So, about that "housing shortage"...
Has this phrase become completely empty and meaningless? Or did people always use it as a substitute for "I don't like the current price of homes"
The so-called housing shortage, which plays such a great role in the press nowadays, does not consist in the fact that the working class generally lives in bad, overcrowded and unhealthy dwellings. This shortage is not something peculiar to the present; it is not even one of the sufferings peculiar to the modern proletariat in contradistinction to all earlier oppressed classes. On the contrary, all oppressed classes in all periods suffered more or less uniformly from it.
— Frederick Engels, The Housing Question (translated pamphlet series), 1872.
It surprises me that many people confidently know how many homes there should be.
They loudly claim that the current quantity is the wrong one. “There’s a housing shortage!” they scream.
Even more than knowing what the quantity of homes should be, they also know what type of homes should be built and at which locations. Craziest of all, they know what the price of homes should be!
I wish I had such powers to solve the economic calculation problem.
We wouldn’t need markets nor private property. We could simply build the right homes in the right places and allocate them to the right people at the right price.
Even funnier is that many who loudly proclaim a shortage don’t know how many homes or people there are, or how these two numbers have changed over time. A twitter poll I ran a couple of weeks back showed the majority thought that the number of dwellings had grown much slower than the population for the past 30 years.
But the data shows that in fact the housing stock gre 60% while the population grew 50% (though remember that demographics plays a big role too).
Another surprise is the rewriting of housing history constantly taking place. When I search the archives for that mysterious abundant housing era, I can never find it. Every place or time I’m told is a great example of cheap and abundance housing seems much worse than recent years.
I’ve even heard the 19th century European cities had abundant housing. Yes, they changed and grew a lot. For example, Paris tripled in population in second half of the 19th century, from 1m to 2.8m. But this is exactly the same population and growth experienced by my city of Brisbane in the past 50 years. And home sizes nearly doubled in Brisbane too. And yet we still complain of a housing shortage.
Which era has abundant housing and which does not?
Don’t forget about the upcoming Land & Housing Economics Workshop I am hosting in Brisbane in June. Tickets are here and the event flyer with full details is below.
Today I want to take a tour across time and space to see how the apparent housing shortage seems to always be present and always based on complete nonsense analysis, which I unpick for you. The ever-present housing shortage is perhaps an even more deceptive idea than that of the ever-present skills shortage.
Oh, and remember, if there not a current housing shortage, then there is an imminent one. Must not rest on our laurels!
