Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

Also known as wrecking tax base for police, schools, local and state economies.... This is a terrible idea - deliberately crashing any asset class, especially one underpinning the majority of local services.

Property taxes account for as much as 63% of state revenue (NH) to as little as 17% (DE and AL, both of which offset this loss by other specialized taxes). Over the US around 35% of state revenues are property tax.

For most states your desire would destroy the economy vastly worse than the 2008 recession or COVID, neither of which tanked such a huge amount of revenue used for services. Good idea there.

> 1) monetary policy

Also done because it affects all aspects of the economy, from manufacturing, to employment, to R&D, to medicine. Claiming this is done for housing is shortsighted. Such monetary policy is decorrelated from housing prices (which you can check in Excel if you like). So to change monetary policy simply to drive housing prices down is a blunt hammer that will also lessen employment, lessen investment in productive areas of the economy, lessen trade by making exports more expensive, etc.

>2) Subsidizing mortgages (Fannie mae, Freddie mac) - allows people to borrow more and so spend more

No, it does not make me able to afford more loan - that is determined by my income. It provides more liquidity for the market, lowering prices. If there was less liquidity, then money would be harder to get, making borrowing more expensive, not less expensive. If you look at research on what people borrow, the term is Ability to Pay (ATP) as the driving factor, which is based on income, not on Fannie providing liquidity. And if you read more research, you'll find that the increased liquidity lowers prices significantly. You have this completely backwards.

> 3) Zoning

Done to industrial plants being mixed with housing. Here's a paper [2] showing that the major driving cost of housing is the marginal cost of physical construction costs, not zoning. There are very few places where zoning is much of a restriction (mostly places where land is super scarce, which is not the majority of the US).

>4) Bailing out banks involved in real estate

The "bailouts" were loans to provide liquidity, repaid with interest, profiting the taxpayer [1]. Many banks were forced to take these loans against their will to prevent signaling to the market vulnerable banks, to lessen bank run issues [2]. This was the correct govt action to prevent further harm. I think you seriously misunderstand what the "bailouts" were or what they affected.

So on this point your belief is vastly removed from reality. Spend some time reading on the details of TARP and you'll learn banks paid taxpayers, not the other way around (and note taxpayers did not even fund TARP, the Fed did, who was paid back with interest - not a cent was raised in increased taxes).

> 6) Mortgage interest relief for home owners etc etc

This is done to encourage home ownership, not to make prices high or low (note mortgage interest deduction has existed through many boom and bust cycles of housing prices). A good place to check your claim is looking pre and post the recent big change in mortgage deduction laws, and again, there are decent econ papers studying the question. Such papers are vastly more accurate than your opinion.

[1] https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/

[2] http://archive.boston.com/business/articles/2009/05/15/first...

[3] https://www.nber.org/papers/w8835

(And I ignored that FM is not the Federal Govt for now...)

From the stats of conforming mortgages being 40% of mortgages and the FM only buying 60% of those, FM is at most guaranteeing (to investors, for a fee) around 24% of mortgages. That's well under 51%, right?

So FM not guaranteeing most mortgages is true, and it's not even close.

Further, you won't ever come up with a system that is 100% inclusive, secure, reliable, and economical. That should never be the goal since it's not achievable or necessary. Covering 99% of cases is good enough.

Things will never get better in their original countries if everyone want's to go to a few very small parts of the world.

And things will eventually be undesirable in the places everyone is trying to immigrate to.

Whatever happened with staying in one place and making it better?

The current state of affairs in the US is that, in most towns, detached single-family housing is the only thing you are legally allowed to build. When you buy land the local zoning board tells you what can be built on that land, and these zones are extremely fine-grained. Thus, the people who want detached houses are the ones who are dictating how others should live.

There is a huge demand for denser urban arrangements, because people would like to live closer to where they work and don't want to drive cars. This is why smaller houses in urban centers go for more money than larger houses in suburbs. This is an arbitrage opportunity for anyone with the capital to buy houses at the periphery of those urban centers and demolish or renovate them to house more people. Except that's illegal, so instead the market is stuck pricing by convenience, and you get a society that demands it's working class spend two or more unpaid hours of their lives each day driving from the suburbs into the city.

Historically, the transition to suburban home ownership as the default mode of living was also something dictated by elites rather than organically decided upon. To explain this we need to talk about cars, because suburbs and cars are basically a package deal. It is extremely inconvenient to live in the suburbs without owning a car, and cars do not work in cities where they have to compete for limited road space against pedestrians and public transit.

So the car companies demanded that the laws and cities change to make their business work. We invented the """crime""" of jaywalking[0] just to make cities more convenient to access in a large vehicle. Car companies even bought up and destroyed public transit, turning efficient streetcar and rail systems into buses that had to compete for road space with individual riders, and often lost. This meant more people having to buy back their freedom[1] by moving to the suburbs and buying cars to get to the job they used to walk to.

Had this decision not been made through top-down power and social engineering[2], the suburbanization of America would have been far more limited. We can see this in much of Europe and Asia, where attempts to level and rebuild cities in Henry Ford's divine image were resisted at every turn.

[0] "jay" is old-timey derogatory slang for rural farmers, roughly equivalent to today's "hick".

[1] I should point out that this freedom was an illusion because road capacity is far more limited for cars than it is for people. Suburbs will inevitably jam their streets and highways in ways that dense urban spaces cannot.

[2] As in, engineering society to work a certain way, not defrauding someone out of their login password