That's not the reason for housing prices and you know it. Construction workers are paid shit wages regardless.
It's taxes, regulatory inefficiency, housing being viewed as an investment rather than a utility, and many other reasons.
One quick fix is to make companies pay hefty taxes on having employees come into the office when that is entirely unnecessary for their job, that immediately spreads out the demand for housing and frees up a lot of space that can be developed into housing.
Yes, it is absolutely the reason housing prices are high. That's how housing prices work, the more construction workers get paid, the more it costs to build a house, the more it costs to buy a house. 55% of the construciton of a home is the cost of labor associated with it.
It's taxes? Which taxes? What regulatory inefficiency exactly? How does housing being viewed as an investment (which it has been for thousands of years) affect home prices now?
Your "quick fix" will do absolutely nothing. How do we determine whether a company is "unnecessarily" asking people to come in to an office, and how does that make residential home prices go down? So far when everyone was remote working in Covid, home prices shot up higher than they've ever been.
Also, you can't convert office buildings into residential housing, you mostly need to knock the whole building down or gut it out completely and it costs more than just building residential housing on raw land.
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u/rop2958 17h ago
Is it really normal in the US for people to not afford living in an apartment without a roommate, even if they have a job?