We need to allow up zoning and get rid of detached single family only zones.
Heck, I'm all for fully decomodifying housing - which I recognize is radical - but the incentives for buying and building housing today don't align with housing the most people in the best conditions possible.
100% on board with this. Having a place to live is too important to leave to the whims of the market. It's arguably more important than having our publicly-funded military—there's no point in defending land if people aren't able to live on it.
The incentives for commodity housing are to build more if the price is high. There aren't a lot of incentive structures that improve on that.
The only alternative that doesn't have strictly worse incentives are if the government builds and assigns all housing. I'd bet that turns out to be worse in practice, but if it has ever worked out anywhere ever I'd be interested in the case study.
It would be a much better idea to stick to non-radical things like tweaking the zoning so developers aren't banned from building things.
Once you reach a certain point, it might not be in your best interest for the housing supply to increase, as your existing investments won't be as valuable.
> The only alternative that doesn't have strictly worse incentives are if the government builds and assigns all housing.
It doesn't have to be all or nothing -- we can change the incentives in various ways. For example, tax on land value not property value. (Encouraging housing to be built rather than parking lots). Allow tenants the right of first offer on property they are renting, so an apartment complex can become a coop rather than owned by a private entity. Increase taxes on non-owner occupied properties, to encourage folks not to just buy and hold vacant property. Improve protections for tenants -- increase penalties for landlords who do not maintain their properties. There's probably a lot more ways we could incentivize increasing the number of people housed rather than maximizing the revenue for the landlord.
Build distributed public housing, in smaller, more manageable buildings. Don't require that public housing revenue covers all maintenance for the property -- if we agree that we should build some, why would we let it fall into disrepair? We should adequately fund its care.
In addition to tenant coops, support cohousing.
We see this in, for example, housing, diamonds, law degrees, and doctors licences. Until Uber and Lyft came along, in taxi medallions.
This is how Singapore works. It has been working great there.
Their policies aren't going to be optimising for general welfare as much as they are working around the fact that they have no land to play with when compared to anyone else. Their system looks like it makes sense for those conditions, but it would be a massive burden elsewhere. Look at the complexity of their quota system, for example [0]. So people are not going to be living where they want and everyone is going to be in the same part of the city anyway because Singapore is small - I could walk the long edge of their land in a single day.
So basically, point taken that it works for Singapore. But Singapore is facing unique geographical constraints and it probably causes a lot of pain in practice that we don't hear about [1]. under normal conditions it would be far cheaper and easier just to build some high density government housing rather than trying to decommoditise. I expect it will turn out that nobody with alternatives should try to copy that aspect of Singapore.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore#Re...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index - See Singapore, entry 151 of 180
HOPE VI is a program of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. It is intended to revitalize the worst public housing projects in the United States into mixed-income developments. Its philosophy is largely based on New Urbanism and the concept of defensible space.
My view is increasingly that it needs to be de-assetified, if that's a word, or de-financialised, almost certainly through a land value tax.
Real property taxes as structured anywhere in the US are not LVTs, and in much of the US (California perhaps most notably) are not significant, either.