Simple answer - they’re bought by investors and flipped for rent seeking and investment. We all know that people owning their own housing is economically inefficient.
Ahh I see. Blackstone and friends are pricing out regular people from shelter out of concern for the environment. This must be a big boost for their ESG score.
who do you expect to save the planet? the humans that don’t understand how to value it, or the companies that have made it their very business to value it?
By home, you mean a western-style stick built single-family residence with a garage and a spare bedroom? In many (maybe most?) parts of the world homes, owned or otherwise, are not constructed out of wood. I think the criticism would find a better mount on a land ownership argument. Though, units in multi-family buildings can be owned as well.
Homes allow for families to be established, families consume resources. So even if you found a way to build a home that’s more environmentally friendly, it’s still requires land which requires clear cutting of forests. And the family itself will need to eat which means the killing of more animals.
I've noticed that many of these areas with declining, aging populations have a large amount of homes with serious maintenance issues. Sometimes the housing stock can die off.
When the boomers die their homes will be bought up by private equity, same is happening to the supply now. Then they'll either sit on them to restrict the supply or charge ridiculous rents. I expect regulatory crackdowns will affect them before market forces do.
There was an article I saw a while back about a "young entrepreneur" who used his natural-born wealth to buy up a couple homes, then used rent collected on them to progressively buy up more. Eventually he owned the entire neighborhood and could charge whatever rent he wanted. It's a micro scale version of what's happening in cities like london and vancouver.
Why should there be a problem of any kind when the Boomers die off? Somebody will buy their houses. True, there will be 'noise levels' of temporarily more empty houses and temporarily more buyers looking to buy. But as in most places in the world population increases soak up those empty houses very soon.
What will happen also is that the worst houses will fall empty and be demolished to build newer, better houses. But that is an ongoing thing all over the World, anyway.
There are more ways for the population to increase than Births being greater than Deaths. I hear that there is a border problem on the US-Mexico border. What's the problem there, exactly?
TLDR answer: Population increases will soak up any houses left empty when the Boomers die off.
