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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

Why?

To me it seems like the exact opposite of democracy.

Wouldn't it be more democratic to let the state own it so every citizen can have a vote over this rather limited resource?

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This seems opposite to my understanding of democracy. Also, in my experience, state distributed housing lifted misery and corruption to some astounding levels

And now we have cities that get too expensive for the people that were born there...

So? What is the argument exactly?

Countries have very limited space and growing populations.

Does it really make sense to give the biggest chunks to people with the most money?

its called gentrification. Nothing new.

When the value proposition no longer makes sense; move?

The question is, should "the value proposition", in terms of finances, be the criteria?

Should the people who are rich be the only ones who can decide where to live?

Democracy means that people have equal representation. Money based systems are literally the opposite of that. A man with a billion dollars has a billion votes.

"Money based system" is a bad sci-fi. State managed distribution is real history, at least for me. It did not work well

What went wrong in your case?

equal political representation and in general equal rights no matter where you come from.

Democracy says nothing about everyone being poor or something. Its a political system, not an economical one.

Imagine if no one paid rent to people that do almost nothing. You'd have hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars in your pocket every month minus some extra taxes. If repairs needed to happen, the state could fix the property because no one, not even people that are bad with money, should live somewhere unsafe. It'd end up saving money in higher educational attainment (lead paint) and health outcomes (pneumonia, cracked stairs, broken elevators, screwed up water etc) as the slumlords are banished.

But then you will have to pay higher taxes to pay for all this housing and maintenance.

Yes, but how much of the housing price is physical maintenance and how much is "location location location"? With the latter eliminated, I'm guessing the concordant increase in taxes will far from compensate for the fall in the price of a positional good. Also, even if the taxes were equal to the current price, but things got fixed faster than most landlords, that's still a win. Don't forget about how much harder it will be to evict someone and ruin their life when there isn't a profit motive involved. So many benefits.

So, if not by price, how exactly would you allocate the most desirable housing?

The obvious choices look awful: lottery, first-come-first-served (sucks for newcomers), bribes (realistic)...?

How are those choices different from money? The money version is only more liberating if you're rich. First-come-first-serve does suck for newcomers, but do they have a right to displace someone that has lived there forever on a whim? It's not obvious at all. It would make sense to attempt to build enough to keep people moving though.

Wouldn't it be more democratic if we let the state own all of Bill Gates' money and stocks, so every citizen can have a vote of that rather limited resource?

No, only real estate, because we can't create new land.

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