Housing crisis is just a result of increasing income inequality and the resulting real estate investment craze. The population of America (real demand) did not suddenly double at any state/city.
Rich have become so much richer that can afford bidding wars at unattainable prices. They can buy investment homes and be cashflow negative for decades in anticipation of the increased market bidding prices. Of course they oppose any sort of legislation that would increase competition.
The population of a place doesn't have to double, or even change at all, for prices to go up. All that is necessary is for more people to want to live in a place. Those with the $ to satisfy that desire will outbid those who don't and you can easily double/triple/10x prices with no change in population.
Your factual statements are wrong. The US population isn't flat over time, and housing (supply) decays over time. Prices aren't up everywhere, just the places people actually want to live.
Your figure doesn't contradict my claim. We have spare housing capacity in undesirable places people don't want to live (rural towns, small midwest cities). We have shortages in the (especially coastal) cities, where the jobs are. This is obvious from prices, which are set by supply and demand.
This seems like it contributes to the problem, but doesn't feel like the root cause at all. Every homeowner, not just the ultra wealthy, has an incentive to oppose new housing. (Though in many metros any homeowner is automatically wealthy by some definition). The lack of supply seems like the core issue here.
If it is just internal money the bubble will burst. If you have the entire world pouring cash to bid on us real estate it can really go to almost infinity
The main reasons that international cash comes in is either speculation or offshoring money.
If the housing supply actually matched demand, the housing market becomes unattractive for speculation.
If foreigners are buying houses just to park their money, building more housing to meet the demand helps to alleviate that. This situation feels like a case where regulations designed to prevent housing supply from sitting empty can make sense but I have no evidence or story on how would need to be implemented to achieve that goal without negative unintended consequences.
A lot of the time it's not rich people bidding over a home, it's people in a game of chicken to see who will put themselves in the worse financial position.
Rich have become so much richer that can afford bidding wars at unattainable prices. They can buy investment homes and be cashflow negative for decades in anticipation of the increased market bidding prices. Of course they oppose any sort of legislation that would increase competition.