Why not simply increase the supply?

If you want to actually solve the housing crisis, you just have to build more housing. It really is that simple.

It's because some people here own real estate and don't want to see YIMBY policies that would cause their rental income to fall

Some people would increase density until we're all living in Blade Runner hoping it would make rents drop.

Increasing the supply means building new buildings, and that often means building huge lots of five-over-ones, priced as luxury apartments in a growing market. The people building the new supply expect to make a profit, and in a market with growing prices, they aren't selling for less than what they think they can get out of it.

We see this in big cities where vacancies are at an all-time high (aka a lot more supply), but prices aren't going down.

You are putting forward that landlords acted collectively to increase the price of realestate. This is obviously wrong. The price of homes is determined by the market. It doesn’t matter who owns those homes, they are worth what the market says they are. Landlords do not control the market and even if they banded together in a conspiracy to increase the price of homes, they couldn’t because the vast majority of homes are owned by regular people.

The high price of housing is caused by a shortage. If you don’t believe me then watch the 60 minutes segment about it. There’s no conspiracy. If there weren’t landlords building new stock it would be even worse. It’s so ironic that the hive mind spits in the face of the only people building new housing; the only people making the problem better.

Landlords and homeowners and the finance industry don't control the market... they just form a political bloc that controls zoning and taxes and transportation infrastructure and central finance, and these knobs in turn control the market. For some reason, they always vote for policies that pump their holdings. Can't imagine why. These policies do create problems, though, and it's not only reasonable to attribute the problems back to the people who voted for them, it's unreasonable to do anything else.

"It's just the market!" is on par with "Look, a squirrel!" in terms of critical thinking.

The landlords don't need to conspire - they know what's good for them and the politicians either own property themselves or are connected enough to landlords to help them out.

None of these parties have an immediate interest in the lower class affording housing or maintaining the community fabric in the long term - especially the faceless incorporated ones.

There's no super strong market force to push the price of a house down, while there is a large market force to keep it valued where it is or make it go higher.

It's also difficult to tease out the effect of general price inflation. If house prices stay stagnant but currency is devauled, prices are decreasing in real terms.

Rents go down when landlords go bankrupt.

That's what happened in 2009-2010. It took about 4 years after peak homebuilding, and 2.5 years after peak home prices, and about 12-18 months after the financial crisis started. Real estate tends to lag financial markets by about that time period. But it does happen - eventually markets respond to supply and demand, and firms that try to buck the trend get swept out of the market.

Owners make money leaving properties vacant all the time. In fact, in many markets capital gains have been much more significant than rental income for a long time now.

There are people who own vacant houses that they have zero interest in renting, and are not looking to sell. This could be a vacation home for a billionaire that they seldom get around to visiting, but want to have ready for them, and just have staff check in periodically. Renting it when not in use may be uninteresting (have to lock up their belongings, arrange some form of management company, have insurance concerns (if somebody realizes they are renting from a billionaire, they might get "hurt", hoping for a big quick payday) etc.)

Similarly there are vacant houses own by speculators that have zero interest in renting out the unit, and are not currently looking to sell, since the market isn't right yet.

This is among many other scenarios where vacant does not mean available to rent or purchase (well at least not at anything close to market rates. Some of these people may reconsider if offered way above market rates, but that generally only happens if a property is uniquely valuable to just that one buyer.)

Where?

Think of houses sold to outsiders as a form of export. It's the best form of export: the good you are selling does not leave the premises, and the local community continues to collect taxes on that. The outsider does not consume government services as much as a local, so, what's not to like? Even better, when those outsiders visit, they spend much more on local businesses, because they are tourists.

The more houses that are empty most of the year, the better for the local community. Because that's tax money that gets collected at very little cost for the local government.

The problem, of course, is the artificial barriers to build more. People have this idea that the land is fully built up, there no way to build more.

That is so far from true. I live in one of the most densely populated neighborhoods on Earth (17k people per km2). Recently a 67-story tower was built across the street from my building. The neighborhood does not feel any more or less crowded than before. If they want to build some more, they can build more. There is (almost) no lot that's not built up, but you can take down a 12-story building and erect a 50-story one.

So, here's my thesis: let builders build as many residential units as they can (provided they are safe, or course). This way the house prices will come down to earth. People will be able to move from the rural areas to the big metropolitan areas, where the jobs are. They can't move right now because the housing costs are just so damn high.

Such a migration would result in both increased GDP growth, and lower impact on the environment. Much lower. I used to live in a very dense city before (3600/km2) before I moved to my current incredibly dense neighborhood. My energy footprint went down maybe by a factor of 10. Easily. Grocery is across the street. Before it was a 15 min drive.

Can you believe that? More affordable housing, higher GDP growth, lower environmental impact? There's no closer thing to a free lunch in our modern society.

The trend toward homes being investment and stores of value for the wealthy is contrary to the goals of building healthy communities that are not filled with ghost homes.

The price of a house should go down in time, just like the price of a car goes down in time. Or the price of any other good.

However, artificial demand must be dealt with as well, or we overbuild resulting in a bunch of empty homes. Another disadvantage to only dealing with the supply side is the prices of building materials will be unnecessarily high due to additional artificial demand from investors building homes as stores of value.

Finally, supply side only solution creates a potential nonlinear event where investors dump once the homes start to depreciate. A seesawing which the Fed has bolstered with artificially low rates across many asset classes. Not necessarily a bad thing altogether for the housing asset class, but it seems inefficient from a resource standpoint.

In principle the supply side has natural constraints, but they are easily 2 times above what has been built until now.

You can think of it this way: the population density of Manhattan is about 27000/km2. The entire NYC has a density of about 10000/km2, while Jersey city has 7000/km2.

https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/essays-culture/how-to-...

(of course there's risk etc)

The only case where you benefit from rising hoise prices is if all of your income comes from owning property, rather than working a job - i.e. you are a major landowner.

If you are doing anything economically productive, from running a business to working a job, houae prices are a blood-sucking vampire squid.

Also, older people think more about downsizing than about upsizing their homes.

Better to rule than be ruled. At the very least it gives you a bigger safety net when you fall out of power.

A true acracy, i.e. a classless society, is never even considered.

Number of births have been dropping since 2008ish, from this graph by the CDC.

Year 2022 - year 2008 = 14

Does that means starting this year, high school enrollment will be dropping year over year? In 4 years time, college enrollment will be dropping year over year. In 8 years time, labor enrollment will be dropping year over year.

As for housing, there was a baby bump around 2008, that helps explain the housing boom for the last number of years. New parents scramble for housing in 2008, then a larger home (after the child hits 6 years old?) around 2014 . But as those kids are now starting high school, and families have settled in for the next 4 years, does this imply a housing slump?

Many older folks are retiring in fields where they might have worked part time for extra money or for that thing that they don't think is worth it anymore following COVID. I've heard it called the "silver tsunami." The "boomers" are all retiring with only those without retirement savings or without generous relatives to fall back working for health insurance or for a little money to pay for food.

The number of flight incidents with rude, disruptive, or violent flyers has reached records levels. Working a grocery store over the past few years supposedly part time but always overtime lately, I have noticed more entitled, rude, desperate, and stressed out customers more generally. It's not just about masks either. I was threatened two years ago because we didn't have soy baby formula in stock for example, as if there were some being hidden in back stock.

In accounting where I work now, we had the senior associates and middle management all quit in a short timespan for other firms. 3/4 of CPAs are eligible for retirement. Your fortune 500 company audits are now being handled by people collectively with way less experience than they used to. Standard operating procedure seems to SALY ("Same As Last Year") in audit the past couple of years or blame discrepancies on COVID. So much fraud has likely happened that will probably never come to light.

Nurses and doctors are all facing mental health crises. Violence against medical professionals is rising at rapid rates even prior to the pandemic. Many health professionals don't report assaults either because of their altruistic tendencies. More than half of nurses are thinking or planning on quitting their jobs. More than half of all doctors wouldn't recommend or don't want their children to go into medicine. Here's a fun little excercise for you. Google the nearest hospital near you and see how many openings they have. Especially for security. The hospital near me has never had a security officer. Now they have five. Hospital workers are being taught de-escalation techniques and taking self defense classes. Senior homes are facing record shortages of labor.

I suppose this is a very brief and calm overview of what's going on. I hope that programmers appreciate how much pay and how little stress you receive in comparison to many other industries. Expect to take care of more relatives, pay more to eat out, and healthcare shortages near you soon. Filipino nurses and teachers are being trained and brought in to fill positions filled briefly by the national guard. Our country is in crisis, and most of us just don't know it yet. I'm not even getting into the healthcare issues in Britain, Canada, and Australia as well.

It's important to recognize why this is happening. The world did a good job at disenfranchising young adults (gen Z + tail-end millennial), and now countries are reaping the rewards from it. The solution is in front of their noses and they are not willing to take it. I'd turn it around and say all those countries are reaping what they sowed.

Give these people a relatively stress-free way to live life the way it benefits society, while having it benefit themselves, and these problems would stop very soon. Them importing skilled workers and refusing students without money alludes to this. If you're that desperate for workers, you don't lock down any and all ways for people without the skills to start picking them up and getting rewarded for it.

I just don't buy the idea of leaders failing the very basics of leadership, 'give people an incentive to do the things you want them to do'. Call it a conspiracy if you want, but it sounds like leaders want to have their cake and eat it too.

https://www.aacnnursing.org/News-Information/Press-Releases/...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/04/19/new-survey...

https://www.ajc.com/pulse/survey-shows-90-of-nurses-consider...

https://www.benefitnews.com/news/nurses-are-planning-to-quit...

Starting a family doesn't require owning a home. Vast numbers of people start families without ever owning a home.

All those people for whom home ownership is just about in reach will delay starting a family. Those living in unsecure shared accomodation won't even consider it. It's pretty clear that fertility rates have fallen significantly in all western countries over the past decade.

OTOH, that apartment complex was designed and built ~1965 or so, when having kids was far more the American social norm. And their business model seemed carefully tuned to attracting longer-term renters.

The amusing part of it is that small children are the most amenable to moving, it's not until they're a bit older and getting into school that moving becomes a real problem for them.

Fertility rates are low enough that it can't be entirely ascribed to housing.

Children are expensive. If you can't currently afford to buy a house and decide to have a child, the chances of you gaining enough wealth to afford one in the 4 to 6 years before your child reaches school age is practically nonexistent.

This means having a child while renting basically pushes your home ownership plans back by probably about a decade.

I never would have had kids if I waited that long.

I get that it’s perverse how we place so much of the cost of raising children in parents. At the same time, waiting until you’re “already established” is too much.

You may have had great reasons for doing this. But if this becomes a widely accepted expectation we are going to relying heavily on immigration.

it should be alleviated by making rental accommodation more stable - such as a longer term contract. What if you had a 30 year contract rental (with built-in, but known ahead of time increases).

so as long as you pay your rent and don't do anything illegal or damaging, you can't be evicted. the worst that can happen is a rise of the rent, but even that is often limited to not go beyond the average market rate for the area.

No they're not illegal. In Austria you see time limited rental contracts all the time, usually 3 years. It's rare to find unlimited rental nowadays as landlords want to make money.

germany doesn't allow time limited contracts. there are only two exceptions. a time limited contract is allowed if the landlord can claim to need to use the property themselves after the end of the contract (which they can only do if they don't have multiple properties to rent), or if they have plans to tear down or renovate the building.

It's nearly impossible as everyone is locked into their rental units and will never move.

You basically have to wait for someone to die.

In Germany, the scarcity is so high that realtors can afford to ghost you left and right despite you having money and then when you finally get to view an apartment there's like 80+ people viewing it and only the one with the best portfolio (full of your private info that they normally shouldn't be allowed to have) gets it. This madness is nowhere near what it's like in the US.

Seems a high risk, desperate maneuver. What's the end-game for the landlord? A building full of drug dealers, in perpetuity? Keeping maintenance up to city code could be a burden, and the insurance company might start to get wise.

Sometimes it’s just to have tenant churn to allow them to get higher rents. Rent control for long periods of time can cause very large disparities between current market rents and what a tenant is paying (thousands/mo). The dangerous folks aren’t usually obvious when first checking out a unit.

At least in NYC, there is a lot of reputed Mafia involvement in real estate.

Owning a home presents a long-term hedge against financial instability. Due to zoning and other factors, it's often not possible to live in areas which are "good" for children without owning a home. My particular neighborhood in a major city has low cost/quality rentals for college aged folks, reasonable subsidized housing options, and condos. If one were to rent without subsidy for a family, they would likely be pushed into a luxury unit and pay an unreasonable and highly inflationary sum.

Of course, plenty of people start families without solid economic footing. But it's a bit harder to invent space out of thin air than it is to take on debt.

Houses are something like more than double the size they were just 40 years ago, and families are smaller.

It does depend on what families are willing to put up with, though. I'm not sure many of my millenial peers want to raise 7 kids in a 1500 square foot house. It's important not to ask what's physically possible, but instead what's probable given societal expectations.

Fortunately it looks like a 10% correction is all we need, and, fingers crossed, it looks to be coming.

Sure, some people do that, but there are race and economic class biases to it, and both the races and economic classes biased to it are shrinking as a share of the population.

The VAST majority of non-single parent families in the US still alive today owned a home.

Maybe current trends are different since home ownership rates are low in young people. But family formation rates are also lower than normal.

While at any given time homeowners may be more likely than their age-peer contemporaries to start families, aggregate homeownership rates don't show any sign of being a positive contributor to family formation.

In areas where developable land is very plentiful - rural, deserts, minimal environmental/nimby protections, etc. - land prices will remain low and house prices should be constrained by building costs. In the same way that we don't expect TV or car prices to go up very much with lower interest rates, even though you consume durable goods over 20years, as competition holds the prices to what it costs to make rather than how you benefit from them. Over the long term, it used to be that house prices tracked construction costs pretty well.

However in areas where the fixed quantity of land is binding - urban, or areas with stringent protections and managed growth policies - land and house prices will be bid up to what people can afford via monthly payments, and will therefore respond greatly to interest rates (and IR expectations)

Further add on that high property taxes in some regions can dilute the costs associated with financing changes (if interest rates increase from 1 to 2%, but you're paying 5% in property taxes, that's only a 7/6% increase in your costs)

edit: to summarize, where supply is elastic, interest rate reductions should cause quantity supplied to increase, price to remain the same, and monthly costs to decrease. Where supply is inelastic, the quantity stays the same, monthly payments stay the same, price increase. We've possibly moved into an environment with more supply inelasticity in recent history.

Go kneel and beg in front of the owners of capital and land. Your concerns will be ignored.

You think this is psychotic? I doubt that, I can guarantee that secretly you are thinking the same thing. You would rather see yourself and everyone else around you suffer, for a chance to become one of the corrupted yourself.

The "working class" does not derive anything from interest and capital gains. It pays more in that it could possibly get back. It is in its collective interest to abolish all rent seeking and let capital yields and profits shrink to 0% as perfect market theory predicts.

But no, everyone wants to start their own feudal little dynasty. Eternally passing our obligation to work for them to their descendants, despite the fact that we won't be alive when those descendants are alive, forcing us to pass the debt onto our own descendants.

Isn't the definition of a bubble that it has the capability to pop and then eventually pops? At least for urban housing, I see no way of that even being remotely possible, neither for the US nor here in Europe. Rural areas simply are too far left behind to support decent human life - no high speed Internet, no public transport, no necessary infrastructure like doctors/pharmacies/grocery stores, no employment opportunities, schools closing down everywhere and that's just the short list of issues.

As a consequence, the rural flight can and will only accelerate - I see no way ever for politicians to approve the absurd amount of expenses for bringing rural areas back to speed, not with the aftermath of covid and the current Russian invasion having strained anyone's budgets to the limit.

I recently moved out of a major city to a small, walkable town so I can get away from the crime, traffic, noise, dirtiness, and car-domination of US cities. It's pretty remarkable to see people and children walk around my neighborhood now -- didn't have that in my major US city before!

Your list of infrastructure issues with rural areas also applies to many major US cities. Let's see:

- no high speed Internet: I have faster internet in a small town than I ever had in any of the major US cities I've lived in. Some cities have fiber in nice neighborhoods, but it's by no means a strong rural/urban divide as you imply here.

- no public transport: Public transit is complete crap in most US cities, with many stuck in a post-covid death spiral thanks to fewer commuters, cut service lines, and rising or perceived-rising crime. There were enough clearly mentally ill people on public transit in my last city that I stopped riding public transit entirely. Where I live now, I can get around entirely on foot or by bike, no need for public transit at all.

- no necessary infrastructure like doctors/pharmacies/grocery stores: I can now walk to the grocery store. I could not in my last city.

- no employment opportunities: Definitely an issue for some fields, but remote work gives more flexibility on this. If anything this is an argument that's weakened over the last 2-3 years.

- schools closing down everywhere: You can only make kids ride so far on the bus in rural America. I know consolidations are an issue in many rural areas, but if you live in a small town, you'll likely be near the only school that remains open. If you live way out in the woods of course you won't have a super close-by school.

On the other hand, rural areas are the only places where many of my non-tech peers ever have a hope of owning a home these days. I suspect their values will perform better over time than million dollar townhomes in rotting city centers with poor internet quality, no walkability, crappy public transit, and lots of quality-of-life issues.

That’s sort of the point. I’d kill myself before I’d live in a small town again instead of San Francisco. I can walk to 10 grocery stores, 20 restaurants, literally find all the food I want, and the public transit is pretty good. Who wants to raise kids in rural areas where there won’t be any opportunities for them?

I'm not interested in raising kids, but if I was, it wouldn't be in SF, Seattle, Austin, Denver, or NYC. I'd raise kids someplace where I could let them walk around and explore in a safe way -- the situation on the street in many US cities is not that. They'd be accosted by the mentally ill or run down by giant trucks and SUVs in no time.

If the answer to any of these questions is no, then you have your answer to why property prices near the cities aren't ever going to match the level of rural properties.

I grew up in a crappy rural area with next to no opportunity, and went to college in a crappy rust belt city with very little opportunity. Moved to NYC the day after graduation to start my career. As far as I can tell, if my life was playing out today, I'd probably pick up a remote gig and move someplace cheaper than NYC where I already know some people -- I simply wouldn't bother with the expensive giant cities because they've never been a good fit for my hobbies and interests. A lack of opportunities definitely shaped my high school experience, but where I live now has a lot more going on than where I grew up, even if they're similar densities. Not all small towns are the same!

And depending on what your kids are interested in, SF, NYC, etc. might lack opportunities for your kids, too -- it's not like they can explore nature, or mountain biking, or sailing, or a million other things easily in your average US city. I guess I'm just trying to say that there are tradeoffs no matter where you live, and we probably shouldn't generalize about "rural" and "urban". There's crappy unwalkable non-kid-friendly rural towns aplenty in the US. But there's also crappy unwalkable non-kid-friendly cities aplenty. The right corner of SF, or the right lively small town can both be good places to raise kids.

San Francisco has some the best access to nature, sailing and mountain biking anywhere in the country. I can drive for 15 minutes and be on the beach, in the mountain. And it's never too cold or too hot.

> I grew up in a crappy rural area with next to no opportunity, and went to college in a crappy rust belt city with very little opportunity

Don't assume the fact that you made it means that your kid would repeat that feat though.

If people looked at this honestly, they would have to admit that relocating from a city into a rural area for the explicit purpose of raising kids is effectively taking a gamble on what thing might look like in the future.

Where I grew up - small town of 4000 with no major city within 3+ hours drive. Nearest “city” was 100k people about 100 miles away.

Even in that - I didn’t feel it was super rural but compared to most people - that is seen as remote. May as well live in the Alaskan wilderness in their eyes.

Some people consider a suburb outside of Indianapolis as “rural”.

For example, I live about 50 miles west of Boston. There's lot of forest and field around me with an apple orchard and a Christmas tree farm next door. It's a small town and I think is technically classified as "exurban." No, I can't walk except to the forest paths but there's no shortage of shops, hospitals, etc. within a fairly short drive--and I can certainly drive into the city for events if I want to.

I work remotely but my local office is actually nearer my house than it is to Boston and that's true of a lot of tech-adjacent companies in Massachusetts which weren't historically in the city.

>If the answer to any of these questions is no, then you have your answer to why property prices near the cities aren't ever going to match the level of rural properties.

If the opportunities are mostly in the city, don't expect the cost of city dwellings to approach the cost of rural dwellings.

I grew up in a rural community and the path is quite simple. Grow up there, leave for university, go where the jobs are or go back and work remotely.

Cities will always be more expensive, but that is to be expected.

All you're really missing then is the connection to the nearest urban center - if it takes an hour to drive into town it's not much different than taking an hour to drive across town, after all.

Rural for others is 40 acre plots. For some it's 400-1000.

Having your houses this far apart will result in extremely high infrastructure costs.

That said, in The Netherlands, these places have also increased in prices. GP is underestimating correlation between rural and urban. If prices explode in the urban area, rural will generally see some increase too.

There's also a lot between a city center and true rural wilds of Wyoming (especially the way the US Census defines it). There's a lot of pretty affordable housing and land within an hour or two of most major cities with decent infrastructure, hospitals, etc. No there's not much public transportation but that's true of anywhere that people are spread out.

I also have issues doing my job if I can’t stream audio/video due to speed issues- and this happens even with a hardwired connection on occasion.

Yes? My internet from Comcast is pretty good but it's not flawless. Power is even better but can go out. And I have very marginal cell reception without WiFi assist. That's 40 miles outside of major Northeast city. I'm frequently on calls where someone or other has network issues and can't present or need to drop. Life goes on. If my Internet goes out for an hour or two I find something to do that doesn't require Internet.

I'm semi-rural and I still get 2-4 times a year where my cable drops out, which I suspect is due to moisture in the lines as it seems to usually happen during spring thaws.

They're bringing in fiber at some point soon.

>I also have issues doing my job if I can’t stream audio/video due to speed issues- and this happens even with a hardwired connection on occasion.

What on Earth are you streaming that causes issues on a hardwired connection? I never have had speed issues with meetings, on Starlink or broadband at previous residences. I do have occasional latency spikes, but those seem to be getting better.

If people stop believing housing is a good investment then prices will fall.

People need something to live in though, and as long as the demand for places to live is higher than the supply, rents and purchase prices will keep going up.

Children are expensive AF - childbirth alone is a risk of dozens of thousands of dollars, you need more living space, clothing, diapers, food, more doctor visits, the person bearing the baby may not be able to work for a time which means less income, you need babysitters, ...

The government has completely failed its job of monetary policy, which in broad strokes is to provide back pressure on capitalism's natural tendency to have money move upward. Today there is way too much money at the top and it has nowhere to go. The economy is less and less resembling a healthy marketplace and more medieval feudalism, with lords stuck in their opulent castles while the peasants farm dirt. The more evenly money is spread across the entire spectrum of society the better the markets work. This is one of the side effects of highly progressive taxation and strong social programs--a healthy economy.

Instead our politicians have been focused on reducing taxes for the ultra rich and this has only accelerated the consolidation of money at the top, which is why our economy is getting heavily distorted and why for people on the bottom they have only been getting poorer. Once you factor in rent/mortgage, health care, and inflation versus wage growth the average American is backsliding and has been doing so for many years now. This is a massive failure of fiscal policy, but nobody in Washington cares because the lobbyists and special interests are happy.

It's a description of a linear trend over a period that rises and falls. Why the trend falls (or how sharply) is not related. A housing "hump" isn't the preferred metaphor, although it's more apt. People like to think that a trend bubble has to "pop" because they imagine a physical bubble instead of a hump in a line.

There was a worry after WW2 that a large number of young, single men, trained in combat and now returning home, would destabilize American politics, especially if they could not be absorbed by the labor market.

One response was the GI bill, so that some could go back to school. That would help to slow their return to the job market, and hopefully prevent unemployment.

Another was the 30-year mortgage. If these men were tied down with obligations, and families, and houses, they would cease to be a volatile element in society, the thinking went.

It's difficult to get decisive evidence as the phenomenon tends to happen at the same time as other things, and it basically devolves to game theory. At the very least, it seems like a very, very bad idea to incentivize the population with the largest capability to destroy, to destroy. Especially when they are necessary to create, educate and set an example for the next generation of men.

A rebellion is an act to pass the negative yield of labor back to the owners of financial capital and land but all at once instead of slowly each year.

To prevent rebellions, the government subsidizes the owners of financial capital and land by paying welfare, a bribe to make the abandoned behave by making them navigate bureaucracy and blame them instead of the original cause of their dependency on the bureaucracy. This is a subsidy, because the cost is not actually paid by the owners of financial capital but by the portion of the working class that is employed so that they hate the recipients of their taxes instead of the owners of financial capital and land that that created and benefited from the class of artificially helpless people.

But I think the same type of question could be asked about your post. For example, the idea of "surplus men": I've heard this before, but is there some statistical "systems theory" view of history that can give us plots/data from which this will jump out?

Some parts of this are obviously true:

> War usually leads to a surplus of women

There are certainly many stories after the American Civil War about this -- about women who were unable to find husbands after the war.

> and a lack of male competition in any other area (jobs, land, wealth, opportunity)

This makes some sense (jobs, mates in particular), but I'm not sure about land, wealth; that could easily remain in the hands of elites.

> starting a war is seen as a society killing off its surplus men in hopes of getting something out of it (every war is a rich man's war)

I absolutely see this -- elites gain some geostrategic prize, at the expense of other mens' lives -- but, to clarify, I don't think the mechanism by which this helps elites is reduced domestic competition among men, since they're already elites; they've already won the domestic competition.

> incentivizing men to play according to the social contract rather than being violent or giving up.

It feels like the examples of ISIS, Hikikomori, and monasticism (Western and Eastern) are all relevant here. But it would help if a clear line of evidence could be assembled for one of those examples.

I sense that your argument comes from a conservative direction, but I'm aware of queer/feminist writing to the same effect, e.g.:

https://www.amazon.com/Loser-Sons-Authority-Avital-Ronell/dp...

I haven't read this beyond the summary, and don't know if its evidence is actually any good. But it's sometimes worth noticing when opposing political orientations agree on some underlying assumption.

Actually the same idea appears in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, in which part of her fantasy is that men's value has been reduced to peeing in a circle around the village to mark the territory. She does recognize that this "utopia" cannot last though (which she deals with by having a man invent the utopia in the first place -- "of course it's flawed").

So, plenty of people on the other side of the aisle do seem to agree with you about the "facts".

https://sites.google.com/a/lanepl.org/columns-by-jim-blount/...

I think it gives a decent window into what was being discussed then, as I understand it.

It's a little hard to Google references that give a feeling for the issues that were on peoples' minds at the time (like the precedent of the Bonus Army), because attention/salience (what "matters" in the culture) has changed a lot since then (and even since 2016).

I had thought that maybe the bill itself would have a revealing preamble, but it doesn't really. The official name does say something though: "Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944".

I think people were very interested in taking lessons from WW1 and avoiding the same problems that had occurred afterwards. Not only would the GI Bill be emblematic of this, but also, say, the difference between the Marshall Plan and the Treaty of Versailles.

It's the same as saying you don't NEED to go to college. No, you don't. You don't need much of anything... But if you did go to college - whether through correlation or causation - statistically you are much better off.

So if college and housing get out of reach for most people - then maybe they will be worse off.

Who knows? Maybe it is all correlation and no causation.

[citation needed]

Per the The Credit Suisse Global Investment Returns Yearbook 2018, the global return for real estate from 1900 to 2017 was 1.3%, while stocks returns 5.2%:

* https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab...

Rent is often cheaper than mortgage payments, and is very more often cheaper than mortgage payments plus the cost of maintaining a home. If you take the difference and investment you can have just as must equity in a few decades. Preet Banerjee goes over the math in this ten minute video:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAMeI4uHAFE

He rents:

* https://www.speakers.ca/2013/10/preet-banerjee-sold-his-hous...

If you want to know when it makes financial sense, the "5% Rule" by Ben Felix is a decent place to start:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9Golcxjpi8

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uwl3-jBNEd4

Until recently he was a renter, but purchased a house 1-2 years ago. Not exactly happy with the decision though:

* https://www.youtube.com/shorts/L5SAF0SHD1w

You also have to factor in that it's a hedge against inflation on rent, and that part of your rent payment is going to principal, and that your mortgage interest is tax deductible.

If you think the average return for the S&P 500 unleveraged beats owning a PRIMARY RESIDENCE on 5:1 leverage, when your marginal tax rate is 45%, and interest rates are 2.7% on a 30-year fixed... I guess time will tell, but it is INCREDIBLY unlikely.

Leveraging in stocks:

* https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marginaccount.asp

it's not the purchase of the home that made you better off financially, but the ability to purchase a home.

If you had that ability, investing in another asset at the same leverage level (such as shares) would net you even more financial income (obviously, its higher risk).

This sounds like Reddit "live in your Mom's basement to save on rent" type financial advice. It doesn't work if you have to use that money to pay rent. Rents tend to be about the same or more than a mortgage. If you happen to live in an area where rents are considerably lower than a mortgage than this is an outside possibility, but this also depends on your rents not skyrocketing over the course of 30 years. One of the great things about 30 year fixed loans is that they allow you to ride out market insanity.

This is the dirty little secret of these housing bubbles. It's mostly the poor who get seriously burned, because people with money have mortgages. They don't have to find a way to pay a rent that increased 40% this year. In fact many of the people are the landlords who are enjoying a massive windfall thanks to the housing crisis. They have an incentive to make sure it continues.

For instance, after paying off a mortgage entirely, my housing costs will be effectively repairs, property tax and utilities. That's a tiny fraction of rent. Meanwhile over 25 years property prices have more than tripled so it's likely the renter's rent would have gone from $1500/month to $4500/month or so. If you have $7000/month for both cost of living and savings then putting $5500/month into whatever assets you choose now that your home is paid off is going to generate much better returns than putting $2500/month into whatever asset you choose after paying off your inflated rent.

Alternatively, you can buy the home purely as an investment rather than a place to live. In this case, you have rental costs either way but you don't just make the capital gains on the home you also make rental income from renting it out. Typically rental income can be around 6% of property value. If you add that to the 7.5% returns to property YoY since 2001 you get 13.5% returns. You will have some expenses to deduct from that so your net returns might end up around 11%. That's still demolishing the stock market returns.

no, if you paid off the mortgage, then the cost of your "rent" is just the cost of the capital sitting in the house (plus those maintenance costs you mentioned).

There's no such thing as free living. it is possible that rent is more expensive - but over time, this ought to normalize, as expensive rent will incentivize build-to-rent and arbitrage the difference to make a profit.

At most the portion of the rent I get from my capital is the difference between deploying the capital in the market and the return to housing. Since housing has historically beat the market that suggests a zero or negative rent for investing in housing.

this is not true unless you only start counting from the past 10-20 years, and only include regions that _did_ beat the market, rather than globally.

see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rvY2rIxdsA

Owning a home isn't just an investment, it's QoL.

Renting is shit, and raising kids in rented space is shit too. If someone moderately cares about their QoL and isn't enamoured with the idea of popping kids not having their own place won't help with deciding to make kids.

But so what? Nothing in your comment is relevant to inflation calculations.

What wisdom does this argument lead us to - basic hygene and human right are superfluous?

The argument put forward previously was 'people were starting families without X, therefore people not having X isn't a problem', where X was a house.

I was trying to demonstrate that no matter what you substitute for X, even something extreme like basic human rights, people were still starting families, therefore either we should not be concerned about anything, or the argument is flawed.

Also many people were rendered homeless or pushed into poverty by the current housing crisis, and I am sure those folks find the argument proposed above offensive and inflammatory.

The article actually mentions that on an inflation adjusted basis the monthly mortgage was the same now as in the early 80s (due to interest rate differences).

It’s basically not true that housing costs are categorically different than any other time.

But most people don't search for the most value-effective house, they ask how much house can they buy and then buy that.

If you're willing to step outside the east-coast corridors and/or break from suburban to "commuting rural" or further, it is quite possible to get a 10 year mortgage on a house on the median income.

> it is quite possible to get a 10 year mortgage on a house on the median income.

If you don’t mind living in a meth infested trailer park maybe. I assume of course you’re talking about regional median income, not the national.

If you want to live someplace with a decent school district and a good community for raising a family on a single income like the silents and boomers could in major cities then rural America today is no magic bullet.

I have no problem with rural living but suggesting hey why not go homestead in BFE Alabama or something isn’t a refutation for housing policy destroying the middle class, which has largely been urban and suburban.

Are you a realtor?