Commodification of housing is driving house prices. It's not like higher earners want to pay as much as they can possibly afford for homes.
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
66 points (100.0% liked)
traingang
22982 readers
12 users here now
Post as many train pictures as possible.
All about urbanism and transportation, including freight transportation.
Home of train gang
:arm-L::train-shining::arm-R:
Talk about supply chain issues here!
List of cool books and videos about urbanism, transit, and other cool things
Titles must be informative. Please do not title your post "lmao" or use the tired "_____ challenge" format.
Archive links for reactionary sites, including the BBC.
LANDLORDS COWER IN FEAR OF MAOTRAIN
"that train pic is too powerful lmao" - u/Cadende
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Honestly kind of incredible to show a graph like this
and not mention the 2008 financial crisis once. That must have taken a lot of restraint.
Couldn't be more disingenuous
Show percentiles cowards
By showing average and median, you can sorta infer. In 2000, median matched housing price, by 2025 housing price is like 50% higher than median, whereas it's in line with average. This means that the poor people are extremely less able of affording a house.
I think your "mean"s should be " median"s.
Thanks a lot for the correction!
It would not surprise me if even the 90th percentile lags
[literally anything except landlords hoarding housing] is causing the housing crisis - voiceoflandlords.com
This one is sort of saying landlords are the problem too, although they won't name them. They're saying inequality is driving higher home prices, and landlords make their money off being more wealthy then the average person and using that wealth to outbid them for housing and rent it back to them.
The more inequality there is, the more the rich are able to bid up prices out of reach of the poors, then the poors are more subject to the rich landlord class.
the problem is actually that everyone is too rich,
Meanwhile, when looking at incomes and housing supply from 2000 to 2020, there was no relationship. The reason may be that when U.S. households become wealthier, they prefer renovating homes, relocating to nicer locations, or finding some other way to improve their housing quality—rather than buying additional homes.
Honestly took me reading the article 3 times to discover just how silly this paragraph is.
It completely ignores the number 1 reason why a rich person might buy additional homes. Not to live in, but to rent out. As a consequence, rich people buying multiple houses barely effects "demand" since every house additional house bought just moves it to the rental market.
This is so obvious that it feels silly to write down.
They are writing for people that have 2 or 3 vacation homes that do actually sit empty.
They are baffled that the "upper middle class" would rather do a sensible addition to their home or maybe add some nice landscaping rather then save for a beachfront home in maui.
Instead, housing supply growth has a strong positive relationship with population growth. In fact, almost all metro areas saw housing units grow faster than their population—even in expensive residential markets like Los Angeles or San Francisco.
This needs to be screamed at every yimby espousing "it's just supply and demand stupid". San Francisco is still down population wise since the pandemic, but has this increase in available supply resulted in lower housing costs, No.
It's because San Francisco is a very nice place to live, and a lot of rich people will pay a lot of money to live here, and that bids up prices out of reach of normal people. This is just the end result of housing commodification and the only thing that can stop it is rent control and public housing.
It's not just rich people buying homes for themselves, it's investors that purchase housing for use as short term rentals.
This drastically sways the "real" market value of homes since those short term rental properties will just sit gathering dust and netting their owners depreciation breaks while they get to leverage that asset/debt in the market.
That's why they're so insistent that housing prices have to go up, because even a minor dip absolutely wrecks the billions of dollars in leveraged debt that's propping the whole system up.
Developers who only build 
for WallStreet and corrupt local officials who keep approving them to gentrify their communities are. There are simply not that many "high earners" for the amount of supply.
That challenges deeply ingrained notions that NIMBYism, red tape, and politicians who favor rent controls over new construction are worsening the housing affordability crisis.
That was only a deeply ingrained notion with West Wing watching, r/neoliberal policy wonk dorks.