Backlog home stretch:
I have an “alt” theory on housing: Maybe the natural state of the housing market is indeed scarcity due to some sort of NIMBYism that’s innate to the human psyche.
If we look back to the pre-suburban/pre-modern era, and really to pretty much most of human history, the only time housing ever gets built is due to scarcity spurred by population growth. Most population growth was relatively slow compared to today, both absolutely and relative to existing populations. Most people lived in small villages, where growth was measured over generations, not months or years. While construction customs of course varied, no one went around building new housing to attract newcomers; you built housing after the fact, not before. Likewise in cities, elites generally controlled that process, and they would mainly be responding to macroeconomic growth conditions like booms and busts, or indulging their predilections towards lavish mansions. To the extent they ever cared about housing, their concern would have been keeping the masses from revolting, not modeling population growth and planning accordingly.
(Keep in mind that this is a gross generalization. There are going to be plenty of exceptions, but I’m getting at the broad political-economy picture, not trying to divine the mindsets of ancient forebears.)
In other words, while what we’d recognize as modern NIMBYism wasn’t ever a prominent strain of historical political thought, we can extract the converse principle that humanity’s default mode of thought on housing has generally been “we’ll build it when we need it”, with the “we” and “need” being highly subjective.
Thus, my core supposition is merely that housing might just be something we will never really get right as a species. Looking at other blocks on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the Agricultural Revolutions helped us get the food supply right, the Industrial Revolution guaranteed universally cheap textile clothing, and we’re currently in the process of greening our utilities. But perhaps housing’s economics will never really square well with our psychology enough to ever reach universal provision like we have for other Needs.
If so, it probably has something to do with our conceptions of hierarchy. Even a cursory examination of history shows that housing is deeply linked to intersections of discrimination and power: American segregation under Jim Crow and New Jim Crow, the Soviet/Communist apartment blocks, Roman insolae, Brazil’s famous slums (among others!). While the other needs like food, water, etc. have of course been targets for enacting these very same hierarchies, you can only go so far with them before you’re just outright killing and starving your preferred Other — which is also something that happens, but is not actually the goal of a hierarchy. To wit, that goal is to put the Other below the in-group.
Tie this in with the fact that housing is just a plain expensive up-front cost, and always has been. It’s simply not worth both the investment and overcoming the hierarchy aspect, unless there’s a major upside (like speculating on profits on suburban housing tracts) or a major downside (you’ve got a huge slum spreading disease and crime to your elite enclaves).
Anyways, just a thought.
RE those “exceptions”: Just for fun, I’d note that two categories of historical housing surpluses stand out.
(1) “Politically planned” cities. Usually would happen when a ruler is moving their capitol to a new, more defensible position, typically on land that was minimally settled prior. However, modern China’s “ghost cities” also count in this category — cities built because they needed a store of value to sink money into in order to maintain the currency regime that propped up their trade surplus.
(2) Disasters like the Black Death left huge housing surpluses.
RE California’s housing bills: Change happens slowly. Even when most people want it! Catastrophes accelerate that by changing facts on the ground without people’s consent.
All of which is to say… as I read some headline the other day about the 1989 World Series Earthquake, it made me wonder if it’ll actually take a devastating earthquake to really upend California’s housing market.
Happy Thursday!