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blatchcorn t1_j5y1p84 wrote

For starters you need to define 80% of who and by what time. I am guessing 80% refers to just the USA because I doubt people living in Somalia will ever be living in small condos doing remote work for tech firms.

Your thesis is based on observing that as technology advances it becomes cheaper and therefore becomes more accessible. Housing isn't limited by technology - it is limited by politics and finance. This means that your examples do not provide evidence housing will also become more accessible.

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UniversalMomentum t1_j5yzelt wrote

Housing costs are mostly the literally costs of material and labor, there is plenty of room for reduction. House costs are not mostly driven by politics and finance, they are big custom build that takes multiple stages and requires multiple skilled workers on their trade to coordinate their material and labor over several months.. that's the main cost. Even the land is still rather cheap compared to the house in most cases.

How we build houses should be re-invented from the materials to the labor and that's where you would get the most cost savings, by far.

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blatchcorn t1_j5zexnn wrote

That's an interesting angle, but the premise of the OP is different. The OP is saying remote work will lead to greater home ownership, where as you are saying materials innovation will reduce housing costs and increase ownership.

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Girafferage t1_j5ygnma wrote

It's also limited by physical land space. Its hard to live in that affordable housing if it's not anywhere near your job location which will statistically be closer to areas of higher prices for homes and apartments.

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Surur t1_j5y3ova wrote

> housing isn't limited by technology - it is limited by politics and finance.

This is not 100% true. First streetcars, then commuter trains and then cars allowed people to live further and further from work and access cheaper housing. So that is directly technology related.

As OP notes. remote work is now allowing people to return to small towns, which is a real thing.

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blatchcorn t1_j5y4vmg wrote

It's fair to say technology has some impact on housing. Technology impacts everything to a degree. But it's not the main input of housing availability.

To go back to my '80% of who' point. Somalia hasn't got remote workers living in condos. The technology all exists for Somalia to have condos, trains, and cars but they don't. That's because the main constraint is money and politics, not technology.

If we focus on the USA, consumer technology improved massively from the 60s and that coincided with the rise of suburbs with affordable housing. But that doesn't mean technology delivered affordable housing. Correlation doesn't guarantee causation right. Instead the housing was briefly affordable while the economy was booming and demographic trends didn't put strain on housing.

Even if you do believe that consumer technology did make housing accessible, you need to acknowledge that somehow that it didn't stay accessible for long. Despite all of those technologies you listed, housing became inaccessible again. It seems naive to think that technology will lead to a permanent change in housing because of this. Again it just keeps boiling down to the fact the main limiter of housing is not technology

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Surur t1_j5y692z wrote

Sure, which is why I said it's not 100% politics and finance. Like everything it's multi-factorial. But technology is a massive enabler.

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strvgglecity t1_j5ytrzm wrote

Until jobs start disappearing by the millions. That's what's predicted for the next 10 years in technology.

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Surur t1_j5yucij wrote

The same technology which replaces jobs will bring down the cost of living and enable us to live in places which are not viable now. Precision fermentation may even make huge tracks of farm land available for habitation.

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strvgglecity t1_j5yvf9m wrote

Disagree! Prices for everything are likely to rise precipitously as climate change and global consolidation of resource ownership continues unabated. We have done nothing to slow or stem any of our biggest problems. Home ownership is dropping in my country. I simply don't believe technology will make wood cheaper to build with or eliminate the greed that stop our homebuilders from making smaller homes in America.

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Surur t1_j5yx40a wrote

> Home ownership is dropping in my country.

Really?

> Typically, there is incremental movement for homeownership statistics over time. However, homeownership rates are subject to volatility around larger economic events. For example, after peaking at 69% in 2004, 2008’s Great Recession led to homeownership rates declining, falling to just 63.4% by 2016. As homeownership began to slowly recover, the rate peaked again at 67.9% in the second quarter of 2020 before falling to 65.5% at the end of 2021, most likely due to the pandemic. Homeownership rates may be subject to more volatility in the near future.

Q1 2020 65.3%

Q4 2021 65.5%

Q 3 2022 66%

Do the numbers being different from your perception change your mind at all? Or are your views not fact-based?

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strvgglecity t1_j609gz9 wrote

Annual rates are irrelevant. Long term trends are more important. A smaller percentage of my fellow citizens own homes than they did 25 years ago, or 15 years ago. Home ownership here has morphed into a corporate business opportunity, a commodity that's repackaged and resold over and over to raise prices. I also don't think the 66% figure means much here, be a use homes are so expensive that virtually all of those "owned homes" are actually under mortgages and only technically belong to the resident - the actual owner is the bank, until the mortgage is paid off. Any recession that impacts mortgage payments for a few months, and the home is no longer owned by a resident (that happens here with great regularity every 10-15 years).

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