eli5: Would making house’s cheaper fix the housing issue?
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Housing prices are just a function of supply and demand. You can tinker with both. Supply is the easiest one to tinker with. You can build more to try to bring prices down, or you can make building harder to push prices up. Allowing higher density building (and smaller homes) makes prices go down. It does cause other issues (like increases in government services needed). Demand for housing can also be addressed. You can restrict ownership to people who live in the homes. That would really lower demand right now, when almost 25 percent of homes are being bought by investors (people who don’t plan to live in the home). The increase in interest rates also makes it more expensive to buy a home, which puts pressure on prices. At any rate, price is a response to a lot of different factors. You can address those factors. Having the government set the price of housing low causes a lot of problems (i.e., not enough incentive to build, more demand, very low supply, etc…). So you can try to address the factors that contribute to high prices.
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