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Comment by thght | Hacker News Reader

This is not only about Greece, a house is a basic necessity of live, wether you can find a job or not. Governments should cap the price per square meter so a house will always be available for everyone.

As it is now you cannot really buy a house, you need a mortgage for live and work your entire life to pay interest. If this continues every house in the entire world will become unending debt and ever more unattainable, except for the rich of course.

This is also why basic income could never work in practice, as the house prices keep increasing you'd also need to increase the basic income. And where goes the money? Indeed, to the rich property owners..

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Price controls are a terrible solution except in special and temporally limited circumstances, e.g. total war. Much better to make construction as easy and cheap as possible, i.e. no quantitative limits on it.

> This is also why basic income could never work in practice, as the house prices keep increasing you'd also need to increase the basic income. And where goes the money? Indeed, to the rich property owners..

If that actually happens, then it's pretty simple to fund basic income entirely from property taxes.

> Price controls are a terrible solution

I never mentioned price controls in general.

In Auckland, New Zealand, investors are buying property and houses en masse. They blow up the market price for profit. In the news you can read that most people born now in New Zealand will likely never be able to buy a house in their lives, and this is a very hot issue there right now. It has never been this bad and it only gets worse every day.

If the price per square meter never exceeds for example 0.25% of the average minimum income, most people should be able to own a house. Property owners could than make profit on the quality of a house, which is fair enough for now, but not anymore on the square meter property price.

How can it be that you are born on this planet and not being able to ever have your own place? Because it is all owned and inherited by a handful of people that took profit of a flawed system?

> In Auckland, New Zealand, investors are buying property and houses en masse.

That isn't exactly a bad problem to have--if free construction is allowed and property taxes (or better yet, land value taxes) aren't constrained, it would be fairly straightforward to fund a significant portion of the governments' budgets, plus a basic income or rent subsidy, by a taxing foreign investors.

Governments should cap the price per square meter so a house will always be available for everyone.

If only someone had thought of that before! http://econlib.org/library/Topics/College/pricecontrols.html

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