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I’m surprised no one has identified the core issue here: local restrictions - NIMBYs. A National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) / NMHC study found that government regulations across all levels (fees, permitting, compliance) account for 40.6% of multifamily development costs on average nationally.
Once a person owns a home in a location, restricting supply means their home goes up in value, and their neighbourhood stays as cozy as it is today. This is why Georgism (championed by every notable economist for more than a century) is the only way we solve this. A land value tax aligns individual incentives with best social outcomes. People are much more reluctant to sit on unused land if they’re being charged 5% per year in tax. They build up. They aggressively lobby their local politicians to make it as easy as possible to build. Supply booms.
This is a solved problem. It’s not complicated. Austin did it. They cut regulation, developers went crazy building apartments, and rents keep dropping. Landlords have to compete to get tenants now, offering everything from 3 months free rent to gym membership and gift certificates.
whats nuts is people want their homes to go up in value. You pay taxes based on home value. I want my home to be lagging behind everything in the area im not cheering everything getting more expensive. Its like are all these people flipping every two years???
Tbf in the US at least, we don’t actually need to build any homes. We have more than enough vacant homes to house everyone
The source article:
https://www.ft.com/content/dca3f034-bfe8-4f21-bcdc-2b274053f0b5
Three distinct factors are at work here…
…a shared culture that values the privacy of one’s own home
…the planning regimes in all six anglophone countries are united in facilitating objections to individual applications
…Anglophone planning frameworks give huge weight to environmental conservation, yet the preference for low-density developments fuels car-dependent sprawl and eats up more of that cherished green and pleasant land.
The author’s conclusion:
Ultimately, whether the goal is tackling the housing crisis, protecting the environme or boosting productivity, the answer to so many woes in the English-speaking world is to unburden ourselves of our anti-apartment exceptionalism.
One reason is that people want houses and it’s not sustainable. Large cities need to go up and living in apartment in a high rise should be a norm.
The problem in the word itself even - housing.
One reason is that people want houses and it’s not sustainable.
Well, it’s been sustainable for centuries. It’s not sustainable if we require constant and explosive population growth for the economy, but I’m not sure I want that. I agree it’s more efficient for people to live in tiny apartments in tall buildings. I just think there is more to life than efficiency. I question the economic imperative to have such massive population growth. I don’t think we would need to cram into ever smaller spaces with ever diminishing green areas if we restructured our economies.
Another factor is that people are living separately from their extended families and change what type of building they live in at different points in their lives, for example:
- Single adult - rented flat or small house.
- Couple - rented larger flat, bought small house.
- Couple with kids - trying not to rent, buying larger house
- Couple with adult children - no longer need the space, buy smaller house
People also like to have gardens and pets, which is easier in a house than a flat. Ownership is also a factor, owning a flat doesn’t make much sense when you have to pay ground rent and a mortgage.
It’s not that they can’t build housing. It’s that housing is bought up by private equity and Monopoly prices are set by the algorithm. There are no many vacant homes and apartments being kept vacant to drive up the cost.
Saying ‘we need to build more houses and deregulation is the key’ only serves the oligarchy
How many vacant homes are there, exactly? What does the trend look like? People always say this, but the last half dozen times I checked, vacancy rates in the US (which is always what people are talking about) were falling.
“Deregulation is the key” is an absolute straw man. We need regulation to enforce the building of affordable housing, and to prevent local authorities from refusing all housing projects due to capture by NIMBYs
Same reason we can’t build high speed rail, have to get approval by every property owner rich enough to hire a lawyer to build anything here.
A median house price and median salary should also be calculated, those datas aren’t very useful without understanding the economic condition of the people
The graph is change in real prices that means inflation / cost of living adjusted. The anglophone countries would need to see equivalent real wage growth to make it just about salaries, which as far as I know they haven’t.
If only they taught you how to read graphs in school ://///
In statistics, making inferences and drawing conclusions from a limited number of variables is considered disingenuous (at best).
Lol wtf does that mean? What would a set of variables that isn’t “limited” even look like? What variables would you need to include to determine whether Anglophone countries had, indeed, built less housing and incurred greater price increases?
The statement in the title of the graph is fully supported by the data shown. What inferences do you think have been made in error here?
I’ve went down the YouTube rabbit hole on this.
My favorites have been dirt-inspired builds utilizing technology found in the animal Kingdom beyond humans. Termites are often cited.
Buildings that have natural AC regardless of the season and mostly passively. Ventilation structure that encourages heat sink/release.
And many are made of just dirt, which seems pretty smart. Enormous insulation values. Endless supply.
This completely and utterly ignores the capitalist pressures that also hit building materials. Just look at wood prices in the US. Prices have skyrocketed outside of the housing supply as well.
TL;DR: Capitalism is cancer on anything required to live, including the vast supply chain for such goods.
That doesn’t explain why some nations are functioning better under capitalism than others though.
Because they put limits on capitalism.
It is not all or nothing.
Here in Denmark we rank higher than the U.S. in ease of doing business. We don’t have a minimum wage and it’s super easy to fire people. We capitalism harder than America. On the other hand, we offer great safety nets and social services (paid for with high taxes), because we acknowledge that businesses do different things to the state.
I don’t think the issue is limiting capitalism. If anything, unleashing capitalism results in competition and amazing products and services. Our tiny nation is a world leader in pharmaceuticals and shipping. Where I think we get it right is ensuring people don’t fall through the cracks. Being temporarily unemployed can be hard to navigate and we help people when that happens. We provide free healthcare so no one needs to try to work while sick. We provide free education so that we can specialise in a competitive world. Because people aren’t desperate for work, they’re able to better negotiate with employers. They can turn down shitty offers and shitty employers. This leads to great workplace conditions for most people and high wages.
Sure but what are the specific policies that explain this specific pattern? That’s what I’d like to know. Just writing it off as capitalism bad doesn’t help, even if it’s true.
If that’s what you wanted to know, why didn’t you ask what the specifics were? All you made was an open ended statement that could be interpreted any number of ways, most of which (in modern colloquial conversation, and this particular context) are going to be viewed as a defense of what the commenter was criticizing.
If you want to have an explicit discussion, ask explicit questions, dont just assume some rando on the internet is going to know your intent.
They’re welcome to buy wood from us Canadians.
Though we are pretty terrible at housing too. Every affordability measure is met with generations taught that their home will be their retirement, who do not want to see prices go down.
I’d blame Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and their disciples on both sides of the Atlantic. Not sure if a legal system based on Roman civil law/the Napoleonic code would have slowed neoliberalism or whether it’s merely correlated with the cultural divide between the former British Empire and continental Europe.
Also, isn’t Singapore a common law jurisdiction with a solid state-backed programme of building housing?
Or… These are very different places with different constraints.
For example, the US is comprised of 50 states - construction has to meet federal, state, county, municipality codes, and then any federal or state agencies that have a say on construction possibly affecting water ways, natural habitat, etc.
The bureaucratic process is staggering.
And municipalities change their minds every day the wind blows (and who is paying them off).
So it’s a problem of bureaucracy and graft.
Right, and maybe civil law is better at fighting bureaucracy and graft than common law.
For example, the US is comprised of 50 states - construction has to meant federal, state, county, municipality codes, and then any federal or state agencies that have a say on construction possibly affecting water ways, natural habitat, etc.
Sounds like Germany.
right and other countries don’t have national/regional/local independent governing bodies?
fucking American brainrot, thinks America is special and inique and that justifies it being shite.
the only things special about the US is that the country is shite, and the population are mostly ignorant sheep.
The right hand graph only covers, like, the last 10-15% of the left hand graph. If this was really a supply issue, then you’d expect to see a divergence starting back in the 1980s, not just the last decade.
There’s so much spread in the ‘civil law’ countries that it’s hard to call this compelling evidence for supply-driven housing crisis. Definitely something different between the common & civil law groups, but it’s not supply. Or not just supply.
Not trying to back any specific side here, but the divergence at 2013 is because they’re using a difference in price relative to Q1 2013 (so near 2013 it will always be close to zero). If you used 2015 or something the right graph would still look similar. We don’t know if such a divergence is present since the 1980s since no data is presented (making it an unhelpful comparison).
It would also be good to see more countries included, and the actual lines labeled for which country they are. Overall I would say this graphic doesn’t provide adequate information to back up its claim.
Also as [email protected] said above, different counties have different markets, policies, economies, etc. making it hard to make generalizations.
