I really wish we'd get some innovation in the housing market. 3D printing of houses or something could be epic. "Just" disrupt the current construction companies... It's clear they can't keep up with the demand right now.
Lack of housing is not a technology or industrial problem. New homes can be made easily and relatively cheaply if given the go ahead.
Lack of housing is by policy. By ensuring there are not enough houses ensures there is more demand than supply, which means higher housing prices, which means higher mortgages. The mortgage market is based on rising house prices. The banking industry is based on the mortgage industry. Low house prices, would mean a falling mortgage market, which means a banking crises. Given that the banking cartel has more influence on politicians than the populous, we have this current state of affairs.
Remember, in the 1950s a new build home would cost about 1 years salary. Now one year's salary might only buy a nice car. Building technology hasn't gotten worse, it's much better and cheaper. It's not the construction companies that need disrupting.
Edit: Also I should say that that was the state of affairs until just recently. This recent move by Blackrock and the like is the prelude to massive inflation. They are abandoning paper assets (cash, equities etc) and investing in hard assets like housing, farmland and commodities.
Remember, in the 1950s a new build home would cost about 1 years salary
I'm afraid that is mostly a myth. This source (https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco...) shows that the home price to median household income multiple in 1950 was around 6, or about the same as now. It did fall quite dramatically during the late 1950's, going a bit under 5x by 1960 and nearing an all time low of just over 4x by the late 1990's.
This other source (https://archive.curbed.com/2018/4/10/17219786/buying-a-house...) shows that median household income in 1950 was $3,000 and the median "home value" was $7,400. Which is still 2.45x. By 2000, the multiple had declined to 2.17. I suspect the media home sale price was substantially higher.
Both sources show a surge in home prices during the housing bubble between 2000 and 2010.
Note, you also get a LOT more house now than you did in the 1950's. Much much larger, much higher quality, many more amenities, etc.
Blackrock is not abandoning anything or massively shifting strategy they have always been a real estate focused investor and have a multi decade history of residential single family investment. This is not evidence of coming inflation.
Except construction costs are insane nowadays, and there is a massive shortage of trade workers. Your theory could hold true if we just considered existing homes, but the costs to build a new home have went through the roof in the last decade.
The bottom line is that local land-use laws are murky and problems with local codes are very difficult to predict and control for at scale - and that's the way existing homeowners want it.
It's interesting too that homeowners are such a powerful lobby, but without a single entity setting policy or giving talking points. It is, essentially, our culture. This is the way we want it to be. At least for now.
Isn't prefab a thing in the US? I have a hunch 3D printing won't solve the issue since you need not just walls, but plumbing, electricity, windows, doors, etc. Then again, imagine Blackrock or someone else just starts buying land. You're screwed anyway.
Sure, we can't print more ground to build on. But it's another cause of increasing real estate prices here in the Netherlands.
Probably need to zone some of that agricultural land (60% of land usage in the netherlands) into housing, if we want to give young homeowners a chance at owning property.
I think the disruption will come from the civil planning side of the equation. When we can figure out how to build a city on the edge of Arizona that people actually want to live in then we can begin to leverage more efficient and automated building techniques like 3d printing houses and stuff.
It takes more than houses; also entertainment, food, infrastructure, jobs, etc. Otherwise, you're 100% right, location is king and nobody wants to move away from a fun/profitable/valuable city to live in an abandoned mining town in Oklahoma just so they can own a home.
As dystopian as it might sound, I wonder if there is some way to "crowdfund" or "preorder" a new township location. Everyone signs up, pledges like 1,000 USD or something with a lease extending at least 3+ years. And developers can use that money to build an entirely new township in a location with cheaper land. This might help alleviate the problems that come along during a cold start with requiring critical mass adoption before a location is desireable to live in. (Not suggesting this exact course because having an entire town owned by a single developer sounds like a capitalist hellscape; just thinking out loud, I don't know what the actual solution would be)
I believe something similar is already happening with something like the Culdesac project. (I have no affiliation with this project, just so happen to live near it and have heard about it a few times) : https://culdesac.com/
Yes, although in hindsight it's easy to say that was poorly executed. It looks far too big and tried to be more than it should have been in my opinion. I'm thinking more along the lines of small neighborhoods on the edge of a city that can provide stronger logistical support.
Closer to Sun City Arizona.
> ... This caught the eye of the FTC, which said the advertising was deceptive and ordered the city’s developers to stop ...
This is also an interesting point in the article. Was it actually a scam or just overly ambitious and poorly executed?
