We stopped building new housing, which turns housing into a transfer of wealth from those who don't have it (the young) to those who have been holding it (the not young).
We have eliminated entry level positions, saddled college graduates with massive amounts of debt by defunding universities, and created great security for older people by taking away opportunity for younger people.
EDIT: I live in one of the 10 fastest growing metro areas of the US. In the last 4 years my county added over 60,000 homes but about 130,000 new people moved here. I drive around and see new development after new development. But more people move here because of the good jobs, schools, etc.
I can drive 2 hours away to some economically depressed areas. Houses are a lot cheaper because the population moves away to the bigger cities for jobs, education, etc. So sure you can have a cheap house in an undesirable location.
In my downtown area, there has been a trickle of a new building with a few hundred apartments per year for the past four years, and people are freaked out at that tiny amount of new housing in a city of 50,000 people. in reality we need at least double that amount of housing per year, but that small amount has people shocked and thinking we're building way too much.
It's been far too normalized that we shouldn't build housing, and it's hurting society at a very deep level and causing massive inequality while blocking access to opportunity.
If you build some, but not enough vs what's actually needed, you get both:
- expensive new market-rate construction that most people can't afford
- localized bumps in rent for increased relative desirability
- overall prices that continue to rise across the city because the new construction was just a drop in the bucket compared to the need
And then it's easy to point to "they built that building AND our rent went up!" as a reason to oppose construction, even though in the long run they'd go up even more if that building wasn't built.
I feel that only works so long. Without new emerging areas offering high wages and decent cost of living, the new grads look at the old areas like SF (no hate just e.g.) and see a financial bridge too far and a tight job market anyway.
Building new clusters of expertise and economic opportunity is extremely hard, nearly impossible, everybody has been trying to replicate the Bay Area's tech success for decades and even with the housing problems it simply hasn't happened anywhere else.
It's far easier to remove the law on the books banning housing than it is to build an ecosystem of any economy from scratch in a new area.
We don't need any new cities, we need to allow existing areas to grow. If every city blocks housing, then even that new area is going to be blocked from growing as it grows.
We must stop everybody in their tracks that thinks it says "I don't want new housing or neighbors near me" because that is the literally robbing of our young people and of society of opportunity.
In Canada - not so much
Also, yes lots of housing has unbelievably expensive deferred maintenance and many sellers are trying to act like their homes aren't huge money pits.
Anyway, increasing supply isn't going to solve our many problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity, but the Ezra Klein dunces aren't ready for that conversation yet.
Why not?
(I guess I'm a "dunce", but I'm one that's ready for that conversation)
"increasing supply isn't going to solve many of our problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity"
It would just help with some of them.
But that's a statement that's obvious on the face of it - cheaper housing costs buy time if you lose your job, and makes it easier to have a bigger emergency fund, but it isn't an infinite reprieve. So. The charitable interpretation still hits a wall because that would be acknowledging that supply would help with some of them, and the "dunces" nonsense suggest that they wouldn't agree even with that.
(In some states in particular, though, home ownership is uniquely protected in ways that would help fight homelessness, so increasing supply and incentivizing selling-to-an-owner vs being a landlord could be very helpful too.)
Ezra Klein is an intelligent man, but he has put his intelligence towards selling hopeful visions to professionals who want hope rather than an earnest diagnosis of the dysfunction afflicting our culture, geography, labor market, and welfare system.
Where do you increase supply? The most desirable places to live like urban centers, or more likely more and wider suburbs. In a vacuum many people will say it doesn’t matter and poor people should move to where they can afford; but many people have strong connections to where they grew up and are not inclined to abandon their lifelong support systems because the pricing in one area has gone up.
How do you increase supply? Ugly 5-over-1s are cheap to make but not desirable, not particularly dense. Single family homes are even less dense. Most supply proponents are talking about these or luxury condos.
How much is the new supply? If we build new homes but they are still unattainable to the people who need them, then we didn’t help much right? Which leads me to
Who gets the new supply? Are they put on the open market for speculators/investors/landlords/private equity to gobble up or are there provisions for ensuring the housing goes to people who don’t already have housing or are physically real people not llcs etc.
Tl;dr we could build a million houses but if they are in undesirable places, unfavorable designs, or allowed to be snatched up and resold at the same high prices we already have, then supply alone wouldn’t fix unaffordability of housing across the nation.
Prices are set through a combination of supply-demand and cost of providing housing. Almost all increase in housing costs are coming from land price increase, due to land shortage from planning policies that limit land use density.
Housing has been made into an investment first, and a home second, by creating housing austerity and shortage. The only way to prevent housing from being an investment is to stop the artificial shortage of housing.
That’s so obvious it’s nearly a truism.
Rate of new houses is below the rate of new households, and it’s been that way for years.
> That’s so obvious it’s nearly a truism.
And that is why Manhattan, due to having the most housing units per square mile, is one of the cheapest places to live in the US.
Since it's not, it is not a truism that merely increasing the housing supply will decrease prices. It takes more than that.
As long as you have excess people willing and able to buy $1M studios, every new studio will get snapped up. Prices can only begin to drop if you build so many that you exhaust the supply of people willing to pay $1M and the highest bid left is $900K.
Think of it as analogous to bond issuances. Just because the government issues more and more bonds the price won't drop as long as there are buyers to clear the price. Bond price only drops when they run dry of buyers at the higher price and must start accepting lower offers.
There is increasingly becoming more of a divide between haves and have nots, and it has a temporal component because of how equity has appreciated over the last decade or so. Both housing and stocks.
People from a decade ago have seen absolutely unsustainable appreciation in their assets while doing nothing. That is putting them at structural advantages against younger generations that will not see those same appreciations. It's like the bus has left without them. No matter how hard and fast they run, someone asleep on the bus will always be ahead of them.
If there is a reckoning, the most pain will be the demographic here on HN, living in the suburbs. Not the billionaires living in the Hamptons or Napa.
The fuel of this fire is white collar high earners. Its also why not much is probably going to change, because these people also vote a lot. It's not billionaires and Black Rock driving up home prices, that's for sure...
Group Wealth Income/yr Spending/yr
50–95% ~$75–80T ~$11–13T ~$9–11T
95%+ ~$95–105T ~$7–9T ~$5–7T
75–85% ~$18–22T ~$2.5–3.0T ~$1.4–1.8TIt creates austerity which means the wealthy do just fine while those with less suffer and overpay and transfer what little they do have to the wealthy.
Degrowth is a fundamentally unequal program which causes massive inequality and suffering. Only with growth does power lessen for those with the most.
What is this supposed to be implying and how do you square it with the massive amount of money being poured into "disruption" and VC investment, etc, in the US?
Where is degrowth being practiced at scale, and how has that caused more of a divergence between the wealthy and the rest than the opposite pro-economic-growth, pro-efficiency policies that brought us Walmart, Amazon, etc and happily shit-canned all the displaced workers from the less-efficient-but-more-evenly-distributed businesses they replaced?
A rising tide raising all ships sounds great and all, until you notice the tide seems to only be rising on one side.
Inequality is the result of allowing economic growth, i.e. freedom.
People say that right up until someone wants to do something and then it's all "not in my back yard" and "won't somebody think of Alex Jones and his gay frogs" or whatever their line is.
I'd say nobody is willing to put their money where their mouth is but it's not money. They'd made more money with growth. It's speculative bullshit "what ifs" that could be mopped up easily if they happened. The problem is people's beliefs, ideology, religion, whatever you want to call it.
This has led to administration bloat and majors that are completely useless when you graduate. Federal loans should be eliminated and universities should back the loans themselves.
The government has a history of inflating anything they offer cheap money for. Housing, healthcare, education.
In our area parents can get several thousand for opting out of public school. That can be used to offset private school tuition. What happened? Private school tuition rose by about the amount the government was giving. It’s no more affordable, the government is on the hook for money, and the private schools have less incentive to compete since they got a 50% bump for doing nothing.
Any time the government offers handouts fraud, waste, and inflation will follow.
Aside from housing, every professional sector has been taken over and hollowed out by private equity or big tech. My grocery store, vet, plumber and doctors are all PE.
No, the problem is that the universities are too bloated, not that we need to take even more in taxes from working people to feed the bloat
Looking like the DMV was no longer accepted as you needed to actually attract students, which means supporting an ever wider array of different things. Daycare, job placement, etc etc individually get tacked on and before you know it administrative overhead has gone wild.
You see similar effects with housing where people buying stuff with major loans are simply less cost conscious. Saving even 1,000$ on a kitchen is a big deal for most people if you need to write a check for it today, split it over 30 years and suddenly it seems largely irrelevant.
That seems to have dried up, nobody is building massive employment centers far from the existing major cities.
The current rate of new build construction is the highest it has been since 2007, ignoring the spike during late COVID-era zero interest rates. Also: US population is growing slower than anytime in modern history, again excluding COVID (though, a few more years and we'll be down at that level again all naturally).
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST?utm_source=chatgpt....
[2] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population...
But more importantly, the most economically vibrant areas, with the most ability to provide economic opportunity, have been stunted by lack of housing: NYC, SF Bay Area, Boston, San Diego, etc. This transfers wealth to current landowners in those regions, but let's only the highest income job professions move in, and overall slows the ability of those with less to access economic opportunity.
And those areas down zones half a century ago, capping out their housing ages ago. That's the true lack of housing, and it's all locational. The only thing you can't build more of is land, and it's not fungible. Best we can do is build up in those special areas where there's the magic combination of people to allow for more productivity and more jobs. (Which also happens to be far more ecologically friendly too, but I'm aware not everybody cares about the environment these days).
"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children."
How can you transfer wealth from people who don't have it?
> saddled college graduates with massive amounts of debt by defunding universities
The debt came from rising tuitions due to the government making it too easy to get loans.
> created great security for older people by taking away opportunity for younger people.
???
Worth expanding on these ??? I think - old people have less security if young people have less opportunities. The opportunities of the young is the surplus generation that creates the resources to support free riders (like old people).
In the extreme case, if the young literally don't have any opportunities at all, eventually they're going to have to just let the old people die off horribly because there aren't enough resources for everyone to make it to the end of the year.
But not everyone in society is cut out to manufacture integrated circuits. It used to be that a person on the left half of the IQ bell curve could go out and get a job making brooms, or plumbing fixtures, or toys, or any number of things that are only manufactured in China now.
Real estate pricing is far stickier than, say, stock prices. But that's also why it's super important to build before prices rise, because prices are probably not going to fall, they will at best stay sub inflationary.
Additionally, in the US many many people are locked in to their current mortgage. They have a super low interest rate on a 30 year mortgage, but interest rates are many points higher now, so if they switch to a new mortgage the can no longer afford as much house as they price they could sell their current house for.
That lock in and lack of places to live and move to also creates a higher demand when there are a few places that are built. "Thousands" doesn't mean much to me without comparing to the total number of existing houses, but there should be a minimum of 1% and maybe 2-3% of existing houses being built all throughout the nation. Yet most areas are not building that much if at all.
Asking those who have only been able to vote for a few years to have solved the problems, in a system where power is gained only through the accumulation of decades of experience, is, well blaming the victims.
The greed of older generations, their lack of compassion and understanding, and their narcissism are all to blame.
Young people are entering a system built by others with the ladders already pulled up. Violent revolution is the only way they could have changed the system in a short time, and nobody wants that.
-GenXer
- the smallest population cohort is entering workforce - Trump and Covid slowed down immigration - high interest rate slows down R&D
I don't see a single effort to reindustrialize now, and in fact the tariffing of equipment and chaotic signaling of policy has been a major impediment to any reindustrialization.
And finally there have been several efforts to specifically discourage the sort of information sharing from highly industrial countries such as the Georgia Hyundai raid that was meant to stop knowledge transfer for manufacturing. The world is getting the message:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Georgia_Hyundai_plant_imm...
You correctly indicate that all of this is a transfer of wealth to those individuals who are already wealthy. Where you're mistaken is in suggesting this is a generational transfer when it is corporations and by extension the 0.01% of the wealthiest individuals in our society that are the clear beneficiaries.
I have a builder friend who told me in the SF East Bay he can't make money building houses except for 4000 sq ft luxury homes on tiny lots.
However it happened, the absolute maniacal obsession with job experience has ruined the market. Yes the more involved jobs in information security do require widespread knowledge that can't necessarily be taught on site. A lot of the entry jobs in tech though are not complicated and can easily be taught on site but even then, companies have defaulted to requiring years of prior experience even for those positions.
My spouse knows a recent grad who took this path through an undergraduate program at the University of Maine (https://www.uma.edu/academics/programs/cybersecurity/cyberse...). As you said, he was unhirable in this field and now works in a completely unrelated job in a hospital.
Universities, local governments, local legislatures, the federal government, and whatever industry lobbying orgs that pushed for this are at fault. The apocalyptic narrative warning of a dire skills shortage are still being pushed out by industry:
Cybersecurity workforce shortage reaches 4 million despite significant recruitment drive (2023) https://www.csoonline.com/article/657598/cybersecurity-workf...
It's led to an expensive, unforgivable mess for a lot of young people and their families.
It’s an industrial complex that uses students as fuel and when the winds shift, they get left holding the bag. Schools want revenue from student loans, employers want the best talent at the lowest cost without expending any resources to train and develop talent. Colleges are also desperate for students due to structural demographics and an ever shrinking pool of potential student customers, so they’ll sell whatever dream students want to buy. Cybersecurity? Sure. AI? Sure. Whatever gets you into the pipeline. Give us your money and we’ll give you a piece of paper of little to no value.
Edit: If you need a sure thing, go into healthcare. The world is going to keep getting older, and the demand for care will not end in our lifetime.
(day job is cybersecurity and risk)
I had a tech career spanning from the late '80s until the 2020s, and I read articles in major media outlets about a shortage every single year. In all that time we had a actual, bona fide shortage for about two years in the late '90s.
Unfortunately, cybersecurity was a hot topic in the education market and people got sold on the idea that they could get a six figure job with nothing but some theory and an entry level certification.
Then what was the purpose of sitting for a degree?
Security, qa, devops, data emgonerkng, the list goes on and on.
Infosec also adds the angle that you want someone with actual grey or black hat hands on experience
So in this sense it is true there is a significant shortage of qualified cybersecurity people to fill the roles.
The mistake is that institutions try to fill that shortage with some undergrad program (or worse, certification) which of course can't build expertise in all the above fields in a few years. So that graduate is nearly as unqualified after graduation as before.
I graduated with an AS in programming in the mid-late 1990s. I continually sent resumes for 18mos and got back 2 replies.
I had 2 major strikes against me. I was a new coder. I worked in a region that was reluctant to consider new hires (even for no-skill jobs) w/o an introduction.
My scholarship came with job placement but the entire program was axed by the Contract With America prior to me graduating. Apparently the animosity toward helping folks off the bottom rung outweighed any platitudes about jobs.
I eventually eked out a living doing local IT work but I never did reach a living wage.
It's quite good. Zoe is really interested in this stuff. The reporting isn't confrontational, it's just how things unrolled.
The problem isn't necessarily with job _experience_. It's the acronym. Most employers seem to believe that YOE stands for years of _employment_, which has effectively cut off anyone who wasn't previously employed at a relevant position. You can gain experience in almost anything by working hard at home (and 90% of that would absolutely carry over to a FT position), but you can't do the same for employment (unless you accept fabricating your job history). Cybersecurity is actually a field where hacking away at home, messing around with codebases, doing ctfs can actually give you TONS of experience, but barring you coming up with major zerodays, no one cares.
It certainly can, companies just don't want to pay for that training. That's really where the "maniacal obsession" with job experience comes from. Companies just want to save money on training.
Colleges seem to be producing tons of the first, hardly any of the second.
The only thing keeping security companies in the business is compliance/certification. If you've been around these compliance programs for long enough you know: they're box-checkers. But, sometimes you need to check that box, begrudgingly, annoyingly, so most companies will prefer to just outsource that security work to some managed security services provider, then think about it once a year when audit time comes around.
99% of cybersecurity in the commercial sector is a box checking compliance exercise.
They are doing the bare minimum for cybersecurity insurance requirements, thats it.
That shifting distribution would somewhat reduce the advantage of a college degree against the average member of the labor force.
In the U.K. youth unemployment is about 2005-6 levels. It was far higher by 2010.
This also neatly explains why Boomers were able to have a good life with just a high school diploma. Wikipedia has a good chart, but the short version is that having a high school diploma in 1965 meant you were better educated than 50% of the labor force.
PhDs are the new undergraduate degree.
e.g. assuming $500k/yr at 4% interest, that would be $20k/yr which is not enough to live on but is still a nice cushion
IMO you could learn a lot more, as a young person, starting a small business than you'll ever learn at college, and it'll cost less even if you fail. So I don't want to make it a "college fund" or anything like that.
College doesn’t prepare you for work as effectively as work, but it also teaches interesting things and prepares for academia (graduate school).
medicine will always be the most secure and stable career, still has a shit life-work balance too.
It only is because it effectively has a guild\cartel system preventing an oversupply of doctors and that we have an aging population that increasingly demands medical care.