> it's not hard to build more and more housing - there's plenty of room in most of the countries.
Building a house doesn't just involve taking a bunch of wood or bricks and making a big box.
You have to dig a hole in the ground to give a solid foundation to make sure the house doesn't shift. You have to have a variety of materials -- siding, insulation, roofing materials, interior walls, exterior walls, doors, windows.
Then of course most people expect new houses to have electricity, running water, sewage disposal, gas, and telephone and cable lines. A lot of this involves running stuff everywhere through the house.
Then you can't just take a square mile of wilderness and have everyone build their own house wherever they want. First the trees and whatever have to be cleared until you have enough space for a house. And most people want a yard to go with their house, not a forest or swamp or whatever it was before.
You can bemoan government regulation all you want, but those houses need to laid out according to a central plan so the lines for the aforementioned electricity and water and whatnot can be laid efficiently. Not to mention the roads and driveways, which people also generally expect houses to have, especially if they're new.
Needless to say, this all requires a ton of equipment and labor, and also tends to go a lot better if you have at least a few specialists on hand who have done this before and thus are familiar with the standard methods of resolving common issues that might arise during construction.
And then there's the pesky issue of building codes. Again, it's government regulation, but in this case I'd rather err on the side of knowing someone actually checked that the man or woman in charge of building my house knew what he or she was doing, and that someone else who is also a trained professional -- a government inspector -- looked at the end result of that work and made sure that all of the above things were done in a way that's sufficiently safe and structurally sound for human habitation.
Of course, all the best locations for building houses -- with the best access to existing roads, closeness to desirable locations, favorable terrain, etc., are already taken. In my area of the country, several new developments have been built in wetlands. Besides the environmental issues of building in wetlands, those houses are slowly and unevenly sinking into the ground, and have issues with water seeping into their basements.
I could go on and on. Neither I nor, apparently, you, have ever built a house. But at least I am vaguely aware of why it's ridiculous to say that "it's not hard to build housing."
As for "demand is inflexible" or "supply is artificially scarce..." In case you haven't noticed, the USA just got out of a housing crisis. In many areas of the country, there are still a lot of homes for sale on the market that can't find buyers. See my other comment elsewhere in this discussion [1] for more on this.
Building a house doesn't just involve taking a bunch of wood or bricks and making a big box.
You have to dig a hole in the ground to give a solid foundation to make sure the house doesn't shift. You have to have a variety of materials -- siding, insulation, roofing materials, interior walls, exterior walls, doors, windows.
Then of course most people expect new houses to have electricity, running water, sewage disposal, gas, and telephone and cable lines. A lot of this involves running stuff everywhere through the house.
Then you can't just take a square mile of wilderness and have everyone build their own house wherever they want. First the trees and whatever have to be cleared until you have enough space for a house. And most people want a yard to go with their house, not a forest or swamp or whatever it was before.
You can bemoan government regulation all you want, but those houses need to laid out according to a central plan so the lines for the aforementioned electricity and water and whatnot can be laid efficiently. Not to mention the roads and driveways, which people also generally expect houses to have, especially if they're new.
Needless to say, this all requires a ton of equipment and labor, and also tends to go a lot better if you have at least a few specialists on hand who have done this before and thus are familiar with the standard methods of resolving common issues that might arise during construction.
And then there's the pesky issue of building codes. Again, it's government regulation, but in this case I'd rather err on the side of knowing someone actually checked that the man or woman in charge of building my house knew what he or she was doing, and that someone else who is also a trained professional -- a government inspector -- looked at the end result of that work and made sure that all of the above things were done in a way that's sufficiently safe and structurally sound for human habitation.
Of course, all the best locations for building houses -- with the best access to existing roads, closeness to desirable locations, favorable terrain, etc., are already taken. In my area of the country, several new developments have been built in wetlands. Besides the environmental issues of building in wetlands, those houses are slowly and unevenly sinking into the ground, and have issues with water seeping into their basements.
I could go on and on. Neither I nor, apparently, you, have ever built a house. But at least I am vaguely aware of why it's ridiculous to say that "it's not hard to build housing."
As for "demand is inflexible" or "supply is artificially scarce..." In case you haven't noticed, the USA just got out of a housing crisis. In many areas of the country, there are still a lot of homes for sale on the market that can't find buyers. See my other comment elsewhere in this discussion [1] for more on this.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4958251