This is myopic thinking. We all live in one big housing market. If you don’t have enough houses built, it doesn’t provide housing for the working class. You just end up with multi-millionaires living in tiny homes.
When you restrict the ability of builders to build new homes, they focus on maximizing the profit of the few homes they can make. We had cheap housing in the US in eras where we made it possible for builders to build vast numbers of housing on a colossal scale. That way you can really harness economies of scale and drive down the price tremendously.
There are two ways to make money by making something. You can either make high-margin luxury goods, or you can make vast numbers of low-margin affordable goods. Our current restrictions on home buildings encourage developer to take the former path, when we want to encourage them to take the latter.
This is myopic thinking. We all live in one big housing market. If you don’t have enough houses built, it doesn’t provide housing for the working class. You just end up with multi-millionaires living in tiny homes.
When you restrict the ability of builders to build new homes, they focus on maximizing the profit of the few homes they can make. We had cheap housing in the US in eras where we made it possible for builders to build vast numbers of housing on a colossal scale. That way you can really harness economies of scale and drive down the price tremendously.
There are two ways to make money by making something. You can either make high-margin luxury goods, or you can make vast numbers of low-margin affordable goods. Our current restrictions on home buildings encourage developer to take the former path, when we want to encourage them to take the latter.