IMO takes like this are problematic. The problem is not enough building. That's it. All the other stuff you said is just noise that confuses people into believing this is some hyper-complicated modern-financial-system problem that's going to end the world due to its intractability. Its not any of that. Its just not enough building.
There are problems which feed into there not being enough building; the biggest one is definitely that property represents a major portion of Americans' investment portfolios, and thus our democratic system is filled with people (and companies) (and their representatives) who are heavily biased toward any decision that will raise property values. But its not that low building causes this; its just NIMBYism. This causes low building; it causes weird municipal rules about density; it causes expensive permitting; etc.
People also say "well, there's not enough land in the place people want to live so of course house prices are insane". Also bullshit. The "place people want to live" changes and expands all the time. Exurbs that were forests 15 years ago are now extremely hot. Why? BECAUSE WE BUILT. That's it. That's all it takes. Build housing. Build parks and sidewalks. Allow cool businesses to open.
Everyone, including and especially local governments, has made this so freakin complicated when its seriously not. Its freakin MBA prediction brain all over again. They're so afraid they don't understand the full problem, or the implications of their decision, that they refuse to act (build) and instead blame the lack of action (building) on intractably large problems like "interest rates" or "blackrock".
It IS more complicated than that. It's not easy to build within a 1 hour commute of a dense population center. All that land is owned, built, and called for. Calling it "overpopulation" could be fair.
A parallel problem is immigration and, as the top comment pointed out, cheap credit encouraging vacancy.
Not enough building, and also the inequality in ownership of land and houses. May be tax every third or later house owned higher and plug loopholes that allow you to own an extra house under trust or other structure to rent.
But where will this end for a lot of investors (which in Canada seems like a lot of the influential population) ?
> Not enough building, and also the inequality in ownership of land and houses.
Its really just building.
I grew up in a somewhat rural part of the US, basically just farm land and forests, but a few dozen miles from a city of ~100,000 people. The amount of NIMBYist "we gotta protect the farm" "we'd never sell to some big developer (spits on the ground)" you hear day to day was extreme, to say the least.
Ten years later, that city of 100,000 people is 115,000 people, a half-dozen miles closer to the rural farming community, and they just opened a strip mall outside of town. In another ten years they'll likely have a Starbucks and a luxury apartment complex. In thirty years that small community won't really exist; it'll be called an "exurb" of a city of 250,000 people.
My point in saying this in response to your comment is: Density brings money; and money trumps everything else. It trumps NIMBYism. It trumps Good Ole American Values. It can also trump inequality, weirdly enough; because density (aka money) increases the efficiency of our land use. The issue is: We aren't building enough.
> where will this end for a lot of investors
Constant-ish property asset values relative to baseline inflation. Its really not the end of the world. There's so many places to park money in the US economic system, its weird that we're so caught up in something so real and ugly as residential real estate. Go park your money in Nvidia.
Here's my take: the government should back low interest rate and high eligibility loans specifically for the purchase of housing which has never been lived in before. There should be some provision which allows the loans to be used in the case of initial development, or redevelopment if the new development has a higher density than the previous development on that lot (e.g. the lot had 1 unit before, now it has 4 units, you're good). These loans should be made available to individuals; two per person, some reasonable market-dependent limit per loan. That's it. If the specifics are correct, a program like this would fix an extreme number of problems the US housing system has. It would create a few problems, for sure, but critically: a program like this would create liquidity in the housing system, and its far, far easier to fix problems in a liquid system versus an illiquid one.
There are problems which feed into there not being enough building; the biggest one is definitely that property represents a major portion of Americans' investment portfolios, and thus our democratic system is filled with people (and companies) (and their representatives) who are heavily biased toward any decision that will raise property values. But its not that low building causes this; its just NIMBYism. This causes low building; it causes weird municipal rules about density; it causes expensive permitting; etc.
People also say "well, there's not enough land in the place people want to live so of course house prices are insane". Also bullshit. The "place people want to live" changes and expands all the time. Exurbs that were forests 15 years ago are now extremely hot. Why? BECAUSE WE BUILT. That's it. That's all it takes. Build housing. Build parks and sidewalks. Allow cool businesses to open.
Everyone, including and especially local governments, has made this so freakin complicated when its seriously not. Its freakin MBA prediction brain all over again. They're so afraid they don't understand the full problem, or the implications of their decision, that they refuse to act (build) and instead blame the lack of action (building) on intractably large problems like "interest rates" or "blackrock".