Houses should not be investment vehicles and almost required for retirement as they are now. Doing so means they need to increase at a rate salaries can never catch up with. It makes zero sense. We tell the younger generation they need to buy housing to retire then lock them out in areas they can have a career. It’s sick behavior. Our society basically deserves to fail at this point if we don’t fix this.

When it comes to collective action, people will exhaust every option except the one where they work together for the common good.

I see a lot of working together to stop any new properties being built, for them it is the "common good" - by common they exclude all "outsiders".

It’s mostly about home equity, and this is a very common collective behavior called a cartel.

It’s illegal for corporations to do this in most cases, but individuals certainly can. Housing is probably the main area where they do, with neighborhoods forming organic cartels to restrict supply to raise price.

As with all cartels the solution is to break it up or take away its ability to restrict production using lawfare and other means.

Clearly that’s not what I meant, and you seem to have figured that out yourself. I meant the common good of society. The greater good, if that makes more sense.

I was at risk of falling into that trap. When we purchased our current home we did so within a few months of $major_national_shitty_homebuilder having closed the real estate transaction and submitting plans to raze a huge forested natural area directly behind our home and develop almost 100 new townhomes.

It was easy to miss that in the due diligence.

And it was really frustrating to experience. The development company cut so many corners that our own neighborhood had to engage several times with the city council and development bodies because their water management was threatening our properties. During construction of the water infrastructure they backflowed a toxic concentration of chemicals into the water supply. Their retention pond design is absolute garbage and while it was inspected and approval has already caused problems. They forgot to account for water going downhill while making assumptions about water volume that a week of heavy rain already invalidated.

We need the housing though, so it’s good we have that. I’m not sure we need more housing in the form of townhomes that cost $700,000+ each but at least it’s higher density than single family residences, which are killing the housing market in their own way.

Would just be nice if home building firms weren’t such a menace.

>We need the housing though, so it’s good we have that. I’m not sure we need more housing in the form of townhomes that cost $700,000+ each but at least it’s higher density than single family residences, which are killing the housing market in their own way.

An optimistic theory is that new high-value housing leads to good outcomes for everyone: developers make a better profit, the area becomes more appealing, wealthier families can upgrade to the new houses, the local government gets more real estate taxes, and the previous houses of the relocators can be bought by less wealthy families (repeat this last step down the wealth scale).