I wonder about this. There's all this noise about a great housing shortage in San Francisco, but the population of SF is up only 65,000 people in 10 years. There are a lot more tall buildings. This may be a monopoly overpricing situation rather than an actual shortage. There's a huge amount of empty office space.
Remember, the world passed "peak baby" back in 2013. Population is leveling off in the developed world.
Population growth is reduced by a housing shortage because people who otherwise want to move in can't if there aren't units available for them to move in to.
Moreover, who is supposed to have a monopoly on housing in San Francisco? Is there any single entity that owns even as much as 1% of all the housing in the city? And even if there was, wouldn't building more housing still fix it, because the more you build the more you dilute their monopoly?
The title of the link indeed says "the majority of the San Francisco Bay Area" but it also says that the largest of them owns 293 buildings, so for twelve times that to be a majority there would have to be no more than about five thousand total properties in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Meanwhile the Chronicle says there are about 2.3 million total properties, I couldn't find them repeating the claim that those 12 landlords represent a majority but they did say that "this list of 12 includes some of the region’s major power players in residential real estate, housing tens of thousands of families". Which I wouldn't expect to be a majority of the >7 million people who live there.
I noticed there is a split how this topic is discussed in (center-)left and (center-)right circles.
The right generally takes as a given that the cause of the problem (if there is a problem at all) is that there is not enough housing and we just have to build more.
The left argues that in we in fact do have enough units that could be used for housing (or at least the situation is not as clear-cut), but that other factors prevent them to be available at affordable prices, like the effects of extreme income and wealth inequality on the market.
Personally, I think the "left-wing" explanation makes more sense - at least I've never understood where that sudden shortage of physical housing is supposed to have come from. We neither had a population explosion, nor a war or catastrophe that would have destroyed a lot of houses. So then why would there have been "enough" housing in the past but not anymore today?
About 14 thousand people move to Prague yearly (netto), but construction hasn't kept pace by any means; Czech building permits are a bureaucratic hell on Earth - hello fighting a 10 year paper war over a banal block of flats!
By pure mathematics, there must be a shortage, and there indeed is.
There isn't any shortage in Ostrava where I am from, because the city lost 40 thousand people since the 1990s. But there is a shortage of well-paid jobs.
Because people want to live in cities again. Lot of people do not want to live in suburbs / exurbs. they want walkability. bikability. community. car-lite living. It’s high in demand, short on supply.
> Personally, I think the "left-wing" explanation makes more sense - at least I've never understood where that sudden shortage of physical housing is supposed to have come from.
It comes from construction dropping far below what was necessary to keep up with historical utilization in proportion to population after the Great Recession and, while it has recovered above the amount needed to keep up, it hasn't been far enough ahead for long enough to cover the accumulated post-GR deficit.
(And the national story undersrates the problem going on in lots of in-demand cities, which weren't keeping up with local need before the broader collapse of the GR.)
OT, I found a look at the US population growth trends quite interesting, especially Figure 2 and the apparent massive explosion in immigration in the last years. Not sure what exactly is going on there.
There might not be a housing shortage on the North American continent, but that doesn't help because people want to live in New York, not upper Saskatchewan
But presumably pricing plays a role. If the cost of housing between NYC and Saskatchewan was comparable I imagine the former would have the higher growth rate.
If you change any attribute about these places at random then the migration patterns are likely to change, but that's a silly way to look at it. The comparison is around what is, not what could be in some other magical universe.
I hesitate because there's not a lot of data out there. Are those being measured the same way? Are they even real measurements and not just repeated talking points...?
You have to look at the average household size and number of children, not just population.
A world where most households are man + woman + 0..3 children is very different than one where most households are 1..2 people + cat/dog. The latter demands far more housing than the former, even when populations are otherwise equal.
A population of 10 million singles demand 4 times more "housing units" than a population of 10 million people in 4-person families.
This is what makes immigration-driven population growth so pernicious compared to childbirth-driven. The family structures you end up with are completely different.
> A population of 10 million singles demand 4 times more "housing units" than a population of 10 million people in 4-person families.
Those housing units are not interchangeable. Families often want extra bedrooms, and units with extra bedrooms are frequently sorely lacking.
This is one thing that is very strikingly different in different markets. A lot of US metros have a fair amount of new housing but almost none with even two bedrooms per unit, let alone three. In a place like Taiwan, there are similarly absurd housing prices, but the new dense developments have four- and five-bedroom units.
I don’t have any data or links to contribute, but my gut feeling is that this effect would be dwarfed by population movement, specifically urbanisation - if rural areas are emptying out as everyone moves to the city, you can get the same patterns (e.g. reduced housing supply in cities and all the flow on effects from that) without any change in total population.
Remember, the world passed "peak baby" back in 2013. Population is leveling off in the developed world.