Considering how crazy expensive accommodations have become the last couple of years, concentrated in the hands of greedy corporations, landlords and how little politicians seem to care about this problem, do you think we will ever experience a real estate market crash that would bring those exorbitant prices back to Earth?
I think it is achievable. But someone has to start doing the economic planning to make it happen in each local area.
One approach is to take political control of each city and resolve the problem by applying sufficient government. Either you make enough housing for the people who are there, or you seize enough stuff for the project that people start leaving. But that can be hard to muster the political will to do.
Alternatively, “housing” per se is not unaffordable: at whatever reasonable fraction of a normal wage, there is somewhere on Earth that you could pay to live. Plenty of empty space in small towns scattered across the US, for example. The problem is that you can’t actually live there, because you also need to have a job to pay for the housing, which isn’t where the housing/empty land is. Also many of these places are so under-served by municipal services as to be practically uninhabitable: you can afford an RV and you can afford an acre of desert with no electric, water, or sewer service, but you cannot combine the two to create acceptable housing.
If the people who control the cities where the work and services are are unwilling to accommodate residents, then work and services need to be organized in places not under the control of these malicious actors. Ideally with new mechanisms in place to prevent the same failure modes from reoccurring.
With more of a push for WFH (which could be legally required as an option in some cases) and ensuring smaller towns have good internet access, smaller towns could be a lot more viable. They aren’t to everyone’s taste, but there’s plenty of people who would love to live in a small town if not for the hellish commuting they’d have to do and the shoddy internet access.
Having decent transit options to the nearest big city would also help. Small towns often struggle with cars being a necessity because you’d have to go into the big city for many things.
In the early days of the pandemic I was thinking the shift to working from home would cause people to flee cities and move to smaller towns, causing major demographic and social changes.
I was half right. People did move to smaller towns, myself included. But then we saw firsthand how awful they are and moved back to big cities because it’s worth it. I could go the rest of my life not living next to mouth breathing MAGAs.
Not sure if we can rely on smaller towns to moderate our prices…