Morgan Housel

The other half of my brain that used to enjoy this beautiful greenbelt and now it's going to be a ton of homes says, so glad I got out of there.

So glad.

So there's part of me that's like, I get it.

I get why if you own a house and you don't and you like the quaintness of your neighborhood and you like your view and you don't want it to change from what it is, people say, I don't want that.

And they're going to use whatever regulatory power they have to protest and put their foot down to get it.

Now,

So I understand like that incentive.

I still think though, it is inadvertently evil.

I think most people who do it mean well, but it is inadvertently evil to say, if you're a baby boomer, when I was in my 20s,

My parents' generation permitted the house that I was able to buy for 70 grand and raise my family in.

But I'm not going to afford that opportunity to the next generation.

If the previous generation helped you build and grow, and by and large, that's what we did in the 1950s and 60s.

We came together and said, we need millions of homes.

We're going to need hundreds of thousands of schools around those homes and fire stations and bridges and highways.

Let's go build it.

We did it.

And by and large, I think we have by choice stopped doing that.

And what benefited one generation 50 years ago has by and large been stalled out today.

Yes, this is not a problem of physics.

That there's a law of nature that prevents us from doing this.