I appreciate the measured and reasonable response, in the current climate! Thank you for clarifying your point - I’m glad you brought up Australia, as well, because I used to live there and I remember how bloody unaffordable it was even back then. In Australia, “negative gearing” is a rule that allows you to write off losses from real estate on other investments (…edu.au/…/australia-housing-affordability-crisis-…). So, your family trust has a nice big house which could rent for reasonable amount of money, but you leave it empty and write off the “lost rent” against your stock market investments, or other properties which are doing well, etc… meanwhile, you have a fully paid-off (and depreciating!) asset on your books which you can, if you need to, use as collateral for a loan against another project, or sell off if you need a big, quick injection of cash. As a result, nobody’s got incentive to sell, which coincidentally drives the price of those held assets higher and gives property owners even less incentive to sell.
Building new inventory to counter the impacts of policies like these has slowed almost everywhere thanks to manufacture and supply chain disruptions (www.usatoday.com/story/money/2022/…/7572802001/ - warning, autoplaying video, but at least it’s muted I guess). In addition to that, Australia (afr.com/…/china-tops-the-list-of-foreign-buyers-o…) and Canada (www.cnn.com/2023/01/01/business/…/index.html) have shared a problem with foreign investors mostly from mainland China buying up property and driving up prices. There are a few reasons those investors might be motivated to purchase foreign property, but I’ve got stuff to do this evening so I’ll leave the research up to you if you’re curious :P
Edit: I will say that growing the population through immigration will increase the number of labourers available to build new inventory, and open and staff new factories producing building materials etc, which will increase affordability either by bringing down prices or generally stimulating and growing the economy so everyone’s richer - but there’s no need for that growth to be unsustainable in nature, or continue forever. Even if that is the historical standard we’re working from 🙄