السكن وسوق العمل.. علاقة لا نراها

Imagine an engineer living in City "A," who has received a job opportunity in City "B" with a salary increase of about 20%. The new job is better, the company needs his skills, and his productivity might be higher there. Without thinking, the move would seem logical, but what if the cost of living in the new city is 40% higher?

Here, the engineer discovers that the salary increase is not enough to compensate for the higher cost of living, so he decides to stay in his city and reject the job offer. From a logical standpoint, this decision seems rational, but economically, the problem goes beyond that rationality since the company did not obtain the skills it needed, and the worker did not move to a place where he could be more productive.

In this case, the housing crisis is no longer just a problem for that engineer alone, nor merely a social issue related to families' ability to buy homes or afford rents. From another perspective, housing has become a significant factor affecting labor market efficiency and the way the economy allocates its human resources. Such cases in economics are described as forms of labor misallocation. Jobs may exist, and skills may also be present, but they do not meet in the same location because geography itself has become an economic barrier.

This idea has gained more prominence with the significant rise in housing prices over the past decades. In a recent report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on housing affordability, the organization points out that the difficulty of accessing affordable housing reduces individuals' ability to move between regions, which may increase the mismatch between skills and jobs and contribute to labor shortages in some areas. The issue here goes beyond how much an individual pays for their home to what the economy loses when housing becomes a barrier to a worker moving to a better opportunity.

Cities do not equalize in productivity; some gather companies, universities, capital, expertise, and infrastructure in one space, creating what economists call agglomeration economies. When companies and skilled labor come together nearby, knowledge transfers more quickly, opportunities for specialization and innovation increase, and productivity rises. However, the problem begins when a city succeeds economically to the extent that housing becomes expensive, making that very success a reason for preventing more workers from accessing it.

The effects of rising housing prices go beyond being a barrier for families; they may mean a job opportunity that was not realized, a skill that remained in the wrong place, and productivity lost to the economy because the right worker could not reach the right place. In short, it is a crisis in the way the economy allocates its most important resource, which is people. This leads us to rethink even the way we measure the success of housing policies. Increasing homeownership is an important social goal, but it is not the only indicator of housing market efficiency. The market also needs diverse rental options, a supply capable of responding to demand, and cities that allow for housing construction near job centers, because the modern economy needs the movement of people as much as it needs them to own assets. Based on this, housing policy should be part of production policy.