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Housing prices (europe.pub)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/workreform@lemmy.world
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[–] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Housing became an investment so people bought more than one.

Second homes are far less of an issue than tenth homes or hundredth homes, what with the rise of rental property consolidation and AirBnB-ification.

Houses are twice the size they used to be. So they cost twice as much for that.

That's not how homes are priced, though. The real raw materials for construction are a fraction of the total cost. Which is why you'll see old ranch homes broken up into clusters of three-story townhomes the closer you get to growing downtown districts. Also, why you see increasingly shoddy construction jobs in new-builds, as compressed lumber and stucco replace concrete, steel, and hardwood. Nevermind the cost of labor, which is all over the map depending on whether ICE has decided to raid you recently.

Houses have a lot more regulations and codes they must comply with.

They've also become more cookie-cutter standard. Far fewer custom homes. Far more big developers who get a rubber stamp (or pay bribes to the right people) to roll out a thousand-unit development.

We build less houses now than we did in the 1970s.

We have less undeveloped real estate connected to highway access points than we did in the 1970s. And we have more Boomer-vacated housing re-entering the market.

The single biggest proximate cause to the housing price boom has been the ZIRP interest rate policy, flirted with after the Dot-Com bust of '01 and bought whole-hog after '08. We've been living in an era of low wages and cheap lending. This has resulted in a historic consolidation of private ownership under banks and hedge funds that have proximate access to the Fed credit window.

The end result is housing units being bought for a market rate and rented for a profit, until the market saturates and you have a sudden forced liquidation. These long drawn-out real estate famines punctuated with sudden windfalls reward people who just happen to be in the market at the right moment. But they otherwise stack the deck in favor of people with the most borrowing power.

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  • [–] -2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Materials require labor. Labor requires inspections. The more material the more everything else. And those materials cost more because they are to much tighter specifications than they were in the 70s. The lumber might be cheap but a fire suppression system in a 4000 square foot house costs a lot more than no suppression system in a 1200 one.

    But as you point out it's not really about materials though. It's about square footage. You don't get a bulk discount for buying a 5000 square foot house instead of a 1200. You pay even more. And zoning won't let you build a 1200 anymore because they tax based on square footage so they jacked up the smallest house size they will approve.

    There is no single cause for houses being more expensive. It's a whole host of them and that's why prices climbed faster than inflation.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago

    You don’t get a bulk discount for buying a 5000 square foot house instead of a 1200.

    Per sqft? You absolutely do. Buying one 5000 sqft house will almost certainly run you less than buying four separate 1200 sqft units, all else being equal. If anything, larger houses are a result of cheaper material inputs. PVC and compressed lumber make manufactured homes easier to produce than their historical brick and mortar and copper pipe counterparts.

    So I think you have it backwards. Houses have expanded in size to justify their inflated costs. But the real price inflation is happening at the ground floor.

    There is no single cause for houses being more expensive

    Privatization and financialization are both but-for drivers of price-inflation. Cheap lending means more dollars are chasing the same number of goods, despite flat wages. The functional extinction of public housing means there's no price ceiling for entry level housing units established by the state. So prices compress around the median purchase rate, while low-income households are entirely priced out of the marketplace and middle-income households are larded up with debt.

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