this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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Yes, I was going to comment the same thing! By saying “there is no housing crisis“, it implies that there is less of a problem, not more of one. It’s provocative, but misleading. At the very least, the title should’ve been changed to say “It’s not a housing crisis, but a broken housing system“.
But honestly, is that even a useful point to make at length? Everyone knows it’s broken beyond just the short term!
Plus, there actually is a shortage relative to similar economies, which is worth mentioning.
A shortage occurs when an external mechanism, such as government intervention, prevents price from rising.
While we do have such controls in certain areas of the economy – you were probably bitten by one case at the onset of COVID when toilet paper wasn't legally able to rise in price due to price gouging laws, leaving the shelves bare instead – I'm not aware of any attempts to restrict the price of housing?
Setting a government mandated price limit on housing is oft suggested as a solution, but the so-called problem here is that the prices have been able to rise. Literally the opposite of a shortage.
It's a "shortage" in the normal colloquial use of the term because the quantity of housing demanded exceeds the quantity supplied relative to some spectrum of desired prices. "There's no shortage if you have $2 million!" is hardly reassuring. I think you're misapplying the jargon found in economics textbooks. On that definition, the recent spike in rice prices which will lead to millions of people starving is not a "shortage" because prices were allowed to rise. Sure, but that's silly. What people normally mean by "rice shortage" is "there's not enough rice". It's not enough precisely because prices are too high.
If you like, call it a "supply-demand imbalance" or an "affordability crisis", but it doesn't change anything. The point is, supply is so low that it's causing a lot of human misery. In normal English, that's called a "shortage", because there's not enough of it.