Urban housing supply

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The rate at which a city produces legally occupiable dwellings, against the rate at which households form in it. Where the first exceeds the second, prices moderate and settlement is formal; where it does not, the difference is not absorbed by people staying away but by people housing themselves outside the system. This is the mechanism that produces informal settlement, and it is a supply constraint rather than a demand mystery: the binding inputs are serviced land, recorded title, permission, and finance long enough to match the life of a building. Singapore is the clearest counter-example of a state solving it directly at scale — about 80 per cent of resident households live in flats built by the Housing and Development Board, and around nine in ten of those households own the flat they live in — and it required the state to hold land assembly, construction and mortgage finance in the same hand for decades, which is a far more unusual arrangement than the outcome is usually credited as being.