Over the years, I’ve curated various streams of information that flow my way on a wide variety of topics I’m interested in.
One of the streams where I tend to find interesting nuggets of information relating to housing/real-estate markets turned up this gem recently:
The Housing Affordability Revolution
In case it wasn’t obvious from the title, this paper examines “housing affordability”.
But what’s unique about it is that it does so over a time span of ~500 years, which is certainly a record for “historical perspective” when it comes to data of this nature1.
Here’s a figure from the paper showing some of these data:
Now, the quality of data that is stitched together like this is always pretty questionable2.
But I think as long as we’re looking at the big picture, I’d venture to guess these data are probably not too far off historical reality, in a broad general sense.
The paper itself presents a pretty interesting perspective on “housing affordability” as well. I won’t spoil it for you – I suggest you read it if you find this kind of thing interesting.
But the general gist of the argument is that living standards today are far better than they have been by historical standards.
And when you put something like the current “housing crisis” in Canada in that context, the perspective it provides can go a long way.
Footnotes
For the uninitiated, finding data on home prices or rents going back even 50 years can be a challenge in a lot of places. So, coming across something that goes back this far is certainly pretty interesting.↩︎
One of the authors of the paper has a GitHub repo that appears to contain some data going back almost as far as the referenced paper, in case you’re interested in investigating it yourself. Here’s a link to the repo.↩︎