Housing crisis street simulator

A model visualization: rising inequality shifts production toward upper-income households, while financialization, monopoly power, and algorithmic coordination make housing behave less like shelter and more like a compound-return asset. All forms of deregulation under neoliberlism led to today's unprecedented levels of inequality.
Higher values move purchasing power upward: fewer households can pay new-build prices, while luxury demand remains deep.
When required compound returns rise, developers reject ordinary projects unless rents, sale prices, or land values are expected to rise fast.
Higher speculation increases land-banking, buy-to-hold behavior, and asset-price pressure.
Higher concentration means a larger share of blocks are priced by portfolio logic instead of local household need.
This simulates alleged algorithmic alignment: landlords stop undercutting each other and target higher asking rents.
The model lets some units stay empty when higher vacancy is profitable for asset/rent discipline.
Co-ops, land trusts, public housing, tenant protections, anti-trust enforcement, and non-speculative finance dampen the feedback loop.
This is an explanatory model, not a calibrated forecast. It deliberately makes causal assumptions visible so they can be debated, adjusted, or replaced.
Median rent
Affordable to median household
New homes built
Vacancy / withheld
Asset-price pressure

Shared-prosperity town

Developers mostly chase the middle of the income distribution; rents anchor closer to wages.

1978model year
middle-income homes
luxury / high-income units
corporate portfolio
land bank / speculative hold
vacant / withheld units

Feedback chain

Pressure gauges

These bars show the model’s internal forces. The street grid changes when thresholds are crossed.

How to read the toy model

Lots are colored by their dominant development logic. Green means ordinary housing clears the developer’s return test. Purple means high-end demand clears it. Orange means land is being held for appreciation. Red means corporate portfolio pricing. Gray means units are vacant or intentionally withheld. Moving the sliders is meant to make the invisible political economy visible at the block scale.

For example, raising inequality alone does not merely “make some people richer.” In this model it also changes what gets financed, who can bid for land, whether new supply targets median households, and whether withholding supply can increase portfolio value.