Ask HN: How do I create a social movement to change the world?

I'd say study how antiwork got started. When you get a lot of eyes on an idea real change can happen.

In the past, your whole community needed to feel that change was necessary otherwise people would just accept the current situation. I argue anti-vax wouldn't exist if there wasn't a meeting place for people with vaccine related anxiety to meet. That place is the internet. And we see how much of an impact it has had on vaccination rates.

Regarding housing issues, to me the solution is simple but untenable to most western cultures. Limit population growth to natural growth unless the vacancy rate of housing is 3% of existing supply. Unfortunately, this would require reducing immigration which would mean wages would need to rise for all workers.

The part I don't understand is how government don't see wage rises as a positive thing. Income taxes make up the vast majority of the tax base in western countries and yet the government seems focused solely on corporate interests. Any country that targets high levels of immigration during a housing crisis must be corrupt.

The orgs that succeed imho have a lot of direct outreach happening below the surface. They are building relationships across the sector, meeting with politicians, business people, subject matter experts etc etc.

You see a website and think, the website is doing the work, but it isn't. The organisers are working super hard, grinding away.

Your Reddit community might be a piece of the puzzle but just a small one.

There are many books on the theory of social change. Start reading. Your specific issue here (housing affordability) is at least defined in scope and on political parties radar. But you need to find out why they talk about it but never fix it.

ALittleLight gives a good general answer here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29533866

Building and departing on that somewhat:

Do study what has worked, and what hasn't. Keep in mind that success may be based on chance, and negative examples also teach.

Keep in mind that there are many ways in which political movements fail (and a few that help them succeed). The study of failed utopian projects is highly illuminating. My view is that creating a self-perpetuating "intentional community" is a possible approach. For these to work, the community itself must be practically viable, and address basic levels of human needs: shelter (obviously), food, work, society, etc. In my view the college town is amongst the more successful of these in the past century or two, though that itself may be based on conditions no longer broadly present.

I strongly recommend Jo Freeman's "Tyranny of Structurelessness". https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

I'd strongly recommend going to the communities most affected by the problem at hand and getting their perspective. I don't believe that those oppressed by a system always fully understand the nature of that system or the solution. I do feel that they can offer highly useful insights, and that if you hope to enlist their support they will want to be participants and not mere passengers.

The general problem is one called "politics". It turns out there's a literature on this stretching back millennia. Old dead men (mostly, there are some exceptions) have something to teach.

There are a number of reforms based around the question of real estate and property. There's an increasing amount of current focus on this. Shane Phillips of the UCLA Lewis Center strikes me as particularly good, his book is a set of recipes for reform you should find useful, The Affordable City (https://www.worldcat.org/title/affordable-city-strategies-fo... https://islandpress.org/books/affordable-city). Simon Winchester's written on the question of land ownership recently, Land (https://www.worldcat.org/title/land-the-ownership-of-everyth...)

There are Henry George, Koprotkin, Tolstoy, and others.

I've written a Hierarchy of Failures in Problem Resolution which some have found useful. (Invert the cases to "success in..." and you find an essential success chain.) https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2fsr0g/hierarc...

There are a number of especially critical points. Many people recognise that there is a problem, and even the nature of the problem. Trouble usually starts with goals and methods, the getting-there-from-here problem.

Often you'll find that progress is blocked by those who 1) deny that there is a problem, 2) aren't interested in solving it, or 3) benefit by the existence of the problem itself. Overcoming these factors is a major challenge.

There are parts of the world which have far less of a housing and real-estate problem than others. Berlin, Vienna, and Tokyo are often mentioned. Looking at how they've addressed the problem and avoided the trap is hugely useful.

A thought exercise I conduct (and would suggest in talking with those dealing with the issue) is what I call "More Money Than God". The point is NOT that you have unlimited resources, but to simply take the funding question off the table whilst options for action are considered. Walk through possible methods and practices without considering how you'd pay for them, for now, and think which would have the greatest positive impact. After doing that, start putting price tags on things. If nothing else, you'll have a list of options to present to participants and potential funders.

A tremendously underappreciated mechanism in property-based market economies is that much personal wealth accumulation comes not from creating wealth (in the sense that a society as a whole achieves greater capabilities) but in asset inflation. And real estate is amongst the fundamental assets. Appreciation of its value is not a creation of new wealth in itself, but an appropriation of wealth creation elsewhere, at best, and quite often a manipulation of others' misery, needs, or lack of options.

Recognising this doesn't make your task any easier, but it does make possible the recognition of the nature of the problem and sources of likely resistance.

A great essay addressing this is Bernhard J. Stern, "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations", 1937. This covers several areas, housing amongst them.

https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag... (poor-quality scan)

Markdown: https://rentry.co/szi3g

The market itself is the source of many distortions. That said, finding a way to leverage it against itself might prove useful. I'm sort of stumped myself on how best to do this, but it is the direction I've been leaning toward myself.

Rather than eliminating property ownership, at least initially, changing its structure might be an option. Co-ops, land banks, and other forms of collective ownership might have merits. These are practiced in many areas, though mostly to a limited extent.

>> The fastest way to achieve this change would be to make a vast fortune

The irony is that had I made a vast fortune, I would likely not care about this issue.

I've noticed that people who own houses don't give a second's thought to this issue, or they don't see it is a problem. In fact, the opposite - if you own a house then you want to opposite of what I am campaigning for - you want prices to keep skyrocketing to infinity.

The only people who own a house who care about this issue are those who have kids/grandkids and are concerned that those kids are forever renters.

Put more simply: if you own a house then you don't give a ** about people who don't own a house.