Morgan Housel

And so you can draw a straight line, a straight line from housing affordability to drug crises, to fertility crises, to decline in marriage, to all of these things from there.

And I think what can be so aggravating about this problem, most problems in economics are very complicated.

And so if we're talking about how do we extract more oil from the ground, like it's a hard problem.

So there's a lot of variables in there and there's technological challenges that make things much more difficult.

How to bring down housing affordability is the simplest thing in the world.

It's we don't build enough homes and we need to build more.

And we're probably short in America something like three to five million homes that we should have right now that we could build.

We have enough money to do it.

We have the supplies, the lumber, the windows to do it.

We could get this done and we don't.

And so it's one of these problems that like if you really get down to it, it's a choice.

that politicians and regulators and communities at large have made that we don't wanna build more homes.

Why not?

I think if it comes down to it, there is the battle between NIMBYs and YIMBYs.

Yes in my backyard, no in my backyard.

And I think it's not too simplistic to say that the group of current homeowners, particularly if you've owned a home for a long time, like it when the value of those homes go up, makes you feel wealthier.

I'll get into a second why they're not actually wealthier.

And if you build more homes, the price will go down.

That's basic supply and demand.

And then if the value, if your parents, your grandparents own a house and the value's gone up a lot and you build a lot of new homes and the price declines, they don't like it.