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Housing prices
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2026
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Housing became an investment so people bought more than one.
Houses are twice the size they used to be. So they cost twice as much for that.
Houses have a lot more regulations and codes they must comply with. Your 1970s wiring is out of code and the new stuff is more expensive. 1970s plumbing is out of code and more expensive. Your 1970s insulation is woefully insufficient and cost more money. Your 1970s house didn't come with an AC unit. Your 1970s house did not have built-in fire suppression.
We build less houses now than we did in the 1970s.
Any one of these four factors would have caused house prices to move up faster than inflation. All three of them together created a perfect storm.
People should be taxed up the wazoo for any property they personally do not occupy.
That just increases rental prices (making buying more attractive, but that's not an option for many people, and also supply is constrained).
I think the best is just to not allow buying a home for the purpose of renting it out. If you want to rent out a property, sure, but you need to build one first.
Rental units are occupied (untaxed). The tax would punish unoccupied rental units and drive down prices.
Or it will increase supply (there are millions of unoccupied units purely for speculation) and lower rent prices.
It's not just size and quality though - my house is the same size as my mom's house was, hers was 13,000 in the 1960s. It's the same size as the old one I bought for 36k in the housing crash in the 1990s, and sold for 80k in 2010ish, after an addition and metal roof. It is actually for sale again now by someone else after more renovations, they are asking half a million and will probably get close to that.
The one we have now (same square footage, half built in 1940, addition in 1990s) we had to pay almost 300k and is "worth" (market, not underlying value obviously) like half a million, we did improve it with hurricane windows and metal roof and roof attachments.
I have never bought as an investment, only as housing. Something is broken, I DO think my house is worth maybe 200k as a real value, I think we overpaid. but the prices now are so much worse than that.
Yes Florida building code is serious so new houses do have additional utility. But I have only lived in older houses and they are also out of control price wise.
The big new ones around here go for 1.5 million now - I could have bought every house on my block in the 1990s for less than that.
It's important that we use inflation adjusted numbers here. 13,000 from 1965 would be $137,000 now.
You only bought it as a house, but people around you bought as an investment.
Right. It was like 2 years of pay for her so 100- 200k seems about right for a house. Not a million dollars.
Now imagine that house burned down. How much would it cost to replace it under current code compliance and construction costs? How much is it insured for? For example, my house is currently valued at about $200,000. I could not rebuild this house for $200,000. I'd be lucky to be able to rebuild it for $260,000.
Anyway, let's get back to the main point. There's more than inflation going on here. There are multiple factors, not just one.
Yeah my husband thinks 350k would rebuild it, because part of the value is the land. But we could not rebuild what we have for any price, because the wood it's made of is not available anymore.
And yes - some of the increase is apples to oranges, just like with cars - the 1967 mustang I had was good for about 100k miles, maybe. New cars last easily 3x that, and safer and more efficient.
But no way is that most of the increase. There needs to be some relationship between pay and housing that makes sense. With insurance and tax, those million dollar homes would cost nearly 8k per month even if no repairs or maintenance- that is so much more than the netpay for a good job, I don't know who is buying them.
I have seen several crashes already, and know price doesn't just increase forever. Am watching with interest to see what happens here.
Second homes are far less of an issue than tenth homes or hundredth homes, what with the rise of rental property consolidation and AirBnB-ification.
That's not how homes are priced, though. The real raw materials for construction are a fraction of the total cost. Which is why you'll see old ranch homes broken up into clusters of three-story townhomes the closer you get to growing downtown districts. Also, why you see increasingly shoddy construction jobs in new-builds, as compressed lumber and stucco replace concrete, steel, and hardwood. Nevermind the cost of labor, which is all over the map depending on whether ICE has decided to raid you recently.
They've also become more cookie-cutter standard. Far fewer custom homes. Far more big developers who get a rubber stamp (or pay bribes to the right people) to roll out a thousand-unit development.
We have less undeveloped real estate connected to highway access points than we did in the 1970s. And we have more Boomer-vacated housing re-entering the market.
The single biggest proximate cause to the housing price boom has been the ZIRP interest rate policy, flirted with after the Dot-Com bust of '01 and bought whole-hog after '08. We've been living in an era of low wages and cheap lending. This has resulted in a historic consolidation of private ownership under banks and hedge funds that have proximate access to the Fed credit window.
The end result is housing units being bought for a market rate and rented for a profit, until the market saturates and you have a sudden forced liquidation. These long drawn-out real estate famines punctuated with sudden windfalls reward people who just happen to be in the market at the right moment. But they otherwise stack the deck in favor of people with the most borrowing power.
Materials require labor. Labor requires inspections. The more material the more everything else. And those materials cost more because they are to much tighter specifications than they were in the 70s. The lumber might be cheap but a fire suppression system in a 4000 square foot house costs a lot more than no suppression system in a 1200 one.
But as you point out it's not really about materials though. It's about square footage. You don't get a bulk discount for buying a 5000 square foot house instead of a 1200. You pay even more. And zoning won't let you build a 1200 anymore because they tax based on square footage so they jacked up the smallest house size they will approve.
There is no single cause for houses being more expensive. It's a whole host of them and that's why prices climbed faster than inflation.
Per sqft? You absolutely do. Buying one 5000 sqft house will almost certainly run you less than buying four separate 1200 sqft units, all else being equal. If anything, larger houses are a result of cheaper material inputs. PVC and compressed lumber make manufactured homes easier to produce than their historical brick and mortar and copper pipe counterparts.
So I think you have it backwards. Houses have expanded in size to justify their inflated costs. But the real price inflation is happening at the ground floor.
Privatization and financialization are both but-for drivers of price-inflation. Cheap lending means more dollars are chasing the same number of goods, despite flat wages. The functional extinction of public housing means there's no price ceiling for entry level housing units established by the state. So prices compress around the median purchase rate, while low-income households are entirely priced out of the marketplace and middle-income households are larded up with debt.
Yeah there just isnt a ton farm land at the edge of towns you can quickly flip into a new community.
We have tons of land, but not much that can quickly hook into existing utilities. Creating a city from scratch is expensive.
If you think building a city from scratch is expensive you should see what it takes to make an apple pie from scratch. You must first invent the universe.
Really? You just need to pick some wild apples and then invent modern agriculture for the rest of the bits.
Carl Sagan
Oh shit. Didn’t know I was dealing with an Antique meme
It happens.
I do have to agree with you. It's a demand issue, combined with the rate that it is being built.
I think it would be fully okay to have the cost of a house be multiplicative, based off how many you own after the second house. So, if you are looking to buy a third house, the price is actually double than what you would be expecting, and then your fourth house would be triple what you're expecting, etc.
The price of the house will be the cost the seller lists it as, and the seller gets the cost that they listed it as. However, anything over the cost it was listed, if you are affected by that multiplier, has that money go straight into the government.
The reason I say after the second house is because I do personally think it's fair for someone to want a vacation home somewhere, I just don't think it's fair for someone to have an interest into having a second, third, fourth, or sometimes even fifth vacation home. And there are many cases where you would want to own a second property such as if you run a self-employed job such as a computer repair specialist, you will probably own a shop, and having a office that's at twice the cost of what it normally would be is extremely cost prohibitive to someone wanting to get into the market.
I also firmly believe that there should be quite extortionate taxes for buildings that are labeled residential but have an owner who primarily rents it out for more than a quarter of the year. The whole Airbnb our property is technically zoned residential but are actually commercial loophole is absolutely ridiculous and a huge problem. If you aren't allowed to put a motel or a hotel there, you shouldn't be allowed to have an Airbnb there.
And all that extra money goes to building social housing.
That's trickier than it sounds. The places where people buy third homes are the same places where NIMBYs can stop development of poor people housing. Even though those rich people need servants and servants need quarters.
If we’re already living in a world where we can tax homes at 100%, 200%, etc. then we’re also living in a world where we can pretty easily tell NIMBYs to go fuck themselves.
Catch 22. As a politician you gotta please the people with money. The people buying homes taxed 200% have the money. Until we reach Star Trek levels of selfless post scarcity society that's not going to happen and by that point it won't be necessary.
I like how we’re making a scenario where things might actually go well and you’re still trying to find ways to lose.
I'm trying to find realistic solutions. And if we don't red team premortem then we are building to fail.
Also Urbanization, guessing there is quite a few houses where people don’t actually want to live