They tell you the city is where the life is. The jobs. The pulse. The “opportunity.” And maybe it is. But the first thing the city does now—before you learn the metro map, before you find the café that feels like yours, before your new badge stops being shiny—is invoice you for the privilege of existing within its radius.
Not for luxuries. For space. For air that doesn’t feel borrowed. For a bedroom that can fit a bed and not much else. For the right to close a door without touching both walls at once.
This is the part we’re supposed to pretend is normal. We say “housing market” the way we say “weather,” as if it’s a cloud passing over and not a machine built by people with names and votes and incentives. We talk about rent like it’s a law of physics, not a price tag attached to scarcity. We stare at listings and adjust our expectations downward with the same obedient resignation we once reserved for gravity.
Seventy years ago—pick your country, pick your decade—an ordinary wage could reasonably buy an ordinary home somewhere near the work. Not everywhere, not always, not magically. But the link between work and shelter still resembled a bargain: you contribute, you get a life. Now, in the top locations—the global cities, the “hubs,” the places everyone is told they must pass through to become real—housing has turned into a toll booth guarding the road to adulthood. You don’t just compete for a job. You compete for a postcode. You don’t just interview with a manager. You interview with a landlord. And the landlord is not impressed by your degree, your potential, your inner light. The landlord wants proof that you can pay forever.
Affordability didn’t decline because humans forgot how to build walls. It declined because we built a system where demand concentrates and supply stays locked, and then we act shocked when the lock does what locks do.
Start with demand. Big cities became magnets because magnets work: dense labour markets, faster promotion ladders, better matching between skills and employers, more chances to fail and rebound without leaving the map. If you’re young, ambitious, anxious, or simply realistic about how modern careers work, a “top location” offers something your hometown often can’t: option value. The ability to switch jobs without switching your entire life. The ability to learn at speed, to be seen, to be in the flow where decisions are made. In a world where careers are no longer railways but ladders with missing rungs, that matters. People don’t move because they love small apartments. People move because they’re buying probability.
Then we poured accelerant on it. For decades, interest rates drifted downward, making borrowing cheaper and asset prices easier to inflate. When money gets cheaper, scarce assets become more expensive, because the question stops being “what is this worth?” and becomes “what can I bid per month without choking?” In places where new housing is hard to add, lower rates don’t produce more homes; they produce higher prices. You don’t get abundance. You get richer owners.
And then supply. Supply is where the story becomes ugly, because it isn’t an accident. It’s governance. It’s politics. It’s a polite word—“planning”—that often means “permission to exist, granted slowly, after you’ve paid the right people in time, money, and compliance.” It’s zoning that treats apartments like a moral hazard. It’s neighbourhood veto power dressed up as civic virtue. It’s endless hearings where the loudest voices belong to the people who already own what you’re trying to buy, who will use the language of sunlight and parking and “character” to protect the one thing they actually care about: scarcity.
Scarcity is not a side effect. Scarcity is the product. Scarcity is the feature that turns shelter into an investment and turns everyone else into a tenant.
If you want the honest version: the modern global city often runs like a members-only club that pretends it’s a meritocracy. The membership card is property. If you already have it, the system works beautifully. Your home appreciates while you sleep. Your “wealth” grows while you sit still. You can call it prudence, planning, responsibility—whatever helps you sleep—but it is, in plain terms, being paid by scarcity. If you don’t have the membership card, you can work harder, study more, network better, and still lose to someone who bought twenty years earlier or someone whose parents can write a cheque. Your salary competes with inherited capital, and capital does not get tired.
So yes: people move to the hubs and live three times smaller. And yes: for many of them, this degrades life satisfaction—less space, more noise, longer commutes, fewer children, later families, more chronic stress. But they still do it because the alternative often feels like slow economic death. Because “comfort” isn’t the only currency; opportunity is. Because the labour market is uneven, and the steep part of the mountain is in a handful of places.
Also because humans are not purely rational creatures seeking happiness. We’re social creatures seeking belonging and status and meaning, and cities are factories for all three. In the right years, a tiny apartment can feel like a badge: proof you’re inside. Proof you’re becoming someone. You can survive on a story longer than you can survive on a sofa. And the story is reinforced by the people around you, the feed in your pocket, the career ladder in your head. You tell yourself it’s temporary. You tell yourself you’ll upgrade soon. Then a partner arrives, or a child, or a health problem, and you discover the upgrade costs the price of a second life.
So what’s the solution? Not the fantasy solutions. Not “just work harder.” Not “move somewhere cheaper” as a moral lecture, as if everyone can teleport their industry and their support network and their spouse’s job. Not “ban investors” as a bumper sticker, as if a single villain explains a structural shortage. And not “subsidise buyers,” because in constrained markets subsidies often become a gift to sellers. When supply can’t expand, pumping demand just inflates the balloon.
The solutions are boring, political, and brutally specific. That’s why people avoid them.
First: build more housing where people actually want to live. Not on the edge of nowhere with a bus that runs twice a day. In the real demand zones: near transit, near jobs, near the places that generate the wages. This means allowing mid-rise apartments in places currently reserved for detached houses. It means “missing middle” density—duplexes, fourplexes, small blocks—legal by default, not as a rare exception after three years of paperwork. It means speed. If it takes five to ten years to approve and deliver housing, your city isn’t “careful,” it’s refusing to solve the problem.
Second: remove the local veto points that let scarcity protect itself. Cities are not museums for the comfort of incumbents. If your governance lets every existing owner block new housing because they dislike change, you will get exactly what you are currently getting: a city that becomes a luxury good. The fix is not to silence residents; it’s to stop treating housing as something that requires moral consensus from everyone who already has it. Clear rules, predictable approvals, tight timelines, fewer discretionary refusals. By-right development where infrastructure exists. Less theatre, more homes.
Third: invest in infrastructure that creates capacity. Transit, utilities, schools, childcare, healthcare—things that make density liveable. If you want people to accept more building, you need to fund the systems that keep life functioning when population rises. “Just build” without capacity is how you create backlash. Capacity is how you turn building into progress rather than punishment.
Fourth: scale non-market housing. Not as charity. As an operating system feature. Social housing, municipal housing, housing associations—call it what you want. The point is a large, stable pool of homes that are not priced like speculative assets and not rationed purely by who can outbid whom. The private market is excellent at building for high returns. It is less reliable at building for broad affordability in the tightest cities. If you want nurses, teachers, postmen, junior analysts, and young families to exist inside the city, you need stock that isn’t auctioned every month.
Fifth: stop using demand subsidies as a substitute for supply reform. If the core problem is scarcity, subsidising buyers is like handing out bigger buckets during a drought. It feels generous; it changes little. It often ends up capitalised into prices. The politically hard truth is that some policies that feel “pro middle class” are pro-landlord in disguise when supply is inelastic.
Sixth: treat “housing as investment” as a trade-off, not a religion. If you structure taxation and policy so that owning property is the safest, most subsidised path to wealth, you will pull money into property instead of into productive activity. And then you’ll act surprised when the young can’t buy in. You can’t have a society where homes are primarily a speculative asset and also a society where homes are broadly affordable in the most desirable places. Pick a priority and stop pretending you can keep both without pain.
And then there’s the hardest solution, the one nobody wants to admit: distribute opportunity. Make more places worth living in. If your economy is a funnel pouring talent into a few metros, the metros will choke. Remote work helps, but it doesn’t decentralise everything; the best jobs still cluster, and the social gravity of hubs remains strong. Real decentralisation means moving institutions, investing in secondary cities, building universities and research centres and transport links that create genuine alternatives. It means giving people the power to choose without sacrificing their future.
None of this is quick. All of it is feasible. The obstacle isn’t physics. It’s the coalition of people who benefit from the current system: homeowners whose wealth rises with scarcity, politicians who fear angry incumbents, and industries built around the churn. They will tell you the problem is complicated. It isn’t. The mechanics are simple: when you block supply in the places where demand concentrates, you create a society where space is inherited, not earned.
So are we “fucked up as a species”? We’re not uniquely broken. We’re just predictable. We build systems that reward scarcity and then we compete inside them like it’s a personal moral test. We confuse high prices with high value and call it “success.” We tolerate absurdity because we can, until we can’t. And we keep moving to the hubs because the hubs hold the levers—jobs, networks, status, probability—and most people aren’t optimising for comfort; they’re optimising for survival in a world that punishes being outside the centre.
The only real question is how long you want to keep pretending this is normal.
Because if the price of participating in the modern economy is a life lived smaller, later, and more anxious—then the city isn’t just expensive. It’s eating its future.
