-----Original Message----- From: Steve Kurtz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Friday, July 24, 1998 11:49 AM Subject: Re: Technology and change... >Greetings, > >Arthur thinking Pete may be on to something, quotes him: > >> Pollard has cited here: the increased buying power of two income >> families, >> I believe, came to dominate the housing market, driving up prices far >> beyond >> the levels that the previous one income family could afford. As a >> result, >> those who wanted to own their own home were forced to develop a second >> income, and the effect of the increased prices on the cost, and >> therefore >> the rental charged, for `revenue' housing, helped spread this increased >> expense to the tenant portion of the population as well. > >This must be very brief as I'm leaving for the weekend. If the material, >labor, and land costs are independent variables based upon supply & demand, >and the same number of people were seeking housing, then the two income >phenomenon is not the primary driver of rapidly rising housing prices. >Increased demand (based upon tremendous population growth via combination >of migration and biolog. rate) combined with material, labor, and land cost >(supply) drives housing prices. > >Finite supply (desirable living areas) and increasing demand are main >variables. David Foot, in "Boom, Bust and Echo", argues that Canadian urban real estate prices began to escalate rapidly when the leading edge of the baby-boom generation, people born between 1947 and 1966, left home and had to find housing. He points out that between 1967 and 1986 more than one third of the Canadian population entered the labour force and hence the housing market. Since then, beginning in about 1990, the real estate boom ended. A smaller "bust" generation had entered the labour force, and jobs were not nearly as plentiful (or, as Foot argues, the pipeline to jobs was plugged with boomers). Ed Weick
