You’d be amazed at how many people refuse to believe the huge surge in homelessness is ultimately because housing is really really expensive. They keep wanting to transmute it into what they perceive as a moral failing by blaming drug addiction. But there are plenty of drug addicts who aren’t homeless. And it was a lot easier to stay housed if you were a drug addict when housing wasn’t unbelievably expensive. And it’s a lot easier to develop a drug addiction when you are homeless from any reason.

You’d secondarily be amazed at how many people legitimately don’t make the connection that their house value appreciating and housing become more expensive is literally the exact same thing. Like exactly exactly the same thing. If you want your house to go up in value you want housing to become more expensive! That’s what it means!

Making housing 90% less expensive would be an unbelievable policy win, you can get most people to agree. But cratering peoples’ house “investment” by 90% would lead to petit boug riots as the world has never seen. There’s this unbridgeable contradiction at the heart of the american dream.