Morgan Housel

It all stems down from lack of housing and even something like drug addiction that you wouldn't think would be that attached to housing.

When housing is very expensive, almost by definition –

the bottom sliver of society becomes homeless.

Housing is expensive because there's not enough of it.

Almost definitionally, people become homeless.

What do a lot of, so many people do when they become homeless to gain a little bit of hope in their life?

Drugs.

Heroin.

And so I think it seems crazy, but there's so many of those where you think housing affordability is a housing problem and it is just a social problem all the way down.

We had a family friend and she was in her late 20s, happily married.

Both of them have good jobs, want to be parents, but can't afford a house where we live and are delaying, delaying, delaying, trying to have kids until they can afford a house, which in many cities, including the city I live in, seems like a good luck waiting kind of thing.

And so it's a huge, it's the biggest social problem I think that we have in America.

The thing that's so, I think, should make you angry about the housing issue is that it's the easiest issue to identify why it's a problem, and it's the easiest thing to fix.

We don't build enough houses.

That's it.

It's the easiest supply and demand thing.

We're probably 5 million houses short in America that we should have built, then we didn't.

Why didn't we build them?

We have plenty of construction workers.

We have plenty of capital.