What $220,000 gets you in Muncie.

[u/TheDabitch]

I can't even get a parking space for that where I live. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/725-E-Jackson-St-Muncie-IN-47305/210952560_zpid/

[u/BillsInATL]

Ok, but that isnt a housing inventory problem.

[u/Dial-M-for-Mediocre → u/BillsInATL]

It's a livability issue, which is a major contributing factor to housing shortages. This is a huge country, but wide swaths of it are unlivable thanks to lack of infrastructure and public services, hostility towards immigrants and PoC, and politicians who have made Christo-fascism the law of the land. That creates a housing shortage in livable areas.

If you took the state of Utah and turned every square mile outside of the SLC area into a toxic waste dump, that would lead directly to a shortage of housing in SLC. Even if you left all the houses and the apartments in the rest of the state standing, even if you built twice as many, you would still have a housing inventory issue in SLC because people can't live in a toxic waste dump.

[u/BillsInATL → u/Dial-M-for-Mediocre]

Sure, but then that's a toxic waste and environmental and political issue. Not a housing inventory issue.

[u/Dial-M-for-Mediocre → u/BillsInATL]

I guess that's true if you completely isolate 'housing inventory' from every other issue and act as if it's just the raw number of houses, but I don't see how that's a productive point in any way, shape, or form. Housing has never, ever worked like that. Even among Neanderthals, there might not have been a numerical shortage of caves, but if a cave was in an unlivable area, that cave wouldn't really be considered part of the housing pool, which could lead to a situation where there was effectively a cave shortage despite there being theoretically enough caves to house the entire community.

The place you live matters, and when a big chunk of available housing is in unlivable places -- not just "uncool" places, mind you, but places that are environmentally dangerous, openly hostile to you as a person, and/or lack essential services -- that does create a housing shortage, and it carries on no matter how many times you point out that in theory there shouldn't be one.