Housing Is A Global Wealth Apocalypse
TL:DR — Housing is F**ked
The cafe hums with the chatter of laptop keys and the hiss of steam wands. Mark and I sit elbow-to-elbow at the narrow zinc bar, cluttered with notebooks and devices, our cups leaving rings on weathered wood.
Mark* (not his real name) leans back, loosening his collar. The startup founder radiates easy confidence, buoyed by the millions in venture funding he just locked down.
As talk turns toward Housing, though, his buoyant mood deflates. Despite his business savvy, the trust of a well-established and nationally recognised VC fund, and new liquidity, the banks denied Mark a mortgage last year.
I’m not asking you to feel sorry for Mark — and neither would he. He’s comfortable, secure, and in a position that a lot of folks would give anything to have. But his story underscores how Housing — whether to rent or own — has become a ubiquitous problem for all of us, shaping our social discourse and life trajectory.
And his story is echoed by the people I talk to every day. People who have jobs and people who don’t. People who make their living with a keyboard and a code editor, and people who make their living working in woodshops and studios. People who are joined by one common factor: they cannot buy a home.
It has become the hollow refrain of the modern age in cafes and bars, around dinner tables, and between office cubicles. We ask each other invasive questions that would have been unthinkable in past years — “Are you renting, or did you buy?” has become an acceptable topic to raise with new acquaintances over happy hour drinks. Housing is required, desired, despised, and utterly inescapable.
The Generational Reckoning
The numbers paint a depressing picture: over 1.6 billion individuals worldwide will face inadequate housing conditions by 2025, constituting a quarter of humanity. This swelling crisis permeates borders, generations, and social strata. Like unquiet waters, it ripples out to reshape our social structures, financial opportunities, and lifestyle decisions. A yawning disparity between incomes and home values is resulting in mass pricing-out across urban centres.
In Australia, factors like speculation, income stagnation and a wealthy retiring class whose dollars and votes hold governments hostage, constrain supply amid major cities’ rapid population growth. With limited housing stock, a crisis is brewing.
I spoke to a number of people — primarily from my Twitter/Mastodon/Threads circles of tech workers, entrepreneurs, artists and creatives. Names have been changed for privacy reasons.
“Home prices feel untethered from reality,” said Sara*, a 25-year-old designer in Melbourne. “Owning real estate always seemed a given for previous generations, but no longer feels like a guarantee for my friends and me.”
And it’s not just Australia. In America, the crisis exposes a generational reckoning. While past generations focused on saving for starter homes, millennials now encounter bids hundreds of thousands over asking for fixer-uppers. And the upper echelons of tech offer little haven — six-figure salaries cannot guarantee access to homes in places like the Bay Area.
Even traditionally stable professionals face precarity. “Every week, another friend tells me they’re moving home because they can’t afford rent in the city anymore,” Sara said. “A huge chunk of my income goes to my landlord. I can’t imagine ever saving enough when one-bedrooms are $600,000-plus.”
This trend has catalysed a sweeping cultural rethink around housing expectations. “They call it the American Dream, but owning feels more like a fantasy for my generation,” said Austin resident Michael*, 32. “Ridiculous prices lock us out from the s**t our parents viewed as a guarantee.”
The affordability crisis ensures that wealth is concentrated in fewer hands while the rest of us face shrinking prospects. And it exposes a generational reckoning.
The Inequality Multiplier
High prices and stagnant wages have widened the gulf between what workers earn and what homes cost. This squeezes even upper-middle-class professionals, forcing difficult trade-offs around mortgages, commutes and quality of life.
In tech hubs like Silicon Valley, white-collar workers earning $200,000 or more qualify as low-income due to astronomical housing costs. To afford the Valley, they must over-leverage or face drives of 3+ hours roundtrip. This fuels the talent drain as skilled workers decamp for cheaper cities.
But, those lower on the socioeconomic ladder experience more acute crises. In California’s Bay Area, service workers cram into communal Housing or live in RVs, unable to afford rents near their jobs. Across America’s Sunbelt cities, evictions skyrocketed nearly 40% from 2020 to 2021 as struggling renters lost savings and low-wage work. In Sydney, single mothers with three kids live in their cars.
The housing crisis exposes inequality in insidious ways. Homeowners gain an appreciating asset. Renters watch payments swell, lining others’ pockets. Lower income brackets face the steepest instability, with displacement threatening continuity. “I have a master’s degree and can barely afford my cramped apartment,” said Michael after losing his job and facing eviction. “Owning property is so out of reach I can hardly conceptualise it.”
Economic mobility and life prospects narrow for a broad society when affordable options shrink. Housing unaffordability constitutes a critical inequality multiplier shaping 21st-century life.
In cities worldwide, from Hong Kong to London to Vancouver, living space per person is constricted. Homes minimise square footage, with bedrooms shrinking closer to the dimensions of monastic cells.
And no matter how well designed the setting for our claustrophobia is — claustrophobia it remains.
The mental toll of housing is felt across cities and generations. Financial stress, interpersonal friction, lack of privacy, and severe social-emotional discomfort are compounding. Unaffordable markets breed individual and collective discontent — at best — and malaise at worse. We become stifled. We become limited. We eschew innovation for survival. We become lost.
The Marginalised Majority
The housing crisis exposes a gulf separating the world’s haves from its have-nots. As prices skyrocket in the West, over one billion in Asia, Africa, and Latin America lack permanent shelter. Inadequate living conditions remain the norm across Global South cities.
At least 150 million worldwide currently face outright homelessness. Severe shelter deprivation transcends cities and is seen in rural areas lacking sanitation infrastructure.
This contrast spotlights lingering post-colonial power imbalances. Western urban centres face “plagues” of unaffordability and scarcity. Yet marginalised majority world populations inhabit much direr realities that rarely make headlines.
Even in wealthy nations, policy often overlooks those at the margins. Third graders do homework in parked cars, rotating between lots nightly. They know the nearest 24-hour laundromats and fast-food restrooms by heart.
“There’s this implicit sense that some people deserve unsafe conditions,” said Catherine*, an artist by day and a volunteer by night who delivers hot meals to vehicle-dwelling families. She expressed outrage at the normalcy of homelessness in American society. “Everywhere you look, financial interests take priority over human rights and housing.”
Commodification and Speculation
Many argue the commodification of a basic necessity catalyses housing marginalisation worldwide. Real estate converted into an investment vehicle squeezes out affordability. Critics contend a rights-based approach should prevail over profit-driven motives in policy decisions.
The U.N. warns that the financialisation of housing markets contributes to inequality, segregation and exclusion. But even amid condemnation, governments hesitate to regulate real estate speculation and corporate and retiree landlordism. Housing constitutes a $50 trillion asset class woven into the global financial system. Potential market corrections pose threats to stability.
In our “folded” era, housing fortunes intertwine across continents. Markets facing crises impact currency and trade networks worldwide. With unprecedented global interdependence, collaborative policymaking between nations grows necessary to address the problem.
Seeds of Hope?
Can social activism spark solutions by raising the profile of housing inequality? Many advocates argue progress will require reimagining entrenched property frameworks centred on private capital accumulation.
They argue that we need to demand public, democratic forms of housing provision and popularise models like social Housing and community-led development that restore agency to tenants; they claim that guaranteeing housing as a right requires dismantling the idea of unlimited profits off this basic need. And no matter one’s own politics, when private concerns and personal responsibilities have not shifted the needle or moved us back from the brink, it’s increasingly hard to argue against more radical socialist ideas.
Savvy organisers increasingly spotlight housing unaffordability as an issue of social justice. In Dublin and Berlin, activists have occupied vacant investment properties to house tent dwellers. App platforms enable users to report empty homes to petition for affordable interventions.
In Sweden, non-profits have converted abandoned apartments into supportive lodging for immigrants and people without Housing. In New Zealand, young families stretched thin by costs have protested to demand reforms.
Okay; So what about technology?
Can innovation provide meaningful relief valves for the swelling housing pressure worldwide? The tech sector’s abundant capital and appetite for disruption constitute a logical realm to incubate solutions.
Several startups now aim to lower barriers to homeownership through financial innovation. Companies like Loftium and Noah facilitate first-time buying by providing down payment support in exchange for future home equity. Others like Milo offer platforms to crowdfund down payments. Such emerging models attempt to unblock ownership pathways for younger buyers and marginalized groups.
On the rental side, startups like Domuso and Jetty employ big data analytics to replace security deposits with small monthly fees. This increases accessibility by eliminating sizeable upfront deposit requirements.
Within smart cities, tech-enabled flexible housing solutions help densify urban environments. Startups like Israel’s Ori create robotic furniture, allowing small apartments to transform based on changing needs.
But these aren’t solutions. They’re band-aids. They’re a hack and a quick fix, but they don’t solve anything. Why? Technology alone cannot remedy such a complex crisis. Housing unaffordability stems from wage stagnation, inequality and speculative investing demanding policy solutions.
Although tech can optimize existing infrastructure, it cannot physically create more supply where it’s lacking. And it cannot fix systemic issues with our economy, stagnating and entrenched classes, and wealthy investors taking money from future generations.
In an age of increased social division, the housing quandary represents a rare unifying force — though one breeding unease more than unity. It embodies yearning paired with a fading social contract as an essential building block of stability drifts out of reach.
