Did low interest rates spawn too many houses? Austrians would tell us that low interest rates gave the wrong signal about the scarcity of houses, they weren't as scarce as the low interest rates would indicate.
Houses really were sparsely over produced by the nature of housing developments. The nature of housing is lack of smoothness, they are built in units of neighborhoods for economies of scale. So the shortage of housing in one neighborhood does not indicate the impending shortage in a nearby city. Usually is it the opposite such that when on nearby city gets a new development then the next cheapest development occurs farther, on the other side of the industrial base because the current housing devlopment, by its size, would increase local land scarcity.
So housing developments partition land around the radius of the industrial center in gaps. Nothing we do with money will help, except keepan average interest rate for housing . . The problem is a the quantization error of economies of scale, entirely within the housing industry. The only solution is greater efficiencies in building smaller groups of houses. If there was an Austrian problem with housing, then it was the government involvement in housing and zoning, not the Fed's.
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