Housing Crises

Brought up to me recently by people having this problem.  

Investing in Flow    by Marc Andreessen

Our nation has a housing crisis.

The demographic trends driving America’s housing market are impossible to ignore: our country is creating households faster than we’re building houses. Structural shortages in available homes for sale push housing prices higher, while young people are staying single for longer and increasingly concentrating in highly desirable urban centers. These factors put enormous pressure on rents in the nation’s most dynamic cities, starkly revealing the troubling realities of both sides of the housing market’s two historical models.

The first model is: you own a home you call your own, typically with a multi-decade mortgage, near your current employer. IF you can find a house, as these locations often aren’t building new housing. IF you can afford that house, as housing prices in many such places have skyrocketed. And even then, you’re now stuck — you can’t move, even if your economic opportunity or life path wants to take you somewhere else.

The second model: you rent an apartment, but: it’s a soulless experience; do you even meet your neighbors, much less have any friends in your complex? Does it feel like home, or just a place to sleep? Are you proud to bring friends and family to visit, or hesitant? And you can pay rent for decades and still own zero equity — nothing. There’s a reason the federal government started subsidizing home mortgages: someone who is bought in to where he lives cares more about where he lives. Without this, apartments don’t generate any bond between person and place and without community, no bond between person to person.

Now drop the impact of the post-COVID world into this. Many people will live in places far away from where they work and many more will shift to a hybrid environment. As a result, they will experience much less, if any, of the in-office social bonding and friendships that local workers enjoy. For many of these people, increased screentime and reduced in-person interaction will cause challenges that are not just limited to work, such as alienation and loneliness. This is not a good path for anyone and it needs to be addressed directly, right now.

At the same time, in the last two years, we have seen a shift in life priorities. For hundreds of years, ambitious young people have had to move to immediate geographic colocation with employers to have access to the best jobs for their skills and talents. That is suddenly no longer true. This newfound flexibility has triggered the “Great Resignation”, where people prioritized other factors over professional considerations. Many people are voting with their feet and moving away from traditional economic hub cities to different cities, towns, or rural areas, with no diminishment of economic opportunity. My partner Katherine Boyle has written about this, and I think she’s right: Can Zoom Save the American Family? and Can Starlink Save the American Mother? ... '