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it's only a crisis for those that don't make enough money to live where they want. So basically, it's no crisis.
Yeah, that pretty well sums it up.
I live in a boring suburb in fly-over country. Nobody *particularly* wants to live here... but it's low-crime, decent schools, an easy commute to a mid-size city. On a 15 year mortgage we're paying significantly less than the OP's price for a 1 bedroom apartment.
I prefer financial security over a cool zip code. Some people choose otherwise.
In many countries the local housing crisis can be laid at the feet of the government, be it Venezuela or California, whose housing woes are vry well documented.
200 years ago the masses weren't landowners. They were tenant farmers renting from lords, counts, earls and other nobles who owned the overwhelming majority of land. They maybe got to farm a small plot of the worst land for themselves and their families the rest had to be used to pay the lords. The urban poor lived in the same tennements being sold as $4 million luxury condos today, except it housed their whole family, had no running water or electricity and in the worst cases, no natural light. The people living in them had to slave away day and night to pay for these places, with even the children even being made to work.
After most of the last century having an achievable middle class dream, today we are reaching, at least in areas with viable job markets, a point where in order to buy property you must already have property. The cheapest houses in your entire metropolitan area are selling for around half a million and all your average worker has left in his pocket is the $150 for groceries after paying for his car insurance you need to get to work, his rented 65sqft room. God forbid you have a baby on the way and are looking to move into somewhere bigger, even a 1 bedroom apartment starts at around $1300-1400 a month in the cheapest areas. You better have a perfect credit rating, references from your last 2 landlords and your boss and make more money than everyone else applying for the same place. Better yet better bid $300 a month higher so $1700 a month just to make sure you can get a roof over your head at the end of the month. This is the reality of modern middle class life in the Western world.
Meanwhile, anyone who's lucky enough to own a house has enough equity to buy another one and another one and banks will approve any loans they ask for. These people could easily rent all their houses out and collect their monthly cheques, but why bother? The equity increases alone will make them richer and richer, and who wants to deal with the hassle of tenants? NIMBYism and resultant zoning laws banning construction of anything other than "luxury housing" even in working class areas is hastening the problem even more.
In the next 20 or 30 years a ruling class of landowners will bring us back to a world eerily like the first one unless some drastic changes are made. Dense slums of makeshift cardboard and wooden housing for once middle class working poor will appear illegally on public lands while legal housing units sit empty as "investments" being traded between the rich or filled by those lucky enough to be able to afford the rent. Or people will become fed up and a new wave of urban flight (to isolated rural areas not to suburbs or anywhere even remotely close to job markets) will cause a return to subsistence farming. This current economic system can't sustain itself for the middle class, something's gotta give.
In a sense you're right. But where this occurs, it is largely the product of bad government policy, not voracious landowners.
Further, the problem tends to be self-correcting. Unlike a feudal society where serfs couldn't load up the ox cart and go, people can vote with their feet and move to places where property is affordable. You're seeing that in California right now. A recent article pointed out that 85% of all homes in California were unaffordable to someone earning a teacher's salary. Meanwhile, no such problem exists throughout the large majority of the country. As a result, there is an exodus. Democratic demographers have spoken of the hollowing out of the state's middle class.
So if you live in a place where housing is exorbitant, move to where it isn't. There is a good quality of life in hundreds of places across the country, not just select enclaves.
And, truly, when population decline kicks in, we'll see housing become even more affordable. In places such as Japan and parts of Italy, they are practically giving houses away.
Yeah when you're country has like 350 million people, 50 states and state capitals and dozens and dozens of major cities I'm sure "Just move somewhere else" is a viable solution. The fact of the matter is this isn't 1913 anymore. We live in a global economy with a global housing and global job market and just because your outlier city in the American Midwest doesn't fit the mold doesn't mean it's not a global problem.
Canada is a larger country than the United States. I'm awfully sure that there are other places to live in your country where you can get a start in life.
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