Zach WeinersmithStupid econ question:
So it looks like a lot of remaining inflation is rent. In that case, wouldn't you want to lower rates to increase home-building and home-ownership in order to reduce rent pricing?
Robert Watkins@ZachWeinersmith building houses lowers rents the way expanding highways solves traffic jams.
It’s part of the solution, but without the other parts, you end up back with the same problem a few years later.
Rusty Earthfire@twasink @ZachWeinersmith With housing "induced demand" would mean more people in homes, which is a major benefit, in pretty stark contrast to more cars on the road.
@RustyEarthfire @ZachWeinersmith
Except that the goal isn’t "more people _owning_ houses" (which is what building more houses promotes).
The goal is to "people in houses they can afford”.
And building homes, while _part_ of that solution, isn't anywhere near enough of the solution. Because there is more than enough housing stock in the US to house everyone, assuming the cost of doing so was free.
The end state of simply buying more houses is that you end up with more landlords charging too much rent, and a significant amount of people being unable to afford rent.
You need to stop, for example, hedge funds going through and buying up every available property in a town so that they can control the rent levels and extract money out of a captive community. (Hedge funds that are perfectly happy to leave houses vacant to prop up the prices they can charge for the other houses)
there is more than enough housing stock in the US to house everyone, assuming the cost of doing so was free.
There absolutely is not, especially not where people want to live.
As of 2022, there were estimated to be approximately 144m "housing units" (houses, apartments, etc) in the US.
With a population of about 333.3m, that's 2.3 people per dwelling.
That's not a supply problem. That's a distribution problem - and I don't mean geographic.
Looking at the US city with the highest number of homeless people - NYC – there are about 47,000 _abandoned or deliberately kept vacant_ houses. More than enough to house the 88,000 homeless people in NYC. Sure, these will mostly be in the outer boroughs, but they're still in NYC.
That's ignoring the regular rental vacancies, people keeping and using multiple properties, empty office buildings that could be used as housing stock, etc.
