News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Solving the housing crisis requires fighting monopolies in construction (2020). Parent comment

Re:Solving the housing crisis requires fighting monopolies i... by monocasa on Saturday June 04, 2022 @05:05PM (#31625060)
Newborns aren't generally buying houses; the population was growing 25 years ago.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Solving the housing crisis requires fighting monopolies i... by adam_arthur on Saturday June 04, 2022 @05:20PM (#31625205)
Housing units per working age person is at an all time high and increasing quickly.

https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2022/3/29/50377332-1...

On mobile now, but you can confirm the stats on FRED

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Solving the housing crisis requires fighting monopolies i... by HarryHirsch on Saturday June 04, 2022 @08:22PM (#31626617)
Housing markets are regional. In my overpriced, overpopulated corner of Western MA construction simply isn't happening. The relevant metric isn't units per person, it's units per workplace. No one is interested if housing is plentiful in any deindustrialized rust belt city when people are moving to either coast.

The person posting that graph has a bridge to sell

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Solving the housing crisis requires fighting monopolies i... by adam_arthur on Saturday June 04, 2022 @10:20PM (#31627319)
Housing is fungible and substitutable. Especially in a WFH world.

Ergo building in FL or TX can reduce prices in CA. Why do you think the northeast and CA are losing population?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Solving the housing crisis requires fighting monopolies i... by HarryHirsch on Saturday June 04, 2022 @11:01PM (#31627600)
If housing is fungible I've got a house in Gary, IN to sell to you. WFH makes it possible.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Solving the housing crisis requires fighting monopolies i... by adam_arthur on Saturday June 04, 2022 @11:26PM (#31627730)
Do you understand macro scoped problems and the significance of subsets of the population having differing priorities? Seems not.

Aside from the snark, I'll make it clear. If you have 100 people and even just 5 of them prioritize LCOL to their current locale, those 5 moving away will reduce demand for the area, regardless if the other 95 would never move to Gary, IN in a million years. Housing is not a closed system, and building nice developments in Raleigh or Denver will take population from higher COL places in the aggregate. Which is exactly why we see population loss in HCOL areas.

Very small brained thinking in the residential real estate world unfortunately.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Solving the housing crisis requires fighting monopolies i... by HarryHirsch on Sunday June 05, 2022 @10:40AM (#31631387)
The withdrawal from large tracts of the country towards employment centers, mostly on either coast, is still ongoing. WFH may have blunted it a little, however the tendency is the same. For every person that moves from San Francisco to Raleigh there's two that move from Lumberton, NC to Raleigh. So - prices in Raleigh are not falling, and who cares about Lumberton? And prices in the pharma hub Boston are out of control. If you are in pharma, you most likely live in Boston, SF or San Diego, with housing out of control in all three. That's the thing - housing is still most intimately tied to employment.
[ Parent | on HN ]