how do you expect houses to get built when there's no money to be made at all by it, especially when there's an immense amount of financial risk and work involved in maintaining a building and dealing with issues that come up, especially tenants who abuse the place and/or surrounding property
I don't have $250k+ to buy a house outright, but some guy is letting me stay at his place for a few hundred bucks a month while I save up. I might be onto something...
well it's capitalism. you can play the "number games" with literally every single type of asset, and if you want your basic human needs met, in the end you'll have to go pay someone. be it food, living space, whatever. they're all tradable assets.
While everything you said is true, it's still disgusting. There are some things I'm cool with having scarcity, only those who can afford to buy can have. Basic requirements for survival should exist outside of that.
The truth of the matter is we have enough housing for literally every homeless person to be housed as is. The only reason we don't house then is because housing is an investment, the supply has to be kept artificially short to pump the prices up.
Land is a very scarce resource, not well suited for the free market. Also i find it "funny" that at least in my country paying a mortgage is actually cheaper than paying rent. It's just that banks have very strict requirements for financing people and so the problem is not that you can't afford the mortgage with your job income, but that you lack the initial capital to invest. Which feels honestly unjust and allows wealthy people to purchase all land and set whatever prices they want.
The barrier to entry for the market is too hig. Thus It's a market that's way too prone to monopolies and needs a strong regulation.
Also. Take the exact same apartment in the city center and take another one in a remote place. The rent for second one will be a lot cheaper even though the value of the materials of the building is the same, the costs of building up the apartment are the same etc. So called essential workers, who work near the city centre will not be able to afford an apartment close to where they work and will have to sustain additional costs for commuting, increasing their burden on society (infrastructure) and the environment, which is inefficient. And they will have a lower standard of life. This is shittier for everyone but the landlords.
That is work for the grounds keeper, the maintenance technician and the accountant. Which get paid by the landowner, who "earns" money for doing absolutely nothing but own something.