zlacker

> The scarcity of houses is real and physical

Not really in a lot of cities, most scarcity is based on government regulations (=not allowing more of them to be built, or not allowed to build larger ones). There are a few locations where there is no actual usable space to build more, but mostly, that is not an issue.

>>ajsnig+(OP)
The scarcity of land is physical. And to supply more housing you need to pay for the ownership of physical assets, and then for people to physically demolish them and physically build bigger structures, which is a lot of expensive to take if the demand for property doesn't already exceed its supply

Or you could create more "limited edition" monkey pictures at essentially zero marginal cost.

>>notaha+56
There are a lot of places where there is enough land to build more and more, but the governments don't allow it. And there are also places such as san-francisco, where replacing single-family houses with apartment buildings would solve a lot of the housing crisis, but the government (and NIMBYs) don't allow it.

>>ajsnig+(OP)
The scarcity might be artificially created, but that doesn't make it any less real.

>>choko+b7
I mean, it depends. If you live in Tokyo, the scarcity is real-real. If you live in a city, where just a re-zoning solves a lot of problems, the issue is atleast mostly solvable, even if it means shaking down a whole pyramid of government officials, and in some places, the housing crisis is bad enough, that they're aproaching the critical mass of people to make this happen.

>>ajsnig+A6
Even in a world with zero building regulation you're still running into constraints though. Sure, people could build more apartments which would slow growth in accommodation prices and maybe directly hurt the value of the neighbours' properties they overshadow, but land is still limited amd expensive (more expensive if you're allowed to build tenement blocks on it) and construction still physically intensive and expensive, so there's still no incentive to drive prices down by supplying more apartments than the market demands.

cf NFTs where digital art itself can be copied and viewed infinitely, and the NFTs themselves are just tokens issued at near zero cost by providers which could happily issue infinitely more tokens referencing the same art (even though at the moment, for the sake of trust and collectibility and not dampening the hype yet, it's more lucrative to issue finite numbers of additional tokens referring to more low-effort variations on the original art instead.)

>>ajsnig+U7
You're playing semantics. If there aren't physically enough homes in NYC for the number of interested buyers there is Scarcity. Talking about that source of that scarcity is irrelevant. Re-Zoning fixes nothing in the short term and scarcity will remain. Even if you re-zoned you need to physically build up inventory which takes years.

>>fusion+dD
Yes, and new york (and san francisco, and many other places) are in a housing crisis for years now, and have not started any major building projects nor liberalized building larg(er) apartment buildings (in case of san francisco).

The best time to start building was 10, 15, 20 years ago, the next best time is now.

>>notaha+Pi
I was born in a socialist country, where people built houses. Literally, you built first, dealt with papers later, and pretty much everyone had a house or an apartment. Government and companies built apartments for their workers, people built private houses themselves, mostly literally (every weekend, wheelbarrow, few sacks of cement, a bunch of bricks, a few friends, a case of beer,...).

After a bunch of regulation, now, the "papers" cost more than materials to build, and most of the area is zoned as eg farming area, even though there has never been any farming there. Of course, prices have gone up A LOT, there is a lot of NIMBYism, by people who already build their house, and don't want another one next to it, and young people are basically fucked.

We might disagree, but in places with available land (and there are many), the only thing that stands between housing and non-millionaire people are (local) governments and regulations.