Considering how crazy expensive accommodations have become the last couple of years, concentrated in the hands of greedy corporations, landlords and how little politicians seem to care about this problem, do you think we will ever experience a real estate market crash that would bring those exorbitant prices back to Earth?

  • @intensely_human
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    -1310 months ago

    Actually the stuff with the freeest (is that a word? How is that spelled??) markets tends to be the easiest to get and cheapest.

    Medicine has uncontrolled price explosion because it’s an incredibly tightly constrained market. Food tends to be plentiful and cheap because it’s not very tightly constrained.

    Yes, food did jump in price in the past couple of years … because of massive market interference when the governments dumped huge amounts of currency into the world, with only the upper classes having access to that new cash (it was given to corporations and to stockholders, leaving the lower class to watch their money devalue with no offset).

    Housing is another tightly constrained market. You practically need positive permission from government in order to build anything, and there are tons of local constraints on what can be built.

    I’m thinking of Boulder as an example where housing prices are skyrocketing, and construction is limited to a certain number of floors.

    Capitalism is based on free markets. Where free markets exist goods become cheap and plentiful. But we have a lot of markets that aren’t free, for various reasons.