591–600 of 1001 posts
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Because I grew up in the UK and there is a fuckton of government housing from 60s and 70s. It is ugly but it is housing people. Government doesn't need to make a profit due to taxation.
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Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Before moving to Europe, I always had this conception of Germany as being very good at organizing things, especially anything involving engineering. It doesn't take long to set this picture straight. > From 2015 to 2024, Austin added 120,000 units to its housing stock—an increase of 30% Compare that to the following [1]: > The [...] government [...] intended to build 400,000 new homes annually, including at least 100…
>But it does show a number of problems inherent in Germany's current situation: (a) shortage of skilled laborers; (b) high cost of labor; and (c) exorbitantly much red tape. These three points alone are among the most frequently cited factors that companies feel inhibit business, and it holds across disciplines. There are 9 billion people in the world, roughly half of them are perfectly capable of doing manual labor.…
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For nearly every homebuyer, a home is the largest purchase they will ever make and the bulk of their net worth. It needs to be a good long term investment that at least reasonably paces with inflation, otherwise you are losing money by buying a home and everyone has to rent and then you have feudalism with extra steps. The good news is this is totally fine with keeping cost of living under control and overbuilding, b…
> a home is the largest purchase they will ever make and the bulk of their net worth That's bad and a central part of the problem. I accept that my car is depreciating in value every year I own it, and but I need a car so I buy one. I don't need it to be a good long term investment, despite it being a major purchase. The entire mindset of treating a family's home as being an investment class rival to bonds and equiti…
> That's bad and a central part of the problem.
Why? Or to ask in a different way, how could it not be?
For nearly all regular working people, there is nothing they will ever buy that costs more in labor and materials than a home. So of course it will be the most expensive purchase most people ever make. How could it not be?
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New construction has already decelerated in Austin due to falling prices, which compresses already-near-zero margin on real estate development. So yes, it really is "just build more housing." The problem is: why would you build more housing as prices fall?
I'm confused by this objection, if you draw a stereotypical supply and demand curve, you can see how prices settle to an equilibrium point. Of course reality has more complications, but I think your objection is 95% answered by a supply and demand curve. You keep building houses when it is profitable. You stop when it is not. This naturally keeps everything in balance.
Its wild how the solution to housing costs is really just: Build more housing. Keep law and order. No it doesn’t need to be “affordable”. Yes rent control is a terrible idea. Just build more housing. Note: that the US already has plenty of housing and housing costs basically go up in areas of low crime relative to economic opportunity. If you build housing, but allow crime to rise, you have wasted everybody’s time.
No, it really is not that easy. Check out China, and read up on the Spanish housing crisis. "Just build more" works only sometimes, as demonstrated in those counter-examples. Housing is massive societal and sociological problem with no simple fix. Furthermore, in many circles, another proposal is to cut red tape. You know, housing in the US already is among the least affordable and lowest quality in the developed wor…
Keeping crime low matters too, because people pay a premium for safety, and high-crime areas often face weaker investment and worse long-term housing outcomes. And “cutting red tape” does not mean legalising asbestos or lead pipes, which is a straw man. It means reducing delays, exclusionary zoning, parking mandates, and other rules that limit safe housing production and raise costs for no good reason. Housing is absolutely a complex social problem, but complexity does not erase the role of supply. More safe housing plus safer neighbourhoods will not solve everything, but it is still one of the clearest ways to reduce pressure on rents and prices.
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I'm confused by this objection, if you draw a stereotypical supply and demand curve, you can see how prices settle to an equilibrium point. Of course reality has more complications, but I think your objection is 95% answered by a supply and demand curve. You keep building houses when it is profitable. You stop when it is not. This naturally keeps everything in balance.
Some would say that housing is a right (while acknowledging the need for housing construction and its workers and supplies to be paid for) and that it should be funded somehow, even if the free marker profit becomes negative during certain periods. Like any market manipulation, the question then would be how to intervene to keep housing construction going when construction isn't profitable, while not fomenting corrup…
I'm honestly trying to take this seriously, but I really can't square the problem of location and utility. On of the reasons why West Virginia has such a low homeless rate is just that mobile homes and manufactured housing is pretty much legal in many areas around the state. One of the reasons why California is so expensive is that those types of inexpensive housing options are effectively illegal statewide.
Public housing also has many models. State owned. State funded but via cooperatives. Part state. state assisted co-buy. There's lots of models and so it is also a bit bogus to talk as if public housing has one shape.
I don't like the tone of input here, there is jeering and name calling and ACKSHEWALLY type responses so I am not going to continue, I just wanted to say: don't forget the lessons learned in Austin may not extend world-wide.
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There is the possibility that the government builds housing, since the government doesn't have to care about direct profits and can include the overall economic effects of affordable housing in its calculations. We don't expect much direct profits from roads either, but we keep building more and more of them.
Because they don’t care about profits, they always end up overpaying and taking way longer time than necessary. And who pays for that? The whole society: Either the government raises taxes, gets more in debt, or they print more money driving inflation up. The most basic commodity, food, is a great example. The moment the government has ever step into controlling production of food, we’ve only seen subpar performance…
You might be surprised to hear how heavily government directed and subsidized food production is in the USA.
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NIMBYism has never been about preserving neighborhood characteristic, or noise and traffic concerns. Menlo Park is not Big Sur. Sure, some concerns are reasonable and should be investigated, but most of the time they're bureaucratic distractions that's been weaponized by people who want to delay progress and protect their investment. For most Americans, A house is their primary savings account, retirement plan, and p…
> For most Americans, A house is their primary savings account, retirement plan, and probably where they keep majority of their wealth. If you allow for increases in density, that house (actually the land beneath it, but still.) becomes more valuable as it's redeveloped. So that American homeowner does benefit, by unlocking the upside of "evil gentrification" (or actually, density increase).
Given the above uncertainty, and higher density could result in more traffic, noise, crime, nymbys are likely taking the correction position for wealth preservation and quality of life.
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We are not talking about economic theory. We are talking about house prices. Time after time it has been seen that free-enough market can lower the prices to affordable levels.
Fair, but the thread has evolved into a discussion on the theory. We are definitely in the territory of theory when the invisible hand is mentioned.