The Television and the Rent 🏠

The television on the wall is enormous and cost less than one shift. The rent is due on the 1st, and it did what it has done every year of your working life: it went up.

That’s not a mood. It’s the measured shape of 2 decades. From 2000 to mid-2022, TVs fell about 97% in price and software about 70% — while housing rose about 80% and hospital services more than 200%. Everything information-shaped deflated. Everything land-and-touch-shaped inflated. Two economies, one budget.

And the split isn’t evenly felt. The poorest fifth of households spend 41.6% of their budgets on housing — the people with the least runway carry the stickiest basket. When the deflating economy hands out its gifts, it hands them mostly to budget lines the poor barely have. The line they do have refuses to shrink.

Why this matters right now: every serious forecast of the AI era, fast or slow, says the deflating column is about to get much longer. Intelligence, design, expertise — cheaper, then cheap, then nearly free. But no market force automatically extends that curve to shelter. Land doesn’t ride a cost curve. Permits don’t compound.

Here’s the hopeful part, and it’s sturdier than optimism: much of the housing floor is sticky by rule, not by physics. Where cities have genuinely legalized building — Auckland is the cleanest experiment — rents bent visibly below trend. And this is the rare issue where the coalition already exists across the aisle: deep-red states and deep-blue cities running the same playbook, because the real dividing line was never left versus right. It’s incumbent versus newcomer.

Rules are the one input a free people can change on purpose.

The floor won’t lower itself. Someone has to decide to lower it — and whether we do decides whether the abundance age arrives as an inheritance, or stays a showroom window.

Not housing or financial advice — a walk around a public question.