Global warming, human-caused climate change!

[freeloader]

The housing crisis of expensive housing is created with high regulations and builders are afraid to build and the ones that do build, their costs are high so it's passed on to the buyers.

1.  There is no housing crisis. There is a market for housing that is doing EXACTLY what it was led to do since the end of World War II. And it’s not political. Republicans and Democrats both wanted houses to steadily increase in value—to provide a vehicle for invisible wealth creation. It has worked perfectly. Now, the chickens are simply coming home to roost. 

2. Of course costs get passed on to consumers. That is called a capitalist, market economy. Planned economies, such as those of some socialist and communist countries, do not pass costs on to consumers. Just to be clear—is your intent to actually advocate for a socialistic, planned economy in housing?    

3. A big part of this problem is driven by the efforts of politicians from on the Ag committees (who come overwhelmingly from farm-belt states) to enrich a small class of ultra-wealthy and corporate farmers. The majority of agricultural subsidies, including subsidies for soil/erosion control (ie, pay farmers not to grow things), go to big corporate farmers. A half-century of farm bills have made farming unprofitable for small farmers. When you destroy small farmers, you destroy entire communities. The people have to go somewhere, so they move to cities and suburbs. 

4. So, to bring things more or less full-circle, you have a growing population which wants (needs) more and more to live in urban and suburban areas. Particularly in places where geography naturally limits supply (New York City, Bay Area), the price is going to increase (all other things held equal) faster than in other urban and suburban areas.

[dfrecore]

The housing crisis of expensive housing is created with high regulations and builders are afraid to build and the ones that do build, their costs are high so it's passed on to the buyers.

1.  There is no housing crisis. There is a market for housing that is doing EXACTLY what it was led to do since the end of World War II. And it’s not political. Republicans and Democrats both wanted houses to steadily increase in value—to provide a vehicle for invisible wealth creation. It has worked perfectly. Now, the chickens are simply coming home to roost.

In CA, they overburden builders with ridiculous regulations, and then consumers are screwed.  ALL new homes in CA are required to have solar panels, adding $10k to the cost.  But multiply that by all the other things they have to include, and the costs just mount.  That's in addition to the time factor: it takes many more months to get approval to build in CA than almost anywhere else in the US, and that's if you don't get sued.  In 2015, it was estimated that the impact fees were $23k - more than triple the cost in other states.  That was before the solar mandate, so now it's $33k, right off the bat.

The reason there's a housing crisis NOW is due to the fact that people are moving like crazy, as many are no longer tied to a job in a specific city; if your job became an online job during Covid and is going to stay that way, you can now move anywhere in the country (or even in the world).  So the housing markets are shifting, and due to Covid, there are major slowdowns in building (we are building now, our house is scheduled to be finished next month, we are one of those families that fled CA for greener pastures last year).  Add to that people feeling like there's going to be inflation, so they're buying now before prices or interest rates go WAY up...and so there's a housing crisis in many places.

[freeloader]

Where, exactly, is the crisis?  I would love to have a 3 bedroom on around the twentieth story of a mid-century building overlooking Central Park West, but I cannot afford it. I have a very nice home in a mid-sized city in flyover country because I can afford that. Is there a crisis when I cannot buy my dream home?  I don’t think so. Perhaps you do. We can agree to disagree.

There are LOT of houses and apartments available. They just tend to be in places where people don’t want to live.  And, yes, they may be far from the places that have the most jobs.

If there is a “crisis”, it is a crisis in the market to produce enough highly desirable units cheaply enough so that people can engage in what you, dfrecore, pretty well note is speculative buying. Again, I don’t view the temporary inability to meet that demand as a “crisis”. We can agree to disagree.

Is there a shortage in many places?  Of course there is. But a shortage and a crisis are far from the same thing. Scarcity is the engine that drives a market. The housing market has shifted, in many locations, to the demand side the of the supply/demand curve. That much is surely true. But the market will reach equilibrium.