system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Where did the houses go?

I know they didn't "go" anywhere, but I'm curious how there's not enough houses all of a sudden? Like, just a handful of years ago there wasn't a housing shortage, and I don't believe the population has grown by an unexpected amount.

I've heard that it's single family homes being turned into rentals, but then wouldn't you expect there would be *pleanty* of rentals available right now? And there's a shortage of those too. 

I've also heard that companies (BLACKROCK?) buying houses and leaving them vacant, but when I drive through my neighborhood I don't see vacant houses by any meaningful amount.

Is it the eviction/foreclosure moratoriums? Like people who would normally live with roommates have been living alone without paying rent/mortgage?

I'm just wondering how we can go from having enough houses to not-enough houses in such a short time. Where did they go?
gpt
"Where do they go" is an appropriate question, with the wrong subject. Of course houses don't just move. But people do.

To put it a bit differently, the housing shortage was never about there not being enough housing in general, but there not being enough housing *in certain (high demand) areas*.

And it's not a particularly new phenomenon. It's generally true that most of these places have very small vacancy rates though.

There are certainly factors that exacerbate this temporarily, but broadly speaking it's the result of urbanisation that has gone on for decades if not centuries. A tad less broadly speaking, it happens because the influx of people in the areas where people want to move to, like New York, Boston, etc. is much greater than the increase in housing supply and has been for a while. Demand goes up, supply doesn't, you get what people perceive as a shortage.

This has indeed slowed down a tad during the pandemic, but we're just seeing the trend continue.