the ultimate question is still the same: why haven’t we had enough housing where it’s needed for prices to be more stable?

“Enough housing” is a bad way to frame it. Because - again - we have plenty of vacant housing in the deindustrialized midwest. We have plenty of vacant real estate in the Great Plains. We have a dormant cache of vacant units in large dense metropoles. Why aren’t these being filled?

• No jobs

• No infrastructure

• Speculative rent-seeking

In that order.

But any good answer to this is going to hit 20 different points.

You can drill down to any individual location and ask why the current housing situation exists/persists. But this YIMBY attitude that the solution is always more New Build constructions on the suburban periphery or massive teardowns of inner city occupied real estate is just six developers in a trench coat putting one over on you.

Yeah, there’s complexity in these markets. But private sector finance driven central planning really does boil down to “profit maximization” wherever you are. The real question, at any given region, is whether you have a housing surplus (because absent demand) or deficit (because excess supply) and how that shapes the prices of units. And a lot of that comes back to who has access to easy credit and who does.