Comments by "" (@jmitterii2) on "Real Engineering"
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Urbanization has occurred in major booms throughout recorded history. It's often a result of the area or global economy turning into an unstable mass of stupidity as its next transition is a second bust that in the recent (100 years ago) to ancient past resulted in civil war/rebellion and war among other nations.
Industrialization long ago concentrated people in cities both suburbs and urban portion of cities. Concentration of people to larger cities is similar to pre-industrial as farming became mechanized needing fewer people to work the land. In this case, factory and service sectors need fewer people, people go where they think will be more prosperous and/or desired climate.
The financial collapse wasn't that people didn't need homes, was rather borrowed at teaser rates made it temporarily manageable. Then when interest started and/or shot up, payments were well above 40% to 60% of take home pay.
Then the slow down in those trying domino effected the economy in mass lay offs making even 33% to 45% home payments or rental payments not affordable.
What should have happened was prices immediately re-evaluated on mortgages and rents forced down, and developers building houses and apartments should have been bailed out of debt and provides subsidies on at least the street and utility construction portion to continue developing homes.
The farce was that the real-estate collapse meant too many homes were built. In fact, construction since 1975 35 to 26 housing starts per 1,000 households to 2015 has gone down to 9.5 housing starts per 1,000 households.
Just for the credit crash, housing 2008 starts were 18 per 1,000 households, down from 1970-57 by about 50%.
From 1975 to 2015 housing starts were down by 74%.
Population growing means more housing and apartments need to be built.
And it doesn't help that worker pay among developed countries have gone down, and/or flat, and in real income (adjusted just for consumer price index inflation which excludes major items like housing) purchasing power has dropped at a rate of -9% per year.
Which is astoundingly bad.
https://www.npr.org/2018/08/06/629410064/the-new-housing-crisis-shut-out-of-the-market
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/1/18246233/economic-growth-workers-wages-economy
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