I think Texas bucked the trend, because they did not try to remove profit from home building and in fact made it cheaper to build housing.
Homeowners and landlords profit from high housing prices, and in most economically productive metro areas local politics is controlled by homeowners and landlords. They therefore try to stop housing production, using sneaky and deceptive language like "taking the profits away from developers" which in turns mean that the landlords make even higher profits from unproductive scarcity.
That's just one of many factors of housing production, and in many places, high interest rates on loans, and high construction costs, are also barriers equivalent in cost to local permitting problems.
Subsidized construction loans, or lower interest rate mortgage loans only for the first owner of a new building might be one way to break out of the current environment. At least it's one of the very few levers that a government could have here, after fixing permitting to be fast, efficient, and cheap. Building a larger and more efficient construction workforce is hard and not easy for a government to stimulate, except through increasing the size of the construction market through other means, and then ensuring that there's a true market of builders rather than a monopoly.
alt Hacker News
I think Texas bucked the trend, because they did not try to remove profit from home building and in fact made it cheaper to build housing.
Homeowners and landlords profit from high housing prices, and in most economically productive metro areas local politics is controlled by homeowners and landlords. They therefore try to stop housing production, using sneaky and deceptive language like "taking the profits away from developers" which in turns mean that the landlords make even higher profits from unproductive scarcity.
That's just one of many factors of housing production, and in many places, high interest rates on loans, and high construction costs, are also barriers equivalent in cost to local permitting problems.
Subsidized construction loans, or lower interest rate mortgage loans only for the first owner of a new building might be one way to break out of the current environment. At least it's one of the very few levers that a government could have here, after fixing permitting to be fast, efficient, and cheap. Building a larger and more efficient construction workforce is hard and not easy for a government to stimulate, except through increasing the size of the construction market through other means, and then ensuring that there's a true market of builders rather than a monopoly.