alt Hacker NewsI wonder about this. There's all this noise about a great housing shortage in San Francisco, but the population of SF is up only 65,000 people in 10 years. There are a lot more tall buildings. This may be a monopoly overpricing situation rather than an actual shortage. There's a huge amount of empty office space.
Remember, the world passed "peak baby" back in 2013. Population is leveling off in the developed world.
Replies
> This may be a monopoly overpricing situation rather than an actual shortage.
An actual shortage is characterized by prices being prevented from rising. It is already understood that "shortage" is being used colloquially here.
Population growth is reduced by a housing shortage because people who otherwise want to move in can't if there aren't units available for them to move in to.
Moreover, who is supposed to have a monopoly on housing in San Francisco? Is there any single entity that owns even as much as 1% of all the housing in the city? And even if there was, wouldn't building more housing still fix it, because the more you build the more you dilute their monopoly?
You have to look at the average household size and number of children, not just population.
A world where most households are man + woman + 0..3 children is very different than one where most households are 1..2 people + cat/dog. The latter demands far more housing than the former, even when populations are otherwise equal.
A population of 10 million singles demand 4 times more "housing units" than a population of 10 million people in 4-person families.
This is what makes immigration-driven population growth so pernicious compared to childbirth-driven. The family structures you end up with are completely different.
Google suggests a whopping 15% if SF homes are empty.
London by comparison is about 2.5%
Why is SFs figure so high. Why are people holding on to unproductive assets, paying to maintain them.
There might not be a housing shortage on the North American continent, but that doesn't help because people want to live in New York, not upper Saskatchewan
[flagged]
I noticed there is a split how this topic is discussed in (center-)left and (center-)right circles.
The right generally takes as a given that the cause of the problem (if there is a problem at all) is that there is not enough housing and we just have to build more.
The left argues that in we in fact do have enough units that could be used for housing (or at least the situation is not as clear-cut), but that other factors prevent them to be available at affordable prices, like the effects of extreme income and wealth inequality on the market.
Personally, I think the "left-wing" explanation makes more sense - at least I've never understood where that sudden shortage of physical housing is supposed to have come from. We neither had a population explosion, nor a war or catastrophe that would have destroyed a lot of houses. So then why would there have been "enough" housing in the past but not anymore today?