Why do you find it surprising that we like country music in Australia?

we just forgot how to build houses or something.

Or something, yep. We financialized housing.

• Instead of building houses to live in, we turned them into investment vehicles to justify the mortgages and expense of owning/maintaining them.
• A house is now a pension, or a retirement savings account; primarily a place for capital to live (people living there isn’t necessary).
• As such, housing value needs to continuously grow and anything that threatens that value growth is evil.
• Since houses are now a place to park money and the growth in value is always supported, increasing amounts of money are moved into housing. Individuals justify larger and larger mortgages and investors start to move money into housing from other productive forms of investment.
• Industries grow and are created to move money into, and extract money from, housing; investors also invest in these industries.
• As housing becomes more and more expensive, it outpaces the growth in wages of homeowners; increasingly in successive years those who would have been homeowners in previous years can only afford to be renters or own smaller and smaller homes.
• International investment and institutional investment, speculators and criminals looking to launder money get interested, since the value of housing has exploded so much it now looks attractive to these players; home values increase further as this additional capital comes into the market.
• primarily land, but also raw materials and labour become more expensive as a direct or indirect result of the inflation of housing market; increasingly homeowners are priced out of new builds, and investors are necessary to finance the building of new housing.
• because investors are financing new housing, it is built for them; cheap, small units that can be disposed of more easily and allow capital to be spread more effectively across a number of houses instead of lumped into just in one.
• the humans living in the houses increasingly become renters, useful to investors only as a means of paying some of their costs via rent; protections for renters threaten the value of the investment, so rental protections are blocked or eroded.
• in the end, houses are built but by investors, for investors, and in a manner that ensures the value of current investments cannot meaningfully decline.

We know how to build houses, but we built a system that builds houses for investors to house money, and not for people to house themselves.

China has a different flavor? 🤷‍♂️

?

Think maybe as humans we just forgot how to build houses or something.

There’s some legitimate issues (e.g. investors buying up housing and trying to squeeze out as much short-term profit as possible, increasing prices for raw materials), but the main issue seems to be that most governments refuse to take effective measures for whatever reason. IDK, maybe they’re just all strapped for cash after the recent pandemic.