Where did all the housing go?
In: 7
* Population growth
* Fewer people in each house
* Widespread use of cars and highways let people live farther from cities
* Individual houses got much bigger, McMansions with larger plots of land
* Zoning makes dense construction illegal, it’s single-family homes or nothing
* AirBnB opened up the rental market, investors bought up units to rent
* Wall Street taking a big interest in Real Estate, your house is a poker chip in the big casino
* Economic shifts to a few big cities (NYC, Silicone Valley, etc) away from manufacturing, not enough land in those few cities for all the good jobs, driving up prices
* Everywhere else, no good jobs, people moving out, prices tanking, houses abandoned
Worth noting that single-family home suburbs are not economically or environmentally sustainable. They rely on dense urban cores to raise the taxes needed for all those extra miles of highway, power lines, sewer lines, etc, etc, etc.
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