It could be years until we see a normal housing market
Not in the article and rarely discussed is the most powerful influence on the price of housing: lack of production.<p>Prices are a function of demand <i>and supply</i>. Oddly, the article seems to just drive right past this as the author discusses the problems related to people having nowhere to go, specifically when mentioning that if they sell their home for a tidy profit, they don&#x27;t actually profit because they now have to go compete for a house. For all the arguments in the article, the following proposition seems like a reasonable evaluation: if Silicon Valley residents woke up tomorrow morning and discovered 5,000,000 new homes on the market, would that be predicted to influence the price? Of course it would, and that impact would be that prices would immediately plummet.<p>This is true because the housing we are talking about may also be called <i>shelter</i>, and the demand for shelter is highly inelastic. People will do a lot to maintain shelter, including going without many other consumer items, buying used vehicles and using them until they turn to dust, sharing housing, taking second jobs, etc. In effect, all of the things we seen the younger generations doing are all the things we can easily predict one to do in order to have shelter, though most are not aware of or otherwise unable to articulate these kinds of economic considerations.<p>Supply was only marginally restricted until somewhere around the early 90s, when states, counties, and municipalities began placing wholesale moratoriums on housing construction*. I can remember in the 80s as child driving through San Jose and seeing large orchards that are all now suburban housing. Looking around the valley, there has been no other housing development anywhere near that size, yet the net job growth in absolute numbers is many times higher.<p>Many of the valley central planners plan construction as if it&#x27;s still 1980, where each residential unit has something like 3 bedrooms to be occupied by two adults and two children, but reality is more like 3-5 adults. The result is substantially higher traffic and inadequate services, notably in the grocery stores which I observed to never have enough parking spaces, long lines, and popular items frequently out of stock on the shelf. Long commutes to far away communities are another result, essentially the planners deciding that among the most efficient workforce on the planet must be the task of sitting in a car 3 hours every day, which commonly cuts into what would likely be a good night&#x27;s sleep, making the workers yet less efficient.<p>The lack of shelter problem cannot be solved through anything other than increased production of housing. It is not a price problem. Prices are just the method we use to inform us on the situation of supply and demand for a product.<p>Older generations will fight this, tooth and nail, because much of their savings are wrapped inside of a product they are consuming. Younger generations, if they ever figure out what is going on, may become hostile to the other needs of older generations, which, in my opinion, is a far greater risk to the older generations than the loss of equity in their homes. This goes without having a discussion as to the immorality of forcing younger generations into conditions of economically-enforced cohabitation and homelessness purely so that older generations can enjoy the profit that comes with restricted supply on the assets they own.<p>I suppose this was a long-winded way of stating that the article&#x27;s title claim is wrong, because there will likely never be a &quot;normal housing market&quot; short of some sort of large scale coordinated effort to substantially loosen or eliminate restrictions on construction.<p>* Especially in California, housing construction is largely limited in absolute number of &quot;new residential units&quot; (NRUs), which is different than the popular understanding of increased difficulty in approval of design (the latter exists, and has for a long time, but it is not as significant as absolute restriction).