Comments by "looseycanon" (@looseycanon) on "Why Are Rents Getting More and More Expensive?" video.

  1. Yeah, let me give you a different perspective. Landlords have the ability (in some countries outright right) to work out your salary, meaning they can calculate rent so high, the effectively lock tenant in. Housing providers actually don't compeet, because it is against their individual and collective interest and utilize extra income to limit the ability of tenants to obtain housing of their own through lobbying, creating zoning laws and more importantly, technical requirements for new houses to be built and old houses to be renovated. This increases upfront investment needed to purchase a home. Down the line, these decrese running costs of the buildings, but if you can't get approved for a loan, you can't get on the ladder and the landlord just squeezes more. As for house shrinking, that has been happening actually, especially in Europe, but there is another problem. We actually don't need smaller housing, because of work from home. The kids room in a typical household has now become the office. This idea was apt in the 90s, when the Internet was not quite as widespread, but now it is so ubquitous, that cars are expected to report to a central server their trouble wherever on the road they are. This translates as far as housing is concerned, that as long as employers are willing to accept remote work, dedicated space for work related activities needs to be present in a dwelling. Meaning building or renovating into smaller dwelling units doesn't solve the problem. because there is not as much space to save, hence a new unit doesn't necessarily get created from the space made available. Furthermore, if I were to shoehorn Zeihan in to this mix, this would further amplify our natality crisis, because people have been shown to not want to establish families in cage sized flats, rather they need a suitably large house counting no less than 2+number of kids+bathroom sized house. With advent of work from home, make that 4+number of kids+bathroom, because both parents need to work to maintain a family these days and employers might not be willing to tollerate husband and wife working for different companies or even different departments to share an office. No the only thing, which can solve housing crysis, is encourage telecommuting, individual transportation and to remove new construction blockers like climate impact limitations and zoning beyond strictly safety concerns (flood plains, sea line etc.), while at the same time implementing and under penalty of seizure of property enforce rent controls and demand construction companies to build housing, whenever they build anything. For instance, you have eighteen story building, then you can mandate that at least six floors of the building will be flats, ohterwise, the building will not get a permit for the office space and shops it was initially envisioned as.
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