Comment by kingstnap
What a ridiculous comparison.
Electronics are made in a factory. Houses are expensive because land near cities and work is scarce.
What a ridiculous comparison.
Electronics are made in a factory. Houses are expensive because land near cities and work is scarce.
People don’t live in land, they live in floorspace.
We can manufacture as much floorspace as we need. We can even manufacture floorspace in factory!
Housing is expensive in large part because of how illiquid supply is. This is in large part because the fixed compliance costs of doing work upon "land near cities" is high. I'm not talking the $50 permit. I'm talking the $50-500k worth of engineering and lawyers and whatnot you need to bulldoze a 1-family and put in an N-family even in a place zoned for it. You typically wind up going rounds with the city at every step just because while you're nominally allowed to do whatever it is you have to bicker over everything like parking and setbacks and whatnot that are nebulously defined for the purpose of allowing the .gov to extract concessions. This is why only big money 5-over N apartments get built. When you have a ton of fixed costs nothing less makes sense.