friend_Fernando

Relative scarcity is the necessary and sufficient condition. Either there's enough housing or there isn't (there's a bit of slack with relocations, house sharing and spare bedrooms but it's largely inconsequential.) That means that supply (i.e. quantity) is enough.

It's true that if it was impossible to speculate on housing, there would be less incentive to create artificial scarcity by e.g. lobbying for restrictive land use policies.

Isn't it interesting how certain online forces affiliated with the letter Z are against copyright for Western IP in general, but are pro copyright when it comes to hamstringing Western AI?

> such as former convicts, individuals with substance abuse issues, those with mental health challenges, people who lost jobs or income, refugees, and more

The one thing they all have in common is how much more expensive it is to house them than it used to be.

We don't have shareholders that will blame us for the apocalypse just because we didn't pay to play.

Tech leaders are just making do like the rest of us, swirling around while the world goes down the drain.

This just mirrors the fake zealotry babbled in Venezuela while the country was cratering. I don't have to prove that mainstream economics works. That's risible Putinist nonsense like the rest of your line of "reasoning."

That's a strawman. Using the right economic policies would fix the problem. Argentina had a cold, maybe pneumonia. The right fix was antibiotics, not a bullet to the head.

No one is objecting to knowledge preservation - when you just preserve it instead of abundantly replicating it with a wink.

Reasonable people are objecting to copyright law violation, for the simple reason that it disincentivizes further knowledge creation.

Even more reasonable people are objecting to weaponizing copyright law violation on behalf of the vilest dictatorship on the planet.

See sibling posts for the cost argument.

> These homes would have been destroyed regardless of building material.

That's just not the case. Fire-resistant construction might not always help the first house at the subdivision's edge, but it will help the rest. One analogy is control rods in a reactor.

As I said in another post, the problem with firestorms here in CA is the rate of initial spread. We always get massive numbers of destroyed structures all at once, and <25% containment until the winds subside. The ignition source for most of the structures are burning wood-frame structures. Early on, firefighters can only help evacuate people.

Your argument only applies to unreinforced masonry, which is no longer allowed by code in seismically-prone areas. For fire resistance you can use reinforced concrete, steel or aluminum framing, or wood framing with non-combustible walls. Or even go exotic with various prefab options and 3D printing.

As for the higher cost, this has become mostly an urban myth. In regions with low construction costs such as the South or the Midwest ($130-180/sqft,) the cost difference is minimal. In areas with high construction costs such as CA ($200-700/sqft,) the difference is either immaterial or negative (thanks to the insurance savings.)