>The population is not even massively growing so we probably will never have a space issue ...
Our massive real estate issues that are pricing people out of having enough space to live in the last decades, have less to do with the population growth in the world in this time frame and more to do with immigration and economic and building policies that must see the asset prices always go up by significant margins to "beat the market".
There's also the issue of location and internal and external migration where given a constant worldwide population, everyone is migration to the handful of cities with jobs, infrastructure and QoL, pushing prices up. I've seen this in my home country that saw a massive population decline yet a massive increase in real estate prices proving that the price of housing is not determined by taking the number of houses in the country and dividing it by the number of people in the country giving us the supply/demand ratio determining the housing price factor, as not people are competing for real estate but piles of money are, since it's also a speculative investment vehicle, and so the bigger piles of money are winning, regardless of the total houses to people ratio.
I've gone a bit off topic but my point is that the struggle for affordable living space is real and is gonna get worse despite the world population not increasing that much, as in traditional capitalist fashion, the banks, companies and people who already have wealth and assets will use it as leverage to aquire more of it, pushing the prices up, at the detriment of those trying to enter the market now with less capital.
TL;DR: The housing situation has nothing to do with population growth trends but everything to do with growing piles of money competing for a pie that's relatively fixed in size. This cannot end well.
Our massive real estate issues that are pricing people out of having enough space to live in the last decades, have less to do with the population growth in the world in this time frame and more to do with immigration and economic and building policies that must see the asset prices always go up by significant margins to "beat the market".
There's also the issue of location and internal and external migration where given a constant worldwide population, everyone is migration to the handful of cities with jobs, infrastructure and QoL, pushing prices up. I've seen this in my home country that saw a massive population decline yet a massive increase in real estate prices proving that the price of housing is not determined by taking the number of houses in the country and dividing it by the number of people in the country giving us the supply/demand ratio determining the housing price factor, as not people are competing for real estate but piles of money are, since it's also a speculative investment vehicle, and so the bigger piles of money are winning, regardless of the total houses to people ratio.
I've gone a bit off topic but my point is that the struggle for affordable living space is real and is gonna get worse despite the world population not increasing that much, as in traditional capitalist fashion, the banks, companies and people who already have wealth and assets will use it as leverage to aquire more of it, pushing the prices up, at the detriment of those trying to enter the market now with less capital.
TL;DR: The housing situation has nothing to do with population growth trends but everything to do with growing piles of money competing for a pie that's relatively fixed in size. This cannot end well.