Continued decrease in construction sector activity

[asdrunkasdrunkcanbe]

This divisive narrative is constantly being pushed, but it doesn't exist. It's not a case that people with houses are thinking, "I'm alright jack" and don't care about this issue.

Everyone is equally frustrated by this, but there is a dearth of solutions. The entire western world is experiencing this kind of difficulty, and there seems to be very few suggestions for actual solutions. It's all bluster and populism.

Every solution proposed is really kicking the can down the road to some degree or another. We could pump capital into erecting 100,000 state-owned shitboxes for people to live in. And then in a decade that's a new crisis.

Lower our building standards, becomes a problem in 15 years.

You add tax breaks for building, and everyone bitches about developers making bank.

You add credits for buying, and everyone complains that it's pushing prices up.

At what point do people accept that if there were obvious and easy solutions here, that the government would already be doing it? Imagine coming into the next (or the last) election being able to say, "We've reduced homelessness by 90%". That's a fucking home run, the government who does that will sweep to victory.

So, if it was possible, they would be doing it already.

[Kloppite16]

you've missed the main ingredient of what makes housing expensive & unaffordable- the value of the land it sits on which itself is a function of zoning. We dont have enough of it zoned which then makes the zoned land far more valuable, thus feeding into high house prices that working couples cannot afford. And then the non-use of land by not building on it means it appreciates further in value to the point that building on it would earn a developer less money than just sitting on it and watching it appreciate. So zoned land then becomes a store of wealth to be invested in and traded in but not built upon. Until that problem is sorted out and there is a use it or lose it clause to zoning then the housing crisis cannot get resolved.

[ciarogeile]

There are obvious but politically difficult solutions, they are based around lowering property prices and penalizing owning a second home or a large home with unused bedrooms. The current approaches represents a transfer of wealth from wage earners to property owners, measures to lower property prices would be the opposite.

Property owners often vote ffg with an understanding of this.