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Comment by dexen | Hacker News Reader

>Not sure what comes after step 3

The steps 1...3 you described are literally "the demand for housing will gradually fall". What follows is, naturally, gradual lowering of the prices, with subsequent stabilization and rebirth.

Curiously enough we observe the same patterns in nature: a species out-grows its prime ecological niche; the population starts falling down (usually without outright crashing), and then stabilizes at the optimum point. The cycle repeats.

The only possible source of instability in the whole housing/population cycle would be the government trying to prop up the house prices once the price correction starts. Some people have this misbegotten idea that real estate has to be a magical kind of investment that always appreciates in value.

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I don't follow, can you elaborate? People making more efficient use of a scarce resource doesn't suggest falling demand. How are steps 1-3 akin to that?

The price signal called "rent in SF" suggests that there is a scarcity, given that people who would like to have a 2 bed apartment to themselves can't get one. That's not weird. What's weird is that we've let the owners of homes vote on whether it should be illegal to build more homes. It makes sense - it increases the value of their asset. It's just not helpful to non-home-owners.

You wrote "The only possible source of instability in the whole housing/population cycle would be the government trying to prop up the house prices once the price correction start" - but the government, at the behest of local homeowners, IS propping up the price of houses by making it nearly impossible to build new ones (this has abated somewhat in the extremely recent past).

Do we give GM a vote on how many cars Ford is allowed to build?

Note that I write "home", not "house" intentionally - providing homes for many people in a small area usually means apartments, condos, etc. for the most part. Houses still exist, albeit as a luxury. It also means you don't price land used for sleeping cars cheaper than land used for sleeping people.

The cycle doesn't always repeat. The cycle only repeats if fertility rates stay where they always have been... the elk continue to attempt procreation at the rates they always have.

Then,once the foraging/pasture regrows, that rate being the same, the elk rebound.

Calhoun proved this. The mice would, despite having everything they needed, despite the population crash giving them the space they apparently required, just not procreate. Lots of bizarre behaviors, but no procreation.

No little girl who has grown up an only child, most of the adults in her life either having just one child or even none at all, will say "I want to have 2.1 children when I grow up!". And it would have to be every little girl that did that for replacement fertility. If only a few do it, then the number has to be higher than 2.1 for it to average out.

The implication is that fertility rates can only ever fall, and never rise. We're more like Calhoun's mice than we are like some cervines that have outgrown their food supply.

You described effect observed in population that grew up in, and descended exclusively from generations living in singular over-crowded space with full living necessities supplies.

Humans out in the real world aren't like that. Some live in the crowded city, some live in the open regions. Some hunt for best deals in the mall, others hunt for the game for lunch. There's a constant trickle of cultural & genetic mixing, and there's a lot of small towns etc. that are somewhere in-between on the scale of self-reliance.

If the city populations were to crash, we the humans wouldn't really suffer all that much. Perhaps less new entertainment content would be produced, but the necessities would be taken care of as per the usual, knowledge would be preserved, and communication & trade would go on. In due time, cities would be re-populated.

To be fair, my wife and I were both "definitely no children MAYBE 1" for a long time, but now that we live in an area with lots of 4+ children families (middle of Ireland) it doesn't seem so outlandish to have 3. We won't, because 1) we're old and 2) We should really view 2 as a hard max if we're going to try not to destroy Earth (though since it looks like we will anyway you might as well just have as many as you want I guess. More soldiers on your side for the food wars).

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