This is just the surface of the issue, housing market problem is far deeper, and even home “owners” aren’t actually owning with their perpetual property taxes, which is unlike rent, uncontrolled. To solve housing for everyone, the solution is simple, it’s not building new units, that’s temporary, it’s not more regulations on whatever, that doesn’t solve the root cause, you need to solve that root cause and that is houses are considered an investment, not a shelter, and investments are always expected to go up, obviously it will reach a point that having a few walls of plywood is like owning a merchandise, it doesn’t take a genius to find this. So the steps to solve the toot cause as follows:

- making housing as a depreciated asset, like a car, TV, whatever, it’s NOT an investment. Go invest and start a business that actually contributes to the economy instead of leeching on other’s wealth.

- ban interest rates on mortgages, so banks aren’t incentivized to pour fake numbers into accounts and deducting fake numbers from other accounts as debt all while enjoying the sweet real money from interest. Once that is ban, they won’t give loans based on speculated prices, ending the daisy chain of using another house to get a bigger loan to buy a bigger house based on fake speculated market value.

- relax the permits and regulations on owning and building houses, which is a big topic on its own.

Among many other points that goes after the root cause, not some duct tape solution, housing is a shelter not an investment, look up any human needs diagram and you will find shelter is at the bottom of it, you can’t be creative or do great things when you are not settling in a house, you can’t think about making a business and contribute to economy if you are paying most of your income to landlord who take that to pay a mortgage so the bank can take the interest. Things now seem calm but most the new generation don’t own a house or ever thinking of owning a one, these soon will be the majority of voting and decision making, and it will be a brutal reaction on boomers and the overall selfish system that do anything to make their lives more miserable.

So I'm Gen-X. Statistically speaking, I have more yesterdays than tomorrows. I can't even begin to describe how much of a dystopian hellscape the world has become and is becoming. Many my age describe the 1990s as the last good decade.

I lived in a 2 bedroom apartment in the 1990s for $200/month 3 miles from the city center. All my other expenses were less than another $200/month. The median house price was less than $80k. College graduate positions typically paid ~$30k but that was OK. This was pre-9/11 so all those old TV shows and movies you saw of people meeting people at the airport gate were very real. I've seen younger people think this was just a trope, like the 30 seconds the trace a call bit. No, that was real. Friends of a friend lived in Iowa and split a 4 bedroom house for $180/month. Not each, total.

For younger millenials and Gen-Z, I honestly wish you could've experienced this world, for no other reason than to see that things weren't always this way and don't have to be this way.

There's an old episode of the Cosby Show that had the father (Bill Cosby) teaching his son, Theo, about finances. It's funny watching it back now because it has the line "an apartment in Manhattan is going to cost you $400" and I remember thinking how expensive that sounded at the time.

The absolute worst thing that has happened is how hoarding housing has become a retirement plan. It's simply stealing from the next generation and it's absolutely strangling the economy. Society is fraying at the edges. For anyone interested, there's been academic work on this that falls under the label of "the housing theory of everything" eg [1].

But what I hate most is how cruel, selfish and stupid everybody seems to be getting, in part fuelled by increasing desperation to stay above the rising tide just a little bit longer. And the ultra-wealthy constantly throw gas on this fire and torch the planet for what? So they can have $200 billion instead of $100 billion? What good does that do you if there's nothing left? But what's crazy is that a third of the population will defend Jeff Bezos in this equation.

What you see in a lot of economic indicators (such as those posted here) can be read as people incradsingly see themselves as having no future. Continued consumer spending is not a sign of a healthy economy or optimism anymore. It's a sign of fatalism.

The entire thing is honestly deeply depressing.

[1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...

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