Housing is a funny old one and speaks to it being a human problem. One thing a lot of people dont truly engage with with the housing issue is that its a massive issue of distribution. Too many people want to live in too few places. Yes, central banks & interest rates (being too low and also now being relatively too high), nimbyism, and rent seeking play an important role too but solving the "too many people live in too few places" issue actually fixes that problem (slowly, and possibly unpalatably slow for some, but a fix nonetheless)

The key issue upstream is that too many good jobs are concentrated in too few places, and that leads to consumerism stimulating those places and making them further more attractive. Technology, through Covid, actually gave governments a get out of jail free card by allowing remote work to become more mainstream. Only to just not grasp the golden egg they were given. Pivot economies more to remote working more actively helps distribute people to other places with more affordable home. Over time, and again slowly, those places become more attractive because people now actually live there.

Existing homeowners can still wrap themselves in the warm glow of their high house prices which only loses "real" value through inflation which people tend not to notice as much.

But we decided to try to go back to the status quo so oh well

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torginus a day ago | parent [-]

I see the issue of housing is a combination of:

- House prices increasing while wages are stagnant

- Home loans and increasing prices mean the people going for huge leverages on their home purchases

- Supply is essentially government controlled, and dependent, and building more housing is heavily politicized

- A lot of dubious money is being created, which gets converted to good money by investing it in the housing market

- Housing is genuinely difficult to build and labor and capital intensive

> The key issue upstream is that too many good jobs are concentrated in too few places

This no longer is the case with remote work on the rise, If that were the case, housing prices would increase faster in trendy overpriced places, but the increase as of late was more uniform, with places like London growing slower (or even depreciating, relatively speaking) to less in-demand places.

	▲	cal_dent 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'd argue that if your point around remote fully held true then that would be shown in the very short-term by rental prices (as the key indicator of people leaving London in lieu of population/census data) but that hasnt been apparent in the data. London rentals have seen much stronger growth post-covid than other places in the UK. What is happening with house prices in london is a combination of the simple effects of high-ish interest rates v high house prices (limiting affordability) and also flats in general taking a beating from post-grenfell building regs changes and leasehold issues. When you look at granular data there is still a surprising amount growth in Zone 3-4 onwards in London because actual houses in those locations are still sort of achievable for decently paid couples. Also regionally, a bit glib, but the price increases are happening in Manchester not Bolton or Sheffield not Scunthorpe. If remote working was truly acceptable then those latter locations would be seeing far more inward movement of people but they're not really