> s/market bears/landlord demands and tenants rearchitect their life, dreams, and expectations to accommodate

I think what you're suggesting here is that housing is such a fundamental requirement that people make life-deranging decisions in order to have it, which creates a distorted view of what the market will sustain. Perhaps similar to healthcare in the US. Is that right?

> I hate this 'market bearing' weasel word. It isn't some intangible super entity. It's everybody.

It sounds like it's a really emotive term for you, but it's also the precise economic term. There are of course human and societal costs of market corrections, but that doesn't mean that this is not a market.

The rest of that thought you expressed seemed to stray into some generalised views of the state of the market. I'll just address this point:

> Home ownership is down as a result, and becoming an increasingly removed dream due to real estate being seen as a speculation vehicle.

When we segment homeownership levels by year of birth, there is a really interesting trend. Here's the peak homeownership rate in the UK for folks born in four year increments since 1960 onwards:[1]

1960-64: 76%
1965-69: 72%
1970-74: 66%
1975-79: 59%
1980-84: 43%
1985-89: 26%

The first four series appear to be declining (entering care/death) or flattening, whilst the others continue to grow. The shape of the curve is shallower for each successive year since 1965-69.

We treat the decline of homeownership as if it's a relatively new problem, but the warnings have been around us for decades. Consider the United Kingdom: a relatively small set of islands. In 1960 (a year of birth which the data suggests has a ~76% homeownership rate in the UK) there were 52m inhabitants of this island. In 2020 that number is 67m. In the next ten years it'll likely grow to 70 million according to the ONS.

One contributing factor is that people are living longer, healthier lives. Average life expectancy for a UK national born in 1960: 70 years. Born today? 81. For most of the census data available it was <50[2]. Decisions have been taken on many, many things, with a misunderstanding of how long it's possible for people to live for.

This is not a market which will simply "clear" if the right economic tweaks are made. There are not enough houses. London has 9m people living in ~4m houses. Portals here list 70k-80k units per month and I suspect the average tenancy agreement is c. 15 months, implying ~1.3m rental units. There are around 4m people in inner London, and 5m people in outer London. Looking at some reasonable-seeming data for age demographics[3], if we exclude everyone under the age of 19, there's 6.7m adults living in London who need to live somewhere. Redistributing the rental stock isn't going to help.

Reliance on the private sector solving housing issues, particularly in affluent cities and overcrowded countries, is a total misunderstanding of the problems we need to solve. In London in 2020 if you are not intent on building housing stock targeting the affluent, then you're going to be outbid and not get the land to build at all. Space is a premium (even more so because of protected views in central London, and institutional resistance to building up/out into green belt land), meaning prices are high. So housing projects must optimise for margin. Attempts at affordable micro-living spaces have been met with resistance from lenders who won't provide mortgages on residential units below a certain square footage.

When you do nearly any amount of analysis here, you quickly arrive at a perspective that the failings we have are not solved by the private sector or by landlords, and mom & pop landlords are arguably doing more to protect the interests of renters by retaining units at fairly flat rent CAGR rather than selling plots of land into the hands of developers who build high end apartments.

There are many solutions to this problem, but it's genuinely difficult to discuss with folks because the knee-jerk reaction seems to usually be that landlords are evil and capitalism is part of the problem.

[1] This is taken from an ESRC/IFS briefing note in 2018: https://www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/publications/bns/BN224.pdf

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040159/life-expectancy-...

[3] https://www.trustforlondon.org.uk/data/population-age-groups...