Jennifer Aniston is single. But as a 2015 write-up from here pointed out, Aniston’s status was a choice as opposed to a situation that she couldn’t escape.
Realistically, millions and perhaps billions of men would have gladly changed Aniston's status to “married.” And they still would. Aniston holding out for something better arguably explains the U.S. housing situation more ably than commentary from the various economic religions presently does.
Not surprisingly, left, right and in between have all sorts of policy prescriptions that they just know would render unaffordable housing affordable. Mostly it’s “Build, Baby Build” from all sides, which is what readers should expect from academics. Easy solutions offered far from the arena, and that don’t acknowledge just how risky it is to build houses (sometimes housing markets correct), drill for oil, or mass-produce any market good that simplistic academics (a redundancy, obviously) reduce the production of to supply vs. demand.
Other theorists point to zoning restrictions and NIMBYs as the barriers to housing affordability. And the theorists have myriad policies to fix those barriers. To academics, there’s nothing policy won’t solve. That every authoritarian regime in the history of the world was dense with “experts” seems lost on the deep in policy thought. As with the geniuses from the past who visited so much tragedy on the world with their certitude, the experts of today even know how many newly built houses are required to end what they deem an “affordability crisis.”
They’re not serious. Evidence supporting the previous claim can be found in the fact that the rate of home ownership in the U.S. is higher than ever. In fact, it’s higher now than it was from 1965 to 1995 when housing was allegedly “affordable” (source: Charles Musick).
From the previous paragraph we can deduce that a lack of policy from the experts well outside the arena isn’t nearly the driver of “unaffordable housing” or “housing shortages” that they claim. Put another way, the various governmental barriers that the experts want to rework on the path to housing Nirvana didn’t just appear in the late 1990s. They were always there, and plainly not the barrier that housing experts claim when it’s remembered that as recently as 2008, the accepted wisdom among the experts was that housing was “overbuilt.” Does that mean zoning restrictions, NIMBY-ism and other barriers to the “supply” that “everyone knows” will solve the so-called “housing crisis” all took a break in the 2000s? Clown question.
Instead of more policy, how about optimism about supposedly out-of-reach housing? That's because more than anything else, the biggest driver of “unaffordable” housing is soaring prosperity that has positioned exponentially more Americans to buy houses. Talking my book co-authored with Jack Ryan, Americans would be wiser to rent over owning as a way of building wealth (we proposed no policy in the book) as is, but book or no book the main driver of allegedly nosebleed housing is American prosperity that most reveals itself through an absence of policy. That’s for you, housing experts.
Back to Aniston and her long-time choosiness about Mr. Right, more Americans could be homeowners assuming they were willing to relax their standards. Which means housing is not presently “unaffordable" as is, there are just a lot more Aniston economic equivalents with the means to seek the "right" house in the "right" location.
