much reason to believe that supply constraints were the primary driver of housing price increases. If they were people would have moved, or somewhere would have ended up being a lot better.
It used to be that housing costs tracked incomes. If you had a medium to high salary you had decent housing. Since the 90s with urbanisation and increased wealth not only do more people want to live in the same places but some have a lot more to invest. So you now need high wealth to have decent housing.
What many really want is housing below market rate so they either don't have to work thier entire lives or can also become wealthy, and preferably both. Which is understandable but not realistic.
Anyone who doesn't believe this should note that this has already been discussed on HN for at least 10 years and still hasn't been solved anywhere I know of globally. But instead still roughly tracks local wealth (and income). And will likely continue to do so.
Because that is what the housing market does. Allocates valuable assets to those who pay the most. Nowhere on the tin does it also say that it promotes social mobility or equality. Maybe it should, but it certainly won't as long as there is the idea that it already does.
That said, is there some effect of supply constraints? Sure. But ultimately it would increase urbanisation, making the situation worse. Affordable housing is already available on the market. Just in places with lesser jobs and living conditions. Which again it is understandable that many don't want to live in. But it isn't a market issue.
> If they were people would have moved, or somewhere would have ended up being a lot better.
sorry, I am not going to bother reading the rest of your comment before writing this reply because reading this part stopped me immediately.
Gentrification and displacement has been a growing issue for decades. Especially in California, people who grow up here can't afford to stay here and end up moving from high cost coastal areas to exurbs in the central valley or inland empire or just leave the state entirely for places like arizona, nevada, texas, or beyond. These are the places that have been growing most over the past couple of decades. Population in the high-cost areas may be increasing too (or at least staying the same) but that's because higher-income people who can afford it are willing and able to move there.
Probably better to say "expected to" rather than "supposed to". The problem is that income growth is not evenly distributed across the income curve, but instead increases up the curve. So the net effect is that fewer and fewer high income entities own a greater and greater proportion of the housing, and lower income levels are increasingly forced to rent, or---at the extreme lower levels--go without housing. As a matter of public policy, this is not what we want to happen, though I'd agree it is what we should expect given current policies.
What gets me is that, ABC reported on this report at the time, however whenever they do one of their "Housing Market" expose pieces its never brought up, focusing instead on some foreign expert who says the supply is fine.
So you get this completely bizarre reporting that jumps from one side to the other depending on the latest person speaking to them.
Depends on the nature of the piece, the amount of free time to expand, and contextual relevance.
ABC Australia, over a long period of time, tends to be balanced and to prefer presenting stories with more domain contect than just a single 'nugget' of isolated current event.
That said, they've taken quite a hit on funding in the past decade (and more) and have suffered bouts of unaligned management (seeking to rip down and diminish public broadcasting as a goal).
That aside, the nature of current nugget reoporting is it's a fact (at some point in time) that a report with a particular take on housing was just released, at another time it's a fact that senior political figures and government policy advisors are touting some 'expert' who has a contrary position.
That puts the onus on the viewer to thread together their own big picture and open Media Watch to frame what's going on.
In an ideal Australia the ABC would be better funded and there would be several hours more a week of good investigative journalism across a fange of subjects.
I dont feel like its intentional bias, but theres an implicit bias when your organisation is largely responsible for training all the new journalists in the country.
Like I dont expect some young journo writing a longer docupiece on the housing market to have researched it to the depth I would like.
But, I expect ABC as an institution to have an institutional memory longer than 12 months.
>Because that is what the housing market does. Allocates valuable assets to those who pay the most. Nowhere on the tin does it also say that it promotes social mobility or equality. Maybe it should, but it certainly won't as long as there is the idea that it already does.
You've hit on the hard reality that neither political side in the US has been willing to squarely face. The housing crisis is not the result of housing policies (though as you say there is probably some marginal effect there). It is the entirely predictable result of unregulated capitalism. In an unregulated capitalist system (defined as a system without any regulation on the accumulation of wealth), income growth accelerates with increasing wealth, and all assets are increasingly owned by a smaller and smaller fraction of the population.
