the builders are the ones who provide housing and collectively they make nowhere close to the amount the houses they make sell for
this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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And that goes double for the actual carpenters, plumbers, and electricians that do the actual building.
No matter how much builders make, if there is no limitation on the use of housing as speculative investment assets there will never be enough houses because speculative investors don't buy houses for people to live in, they buy houses to ride the price bubble and sell later for a profit.
Just look at what has been going on in London (UK) for more than a decade - certain buildings made for sale to investors are almost empty of residents even though all the units were bought: the buyers simply don't live there and don't even want to rent because they don't want the hassle of tenants or the loss in value from the apartment actually getting used (this is more so in the Luxury segment were there's probably more units than people living in London who can and are willing to pay luxury rents)
With speculative investment the Demand side of the housing market is not limited to "how many people need a house", it's limited by that PLUS "how much money do speculative investors have to invest in housing", so that's basically how much money all high net worth individuals combined are willing to put in it plus how much money can banks lend against real-estate as collateral, and in this new Era of High Inequality the first number is huge and given that banking nowadays operates on Fractional Reserve Banking rules (basically banks can create from thin air up to 97% of their loans) that second number is even more larger.
Investor demand pumped up by cheap finance on the Demand side of housing are driving the real-estate bubble way more than reduced construction is driving it on the Supply side.
Builders are doing pretty good. When you can ignore minimum standards and sell a house for a million that you spent a couple hundred thousand to build, you can rake in the cash.
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A friend of mine who has some money mentioned maybe getting a rental property at some point. I told him I think that's immoral and he didn't understand. He insisted that he would charge below market rate. By his logic, the market rate is like a neutral point for morality and below market rate is morally good. But if you charged above market rate and got a renter...that's just the market rate now. There's no way for him to be immoral by his standards.
I told him I thought that a fair rate was the cost of property management. Basically the cost of maintenance and the administration of the property. It's arguable that the cost of property insurance should be included since a lot of maintenance will be through your insurance. He of course mentioned that wouldn't even cover his mortgage. I told him I don't believe people poorer than you should be buying you an asset. Why don't you get them to contribute to your 401k while your at it.
Friendly reminder that the USSR provided housing as a right, people accessed their housing through their workplace union ensuring fair distribution and proximity to the workplace, and housing costed on average 3% of monthly income, or 7-10% including utilities. Urban plans prioritized walkability and public transit, green areas, high density and availability of services. Homelessness was de facto abolished, people weren't segregated by income in rich or poor neighbourhoods, and literally everyone was entitled to a warm living space, at the minimum in a communal dorm.
Those Khrushchevka etc. apartments weren't exactly villas, but I agree it's far better than being homeless or pay most of your income for a somewhat liveable apartment. With the technologies nowadays it could probably be made much better and less depressing.
Khrushchyovki were built starting in the 1950s, in a country that 20 years prior had a 90% of starved, uneducated peasant agrarian population. They were kinda small (not smaller than what people in Madrid rent nowadays for 10 times the price though), but they literally had to build a country from scratch: there had been no modern housing prior. England or Germany had a healthy 150 years of industrialization + urbanization at that point, the Soviets had 20 years.
For most of the history of the USSR, they were building the largest amount of housing of any planet on Earth, smaller housing was preferable to no housing. They literally couldn't build more, the country ran on full employment, building more housing would have meant reduced doctors, teachers, factory workers or farmers.
That housing only looks depressing because it's been ran down after 35 years of negligence in capitalism. As they say, "what communism built capitalism can't even paint". The pictures are also often taken in winter with the dead trees and grey dark days.
That doesn't look sad or depressing at all to me
I fully agree that with modern technology we could do absolute wonders and magnificent housing.
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Payment for rent should increase your ownership in that which is rented.
That's called a mortgage..
Right, rent is theft from the poorer person to the wealthier person because it can never improve their situation compared to a mortgage. It's a system which only serves to redistribute wealth faster and faster as the system slowly accelerates that imbalance.
Renting should be reserved for a niche scenario of temporary housing while a person moves somewhere or temporarily visits and the entire housing system should be reworked so ownership of the place you live is simple and standard. Landlords should be an extremely rare service in a well-functioning, humanist society.
Exactly, i have no problem with homebuilders, we need new homes being built. The problem is using money you inherited from your ancestors to price people out of homes they need to start their own families and then renting them out for a profit.
"more than it's worth" yeah the solution is pricing necessities for human survival FAIRLY....
If only there were example of societies that had managed to eliminate landlordism and had provided affordable housing to everyone as a right... I'm sure every leftist here would agree with such societies!!!
And city governments help them to raise prices and maintain their cartel
When the premise is to grow GDP, raising housing prices is good policy.
This is criticism of capitalism and GDPmaxxing, not an endorsement of landlordism.
GDP is such bs.
Our city council, and many city councils, work with big landlord corporations to maintain a certain amount of empty houses. A big component of this is YIMBYs in our city who would push their own children in front of a moving bus if it meant a big developer doesn't pay taxes to build "luxury" apartments in gentrified neighborhoods. Said apartments are required to offer a certain number of "affordable" units son the poors can have a taste of the good life, only $2500 per month for a family of 3 making up to 26k per year, on a single bare unit in a mid sized Midwest city, but don't try to use the front door or the gym.
You get what I'm saying? The affordable housing rules are what keeps these units empty, floating the value of the other units. When distributed city wide, it's a scheme to keep rents high, while the companies building the new buildings don't pay taxes for 25 years.
All the while, touting affordable options to families in need. A couple years ago our city received $14M from the state to provide affordable housing, and gave $11M of it back a year later. And all the while, the only housing people can afford, gets worse and worse.
Regulations differ between capitalist countries, results don't: housing is unaffordable everywhere and landlords are rich all over Europe and North America.
The problem is not with the specific legislation when 25 different legislations give the same result.
I'm not arguing that the problem is local government and not capitalism. I am saying they work together in very specific ways.
Capitalism is not a ghost or the devil. It is a particular set of social relations. Defining it abstractly like the big bad in season 1 of some superhero movie is not practical. In order to learn to defeat capitalism we have to fight the forms it takes in order to expose how it has corrupted government, democracy, human rights; but also to show that capitalism will never stop taking different forms and the bourgeois will never stop trying to swindling their way into more and more power, until the profit motive has been totally negated on every level.
excellent use of the godzilla 2 cover, the game rules too
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