"Early American zoning is generally thought to have been motivated partly by racism, when suburban white Americans sought to exclude poorer non-white Americans from their neighborhoods by banning the only kinds of housing that non-white Americans could afford."
My only disagreement is in the "partly motivated by racism". If it was only part, it was by far and away the biggest part. Americans (I'm one) are remarkable in their ability to perform wildly complicated gymnastics to show they aren't racists by coming up with all manner of reasons for restrictive zoning. Sometimes it takes more than scratching beneath the surface, sometimes you have to dig a bit, but it's amazing how often it comes back to ways for keeping The Other™ out of the neighborhood. I worked in the field my entire career, and without question my time as a zoning administrator was the most educational for seeing through the goofiness of American housing issues.
Thank you! I do think the prevalence of zoning in Europe, even before mass immigration, suggests that other factors (including social class exclusion!) play a role too. But it is certainly striking how racial exclusion was the most prevalent clause in private covenants in the early twentieth century.
I disagree. One cannot understate how elitist miny suburban developments were. Just witnessed the grand names. Sure, that can also be construed as racist, but it needs to be recognized.
The UK is the case study for this. Our housing debate races to name a villain — migrants, second-homers, developers — when the boring throughline across Europe is the same: we stopped building enough, for decades. Migration interacts with the shortage; it didn’t create it. Supply is the answer nobody campaigns on.
One of the issues I know the NIMBYS have in my area in the US, is that the YIMBYS claim that its all about making construction affordable but in reality all it's doing is encouraging the building of luxury condos, townhomes etc... so it feels a bit like "but think of the children" then its completely not about them. In addition, no one ever explains how the sewage system and other utilities are going to cope with the increases without upgrading their infrastructure too. Which means additional costs that current ratepayers pay. So the incentives to encourage development isn't there (and the local YMBY group, called Greater Greater Washington is completely funded by developers. Which doesn't help their cause much as everyone knows why they want to do it).
They would have a better argument if they explain that by building new luxury dwellings they are making the older stock look less attractive and hence those homeowners will have to lower their prices to stay competitive, but no one really likes to hear that argument (and in Europe, their older housing stock is better than American, so its less likely to impact prices without regulation). The harder alternative is to do what China is doing: make underpopulated places more attractive by moving prestigious institutions to new locations to encourage people to move. However this sort of failed with the universities, as the universities moved out, but the leadership stayed in Bejing as they didn't want to go.
Indeed. It is absolutely true that moving chains (‘filtering’) exist and hence that more luxury housing is good for everyone, but it is highly unintuitive to most people, and they often suspect it is a trick or sophistry of some kind. I have written about moving chains before (https://capx.co/filtration-or-how-building-expensive-homes-can-help-people-on-low-incomes) but I’m not sure how to make the argument more persuasively.
> the YIMBYS claim that its all about making construction affordable but in reality all it's doing is encouraging the building of luxury condos, townhomes etc...
More homes will lower housing costs for everyone. This is empirically validated through dozens of studies, as well as obvious if one thinks through what happens when more housing becomes available.
Rich people will bid up the costs of other housing if they have no alternatives.
But it's not used in our area. They just keep going on about the 10% of affordable housing that will be connected to the luxury apartments and never bring the other part up.
Yeah, there's at least several dozens of opinion pieces pointing it out, in addition to it being "real estate common knowledge". It's like folks are finally discovering what real estate developers have known for a century.
The cross-country angle is the clarifying bit: shortages show up under very different migration and planning regimes, which is exactly why pinning it on any single input falls apart. The common thread isn’t who’s arriving — it’s decades of building too little into rising demand. Supply is the story.
This was interesting, well done! Indeed, Paris has suburbs with a decent number of single family units, or larg-er apartments. This is true, "I have been particularly struck by this in Paris. Paris has vast modern suburbs of low-density, owner-occupier, single-family houses. Some of these are very wealthy, like Le Vésinet or Vaucresson."
But they aren't really part of "Paris culture" which is odd because, especially the 92, is known as a great place to live.
Thank you! I am not at all an expert on France, but my anecdotal impression is that France has become a suburban nation without noticing it. And as you say, many of their suburbs are really nice!
What do you think those real price charts would look like without NIMBYs? I mean, they must rise in the long run if people earn more and grow their real incomes, no?
Not necessarily! In the nineteenth century real house prices were basically flat, while incomes rose steadily. The result was improving affordability. Not just some, but most, goods have become more affordable in affluent societies – food, clothes, transport, furniture etc. Housing is an anomaly.
Absent NIMBYism there might have been some increase in real prices due to build costs increasing. But I’m not sure! Knoll found that American build costs remained remarkably flat in the twentieth century, as technology improved the productivity of the construction sector to about the same extent as construction labour became more expensive.
Fair. So how do you square the rental affordability "revolution" of the mid-20th century with that price data showing rising prices since the mid-20th century?
One point that I would add is that it is important to differentiate between:
1) Why zoning rules were originally implemented in the late 19th and early 20th Century, and
2) Why there is political resistance to changing zoning rules in the 21st Century.
Those are likely two different explanations.
The original push for zoning in the 19th Century came primarily from public health concerns and conflicts created by industrialization. Then is was reinforced by Urban Design philosophies that believed that cities should be designed rather than growing organically and that certain types of economic activities should be in separate areas.
I think much of the difficulty in rolling back zoning rules is primarily political and institutional inertia. Government regulations and programs tend to persist even when few voters support them.
Europeans greater deference to governmental power may be part of the reason why YIMBYism is much weaker in Europe.
Interesting! I am not sure I entirely agree. Zoning rules certainly arose in the context of public health concerns, anti-density elite consensus, etc. But it is striking how (a) they overlapped with the covenants that landowners already used and (b) where zoning was perceived to run contrary to landowner interests, it tended not to happen. At risk of presuming upon your patience, I wrote about this in detail here: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-great-downzoning/
I have some sympathy with the claim about contemporary inertia, although I do think NIMBYism is still a genuine and potent political force.
In my town, it's about appearances. To come out and say what folks actually think would be societal suicide. Rolling back zoning means allowing people poorer than what one perceives oneself to be... into the neighborhood. I've witnessed remarkable semantic gymnastics to avoid being labeled racist/classist/whatever-ist, but scratch beneath the surface and one finds the usual human inability to accommodate folks different from them.
Interesting. It would be nice to know more about this. A lot of important housing stories get completely overlooked because of ‘national siloing’ of policy debates.
I'm most familiar with Finland, where there was a surge of activism in the 2010s, when a bunch of people got together online to discuss why city planning in Helsinki couldn't produce the kind of urban form people liked. One byproduct of it was a citizen city plan that was inspired by a similar effort in Stockholm:
These and similar policies in other cities are one reason why Finland has seen much more modest housing cost inflation than most other European countries:
Why Finnish cities decided to pursue relatively aggressive supply side policies probably isn't attributable to a single factor, but a major one is that rent control was abolished during the financial crisis of the early 1990s, removing a potential policy distraction.
It would be worthwhile to look at the housing affordability problems in Australia and Canada as distinct cases. A common contributor is land use and zoning, but there are other aspects such as tax policy, and the underlying structure of their economies. I know this publication wrote about a case study in Vancouver Canada but that appears to be an isolated example that cannot scale across Vancouver which still has among the highest housing costs as a ratio of income.
Indeed. I visited Canada recently and learnt a lot about it, but I don’t know if I have a clear overall model. Australia seems like a fascinating case but I have never had the chance to study it properly.
Indeed. Outward expansion can mostly make up for density restrictions, and densification can mostly make up for urban containment, but if you have both kinds of restrictions, you have a serious problem. Britain is alas the model case here.
There are two big fators. One is internal movement towards major cities, meaning that there are still housing shortages there even while there is plenty of housing elsewhere. Tokyo has scarce housing even though Japan’s population is in steady decline. The other is immigration, which means that European populations (unlike Japan’s) are still growing despite low birth rates.
It may be related, but I tend to think it's more coincidental.
We...meaning me and my stoner hippy carpenter friends...were looking at the idea 40 years ago and seeing that there aren't going to be enough houses in the places that people wanted to live. It didn't take genius, just being involved at a base level in the housing industry and understanding there isn't enough land for the types of houses everyone wanted to live in. Being poor and absent the financial strength necessary to place long term bets on a sure thing, the economic windfall escaped us, but we could clearly see what was coming long before the crap entered the fan. It happened slowly, then suddenly...once again illustrating the shape of momentous change.
Low birth rates...I have no idea. Opinions masquerading as theories are everywhere. Given humans propensity for wanting to have sex all the time, it's a mystery for me.
Yet what always surprises me is that no one is talking about land carrying capacity... because if the Netherlands did, they would realise that at the height of its well-developed and innovative bio-based economy of 1870, its land could support a maximum of 4-5 million people.
Now, without giving it any thought, they are aiming for 20mln. Based entirely on the unspoken premise that energy will always remain cheap and abundant. But what if it doesn't? Name me one country that can survive a few months' stress test without diesel? Most won't last a week or even a few days...
It would take the Netherlands 200 years at a TFR of 1,6 (economically considered a safe descent) to return to its natural carrying-capacity population. Surely we must realise that this 15 million surplus will be shedded far more quickly and violently as time will be luxury they no longer have. The same will occur in many places.
I mostly only know about Germany, where bureaucratic sclerosis is indeed one main reason that prevents densification. However, what's keeping prices in check is the demographics. Germany has a dual real estate market, where the areas close to the productive cities are much more expensive than the dying countryside.
In my metro, Frankfurt, the second most expensive after Munich, construction is taking place cautiously. But while sclerosis plays a role, that caution is at the margin mostly due to forward-looking developers. They see the demographics and don't have much appetite for massively building homes they won't be able to rent out a decade from now.
Developers have had a very cautious outlook on demographics for at least two decades. What then increased house prices is merely that they underestimated immigration by a lot - the 2015 wave of Syrians and the 2022 wave of Ukrainians have both suddenly congested real estate markets and driven up prices. Since no next immigration wave is in sight and in fact productive-age Germans are emigrating in droves, they're wary of overbuilding again.
this is another in the series of contributions making "The works in progress" actually the "make complex problems simple and just like what I happen to know about". House shortage in continental Europe is due to a lot of factors, of which NYMBYsm appears to be at play only in some (wannabe) rich suburban areas. Others involve: shrinking household size, a huge numbers of second homes in tourist areas, a huge number of B&B in old art-filled cities, building regulations that try to limit the use of virgin land forcing construction where old construction is already, a huge urbanization movement with whole towns left abandoned, houses left unoccupied because of slow inheritance processes, houses left unoccupied because it is difficult to evict non-paying tenants if it's a family with kids, public houses left unoccupied because they have not been properly maintained, etc., etc. Different in every country, in every city. Too much?
Housing shortages are a scam. Manufactured by the bank and real estate industry, and supported by government propaganda. Data and tech companies will spread stupidity. The real price is real estate is set to collapse along with credit and then banks. After that you will see housing availability flood the market as the banks will be ruthless reclaiming the credit they over extended the inflated real wastage market$.
The "supply shortage" narrative in Europe is a total myth driven by a flawed assumption: that housing demand is fixed to population growth. While that argument is hard to disprove in the US due to actual population expansion, the math completely collapses when you look at Germany. Let’s look at the actual data over the last 20 years: The Population Myth: Germany’s population grew by a miniscule ~1.5% over two decades. The Construction Reality: Germany witnessed a record-breaking housing boom in this exact period, building 5 million new homes.The Affordability Flip: In 2006, Germany had some of the most affordable housing in the Western world. Today, after adding millions of homes and virtually no population, it has some of the least affordable. The mainstream fallback argument is that "household sizes shrunk, so we needed more doors." But this gets the economic causation completely backwards. Household sizes shrunk because there was an abundance of homes and ultra-cheap credit allowing people the luxury to live alone.The real driver of the crisis isn't a lack of bricks and mortar; it's monetary policy. Post-2008, the ECB dropped interest rates to zero and flooded the market with liquidity. Global capital didn't care about population growth—it just needed a safe haven, treating German real estate as "concrete gold" (Betongold).
Prices skyrocketed because of an explosion in financial demand, not human demand. Stop letting pundits blame a "physical shortage" for what is clearly a central bank asset bubble.
"Early American zoning is generally thought to have been motivated partly by racism, when suburban white Americans sought to exclude poorer non-white Americans from their neighborhoods by banning the only kinds of housing that non-white Americans could afford."
My only disagreement is in the "partly motivated by racism". If it was only part, it was by far and away the biggest part. Americans (I'm one) are remarkable in their ability to perform wildly complicated gymnastics to show they aren't racists by coming up with all manner of reasons for restrictive zoning. Sometimes it takes more than scratching beneath the surface, sometimes you have to dig a bit, but it's amazing how often it comes back to ways for keeping The Other™ out of the neighborhood. I worked in the field my entire career, and without question my time as a zoning administrator was the most educational for seeing through the goofiness of American housing issues.
Excellent article, brilliant in fact.
Thank you! I do think the prevalence of zoning in Europe, even before mass immigration, suggests that other factors (including social class exclusion!) play a role too. But it is certainly striking how racial exclusion was the most prevalent clause in private covenants in the early twentieth century.
Lots of teeth checking, I’m sure.
I disagree. One cannot understate how elitist miny suburban developments were. Just witnessed the grand names. Sure, that can also be construed as racist, but it needs to be recognized.
The UK is the case study for this. Our housing debate races to name a villain — migrants, second-homers, developers — when the boring throughline across Europe is the same: we stopped building enough, for decades. Migration interacts with the shortage; it didn’t create it. Supply is the answer nobody campaigns on.
One of the issues I know the NIMBYS have in my area in the US, is that the YIMBYS claim that its all about making construction affordable but in reality all it's doing is encouraging the building of luxury condos, townhomes etc... so it feels a bit like "but think of the children" then its completely not about them. In addition, no one ever explains how the sewage system and other utilities are going to cope with the increases without upgrading their infrastructure too. Which means additional costs that current ratepayers pay. So the incentives to encourage development isn't there (and the local YMBY group, called Greater Greater Washington is completely funded by developers. Which doesn't help their cause much as everyone knows why they want to do it).
They would have a better argument if they explain that by building new luxury dwellings they are making the older stock look less attractive and hence those homeowners will have to lower their prices to stay competitive, but no one really likes to hear that argument (and in Europe, their older housing stock is better than American, so its less likely to impact prices without regulation). The harder alternative is to do what China is doing: make underpopulated places more attractive by moving prestigious institutions to new locations to encourage people to move. However this sort of failed with the universities, as the universities moved out, but the leadership stayed in Bejing as they didn't want to go.
Indeed. It is absolutely true that moving chains (‘filtering’) exist and hence that more luxury housing is good for everyone, but it is highly unintuitive to most people, and they often suspect it is a trick or sophistry of some kind. I have written about moving chains before (https://capx.co/filtration-or-how-building-expensive-homes-can-help-people-on-low-incomes) but I’m not sure how to make the argument more persuasively.
> the YIMBYS claim that its all about making construction affordable but in reality all it's doing is encouraging the building of luxury condos, townhomes etc...
More homes will lower housing costs for everyone. This is empirically validated through dozens of studies, as well as obvious if one thinks through what happens when more housing becomes available.
Rich people will bid up the costs of other housing if they have no alternatives.
I think if you read my comment, you see I said that.
You sort of did, but suggested that this was somehow at odds with “affordability.”
He did kinda say that, but in a slightly roundabout way so it was easy to miss.
He implied that it’s not a common argument, when it’s literally the most common YIMBY rebuttal to his points.
But it's not used in our area. They just keep going on about the 10% of affordable housing that will be connected to the luxury apartments and never bring the other part up.
Yeah, there's at least several dozens of opinion pieces pointing it out, in addition to it being "real estate common knowledge". It's like folks are finally discovering what real estate developers have known for a century.
The cross-country angle is the clarifying bit: shortages show up under very different migration and planning regimes, which is exactly why pinning it on any single input falls apart. The common thread isn’t who’s arriving — it’s decades of building too little into rising demand. Supply is the story.
That’s right, that’s very much my view.
Appreciated, Samuel — rare to find the supply story stated without a villain attached. Onwards.
This was interesting, well done! Indeed, Paris has suburbs with a decent number of single family units, or larg-er apartments. This is true, "I have been particularly struck by this in Paris. Paris has vast modern suburbs of low-density, owner-occupier, single-family houses. Some of these are very wealthy, like Le Vésinet or Vaucresson."
But they aren't really part of "Paris culture" which is odd because, especially the 92, is known as a great place to live.
Thank you! I am not at all an expert on France, but my anecdotal impression is that France has become a suburban nation without noticing it. And as you say, many of their suburbs are really nice!
At least Paris has! So funny to see the crestfallen expression of my fellow Americans when I say I live in a suburb.
Ma’am, I live in the Brookline, Mass of Paris. ;)
What do you think those real price charts would look like without NIMBYs? I mean, they must rise in the long run if people earn more and grow their real incomes, no?
Not necessarily! In the nineteenth century real house prices were basically flat, while incomes rose steadily. The result was improving affordability. Not just some, but most, goods have become more affordable in affluent societies – food, clothes, transport, furniture etc. Housing is an anomaly.
Absent NIMBYism there might have been some increase in real prices due to build costs increasing. But I’m not sure! Knoll found that American build costs remained remarkably flat in the twentieth century, as technology improved the productivity of the construction sector to about the same extent as construction labour became more expensive.
Fair. So how do you square the rental affordability "revolution" of the mid-20th century with that price data showing rising prices since the mid-20th century?
For example, take a look at this paper.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334665536_The_Housing_Affordability_Revolution
So something else must be driving the variation of prices which aren't reflected in rents, or there are measurement issues galore!
Very interesting article.
One point that I would add is that it is important to differentiate between:
1) Why zoning rules were originally implemented in the late 19th and early 20th Century, and
2) Why there is political resistance to changing zoning rules in the 21st Century.
Those are likely two different explanations.
The original push for zoning in the 19th Century came primarily from public health concerns and conflicts created by industrialization. Then is was reinforced by Urban Design philosophies that believed that cities should be designed rather than growing organically and that certain types of economic activities should be in separate areas.
I think much of the difficulty in rolling back zoning rules is primarily political and institutional inertia. Government regulations and programs tend to persist even when few voters support them.
Europeans greater deference to governmental power may be part of the reason why YIMBYism is much weaker in Europe.
Interesting! I am not sure I entirely agree. Zoning rules certainly arose in the context of public health concerns, anti-density elite consensus, etc. But it is striking how (a) they overlapped with the covenants that landowners already used and (b) where zoning was perceived to run contrary to landowner interests, it tended not to happen. At risk of presuming upon your patience, I wrote about this in detail here: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-great-downzoning/
I have some sympathy with the claim about contemporary inertia, although I do think NIMBYism is still a genuine and potent political force.
In my town, it's about appearances. To come out and say what folks actually think would be societal suicide. Rolling back zoning means allowing people poorer than what one perceives oneself to be... into the neighborhood. I've witnessed remarkable semantic gymnastics to avoid being labeled racist/classist/whatever-ist, but scratch beneath the surface and one finds the usual human inability to accommodate folks different from them.
Finland and Sweden both have quite active discussions about zoning, which are, in typical European fashion, poorly attested in other languages. Most of the writing in English about the topic seem to be by academics who are upset by the direction it has taken, e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343102751_Growth_in_WEIRD_Helsinki_Countering_Dominant_Urban_Politics_and_its_Green_Pretentions
Interesting. It would be nice to know more about this. A lot of important housing stories get completely overlooked because of ‘national siloing’ of policy debates.
I'm most familiar with Finland, where there was a surge of activism in the 2010s, when a bunch of people got together online to discuss why city planning in Helsinki couldn't produce the kind of urban form people liked. One byproduct of it was a citizen city plan that was inspired by a similar effort in Stockholm:
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollective/future-cape-town-why-young-urbanists-made-their-own-city-plan-helsinki/1058116/
It came at an moment as Helsinki was just preparing to update its city plan, which ended up being unusually ambitious: https://www.eurometrex.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Helsinki_study_final_draft_V3_complet28_01.pdf
There has also been some development on more wonky policy areas such as parking requirements: https://www.hel.fi/en/news/helsinki-to-revise-parking-regulations-fewer-parking-spaces-required-for-new-residential-buildings
These and similar policies in other cities are one reason why Finland has seen much more modest housing cost inflation than most other European countries:
https://www.bofbulletin.fi/article/analysis/2022/nordic-housing-market-risks-can-affect-finland-s-economy/
Why Finnish cities decided to pursue relatively aggressive supply side policies probably isn't attributable to a single factor, but a major one is that rent control was abolished during the financial crisis of the early 1990s, removing a potential policy distraction.
It would be worthwhile to look at the housing affordability problems in Australia and Canada as distinct cases. A common contributor is land use and zoning, but there are other aspects such as tax policy, and the underlying structure of their economies. I know this publication wrote about a case study in Vancouver Canada but that appears to be an isolated example that cannot scale across Vancouver which still has among the highest housing costs as a ratio of income.
Indeed. I visited Canada recently and learnt a lot about it, but I don’t know if I have a clear overall model. Australia seems like a fascinating case but I have never had the chance to study it properly.
You can have a green belt or you can have low density low height neighbourhoods. Can’t have both.
No green belt means low density sprawl.
If you want green belt then you need to build up your 5-6 floors everywhere within the belt.
Indeed. Outward expansion can mostly make up for density restrictions, and densification can mostly make up for urban containment, but if you have both kinds of restrictions, you have a serious problem. Britain is alas the model case here.
How come we have low birthrate AND housing crisises at the same time?
There are two big fators. One is internal movement towards major cities, meaning that there are still housing shortages there even while there is plenty of housing elsewhere. Tokyo has scarce housing even though Japan’s population is in steady decline. The other is immigration, which means that European populations (unlike Japan’s) are still growing despite low birth rates.
Thank you
It may be related, but I tend to think it's more coincidental.
We...meaning me and my stoner hippy carpenter friends...were looking at the idea 40 years ago and seeing that there aren't going to be enough houses in the places that people wanted to live. It didn't take genius, just being involved at a base level in the housing industry and understanding there isn't enough land for the types of houses everyone wanted to live in. Being poor and absent the financial strength necessary to place long term bets on a sure thing, the economic windfall escaped us, but we could clearly see what was coming long before the crap entered the fan. It happened slowly, then suddenly...once again illustrating the shape of momentous change.
Low birth rates...I have no idea. Opinions masquerading as theories are everywhere. Given humans propensity for wanting to have sex all the time, it's a mystery for me.
The Dutch parliament did extensive research on why > https://www.tweedekamer.nl/sites/default/files/field_uploads/Eindrapport%20Huizenprijzen_tcm181-232770.pdf
Yet what always surprises me is that no one is talking about land carrying capacity... because if the Netherlands did, they would realise that at the height of its well-developed and innovative bio-based economy of 1870, its land could support a maximum of 4-5 million people.
Now, without giving it any thought, they are aiming for 20mln. Based entirely on the unspoken premise that energy will always remain cheap and abundant. But what if it doesn't? Name me one country that can survive a few months' stress test without diesel? Most won't last a week or even a few days...
It would take the Netherlands 200 years at a TFR of 1,6 (economically considered a safe descent) to return to its natural carrying-capacity population. Surely we must realise that this 15 million surplus will be shedded far more quickly and violently as time will be luxury they no longer have. The same will occur in many places.
I mostly only know about Germany, where bureaucratic sclerosis is indeed one main reason that prevents densification. However, what's keeping prices in check is the demographics. Germany has a dual real estate market, where the areas close to the productive cities are much more expensive than the dying countryside.
In my metro, Frankfurt, the second most expensive after Munich, construction is taking place cautiously. But while sclerosis plays a role, that caution is at the margin mostly due to forward-looking developers. They see the demographics and don't have much appetite for massively building homes they won't be able to rent out a decade from now.
Developers have had a very cautious outlook on demographics for at least two decades. What then increased house prices is merely that they underestimated immigration by a lot - the 2015 wave of Syrians and the 2022 wave of Ukrainians have both suddenly congested real estate markets and driven up prices. Since no next immigration wave is in sight and in fact productive-age Germans are emigrating in droves, they're wary of overbuilding again.
this is another in the series of contributions making "The works in progress" actually the "make complex problems simple and just like what I happen to know about". House shortage in continental Europe is due to a lot of factors, of which NYMBYsm appears to be at play only in some (wannabe) rich suburban areas. Others involve: shrinking household size, a huge numbers of second homes in tourist areas, a huge number of B&B in old art-filled cities, building regulations that try to limit the use of virgin land forcing construction where old construction is already, a huge urbanization movement with whole towns left abandoned, houses left unoccupied because of slow inheritance processes, houses left unoccupied because it is difficult to evict non-paying tenants if it's a family with kids, public houses left unoccupied because they have not been properly maintained, etc., etc. Different in every country, in every city. Too much?
Housing shortages are a scam. Manufactured by the bank and real estate industry, and supported by government propaganda. Data and tech companies will spread stupidity. The real price is real estate is set to collapse along with credit and then banks. After that you will see housing availability flood the market as the banks will be ruthless reclaiming the credit they over extended the inflated real wastage market$.
The "supply shortage" narrative in Europe is a total myth driven by a flawed assumption: that housing demand is fixed to population growth. While that argument is hard to disprove in the US due to actual population expansion, the math completely collapses when you look at Germany. Let’s look at the actual data over the last 20 years: The Population Myth: Germany’s population grew by a miniscule ~1.5% over two decades. The Construction Reality: Germany witnessed a record-breaking housing boom in this exact period, building 5 million new homes.The Affordability Flip: In 2006, Germany had some of the most affordable housing in the Western world. Today, after adding millions of homes and virtually no population, it has some of the least affordable. The mainstream fallback argument is that "household sizes shrunk, so we needed more doors." But this gets the economic causation completely backwards. Household sizes shrunk because there was an abundance of homes and ultra-cheap credit allowing people the luxury to live alone.The real driver of the crisis isn't a lack of bricks and mortar; it's monetary policy. Post-2008, the ECB dropped interest rates to zero and flooded the market with liquidity. Global capital didn't care about population growth—it just needed a safe haven, treating German real estate as "concrete gold" (Betongold).
Prices skyrocketed because of an explosion in financial demand, not human demand. Stop letting pundits blame a "physical shortage" for what is clearly a central bank asset bubble.