Population and Housing

[Bytor]

I am increasingly of the opinion that there needs to be a bubble burst and crash like 1989 that brings back housing costs to pre-2014 levels with respect to present/future incomes, if not lower.

If not, we'll still have far too many people with issues affording housing.

A value crash won’t build more housing.

No, it won't, but every day I am less and less sanguine that we can build enough new housing soon enough to make a meaningful difference, even if we upzoned everywhere to encourage missing middle housing.

Increasingly that seems to be a long term solution for preventing/mitigating future housing crises that does absolutely nothing for right now. If we froze housing prices right nowand had zero inflation on them (bot possible, I know), housing prices are still too ridiculously high and it would take a generation or more for essentially stagnating wages to get housing costs as a fraction of wages back to ratios like the early 2010s, even with increased missing middle development

So in addition to zoning reform, property tax reform (lower density pays more), and government built housing, the real estate bubble bursting (crashing, if you prefer that framing) is going to be a necessary thing.

I dream of provincial and national policies that would regulate residential property to barely more than inflationary appreciation in order to make property a commodity rather than a speculatory investment to get rich on.

How would this result in more housing being constructed? Instead of people being priced out, they would have to queue for access to housing.

It doesn't do anything get housing built, it's not for that. That's for other policies to do, like upzoning or public housing or differential property taxes.

As I said, this is to eliminate or at least significantly reduce the speculation that is one of the big factors that got us into  this crisis in the first place. If inflation ios 2% and house goes up 3%? OK, but not 5% or 10% or 20% or 40%.

Somebody who has property and builds on it housing or other amenities needed by the community is giving value to the community. Somebody who is just sitting on a property and watching the value rise through no work of their own but expects to profit through a later sale is a leech and a parasite on the community.

I suppose if we believe that so much existing housing is sitting empty that flushing speculators out of the market and bringing it into use would give a significant increase in effective housing supply, then maybe this sort of tinkering with pricing rules could have an impact. I’m skeptical of this however: I’m pretty sure the only way out is to do things which cause more housing to be built.

I didn't say anything about empty housing.

This guy explains it well. https://www.tiktok.com/@sweetbbluke/vide..._webapp=v1