Comment by 7e

It is instructive to look at how we got expensive housing in the first place. Expensive housing comes from a surplus of people. How did we get all those people? By building more housing and having people breed there.

New housing is only a temporary salve and perpetuates a vicious cycle. The people who move into these new units will have more babies, because they have new habitat. These babies will grow up and eventually drive up housing prices. Even before then, people will move or emigrate into cheap housing and fill it up. Housing then becomes expensive again, only with more people filling up the earth: polluting the air, straining water supplies, clogging roads, uglifying neighborhoods with massive buildings, overrunning parks and trails.

Thankfully, expensive housing, in part, has reduced American baby making to 1.6 per woman, a sustainable rate. Unfortunately, because humans are living longer, the US population still continues to rise. The U.S. Census Bureau currently projects that the resident U.S. population will peak at nearly 370 million around the year 2080, before it gradually declines to about 366 million by 2100. If immortality is invented before 2080, the population may never go down, ever.

Meanwhile, the latest estimates put the current U.S. population (as of mid‑2025) at approximately 342 million. The population has increased roughly 4.5x since 1900. From building new housing.