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Comment by foota | Hacker News Reader

Rent control, when coupled with other means of ensuring housing is built for those that can afford it, is a reasonable way of ensuring housing for those that can't afford it at the market price.

That is, globally applying a cap on rents would be a bad idea, since there would be no incentive to build new housing. However, when coupled with restrictions such as requiring only some fraction of new housing construction to be below market rate it can produce better results.

Imo we should just solve this issue once and for all by supplying government housing to anyone at a low price, but there seems to be little political will for that. It seems to me if you can reach the right people to pay for it they would gladly pay to solve homelessness (which, is admittedly more than just having available housing), but it's difficult to get that to happen.

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It has a couple of issues:

1. There's no right to live somewhere. If you cannot afford it, it doesn't matter you grew up in the place or that you like the place a lot. 2. No place is inflatable. You can increase density, but only to some point. 3. Have you seen how housing built in this style looks like? Most of them are concrete cubes. You can find them anywhere in Eastern Europe. It's not desirable.

Let's imagine a beautiful town on a small island. Neat houses and everything. Place for 100 houses. But now, 1000 families decide to live here. So the politician replaces those 100 family houses with a five huge 100 unit buildings. Locals get units, living is more affordable for everyone. The place is destroyed. Nobody wants to live there anymore.

So those 1000 people find another beautiful island with 100 neat houses...

> Imo we should just solve this issue once and for all by supplying government housing to anyone at a low price, but there seems to be little political will for that.

Where would that end? If you always build more to accommodate any poor or homeless people, they'll come from other cities to enjoy the cheap housing.

This is a national problem requiring a federal solution. Anything less will be exploited by desperate people. Don't hate the poor players. Hate the rich exploiting them for profit.

What would you propose the federal solution would be?

I guess you could require municipalities greater than a certain (fairly small) size construct and maintain some public housing, with the required unit count related to population in some way.

If you applied that uniformly across the US, no one city or town would become hot spots for migration.

I don't think this is really a workable policy, however. Not even sure it'd be constitutional for the federal government to do this.

And public housing has a reputation for being lowest-common-denominator, poorly-built, and poorly-maintained. If you drive through the south of the Potrero Hill neighborhood in SF, you'll see a lot of public housing, and... frankly, it doesn't look particularly pleasant to live there. I'm sure there are much worse options, but the housing there doesn't look in great shape.

A federal housing guarantee. In every instance where someone cannot find affordable and sufficient housing for themselves and their family then they are entitled to the live in an unoccupied unit that meets their families needs (1 bedroom per kid and 1 for parents, at most 30 minutes by, public transit from their primary job, or car if they have a reliable vehicle and the income to maintain it) for at most 30% of their income. Their primary employer pays half the difference in cost and the property owner absorbs the rest. If this kills a business then so be it. Businesses are not entitled to impoverished workers.

Vacant properties should be taxed at an increasing rate sufficient to force the owners hand to either lower rates (and realize the losses from the new valuation from their creditors) or liquidate the property. The proceeds of these taxes can go towards the building and maintenance of affordable housing in the district their collected from.

This should encourage liquidation of speculative properties in hot markets and allow those without capitol to compete against those living parasitically off of their "investments".

Obviously this isn't perfect, and I'm open to admitting it's a terrible plan. But can we at least try something FFS? So long as people are homeless and can't afford to buy homes near their jobs I don't think anyone is entitled to profiting off of renting property.

Also worth trying:

Eminent domain land and task the national guard or army engineers with building minimally viable affordable housing condos. Attach a jobs program to train the un/under-employed from the area and scale up to the size of the problem.

" If this kills a business then so be it. Businesses are not entitled to"

"Yeah my policy is toxic political poison that will ensure the defeat of any politician who runs on it outside SF and Manhattan but SO WHAT?"

Your rebuttal is that change is a hard sell? Did I read that right?

In that case why have politicians at all?

No my rebuttal is that if your solution is laughably extreme and unserious.

You can advocate for Soviet style collectivization and liquidating all businesses in the US if you want but no one outside of SF is ever getting elected on it in our lifetime.

Your banal misinterpretation of my ideas is more applicable to your own trite comments than my own.

If you think taxing zombie landowners and forcing a more equitable evolution in the archaic property market is too extreme wait until you hear some other ideas like:

Nationwide rent and mortgage strikes

Renters unions

Actually collectizing housing by taking property, some people aren't even ashamed to say they'd be forceful about it if their positions continue to deteriorate.

We can keep debating solutions to these problems until the worst effected take matters into their own hands, and pay more to clean up the mess, or we can behave like rational humans and make sure that everyone has the basic necessities of life as a prophylactic against mob violence from those with nothing to lost but their miserable lives.

So please, take a stand and share with us what your solutions are and how you're so confident they're better than the ones I've mentioned. Casually calling ideas extreme and unserious without honest consideration is at minimum rude and at worse a disingenuous bad faith distraction from the merits of my statement.

No, it’s the definition of a local problem. Housing where I live is affordable. I sure as hell don’t want voters in San Francisco mucking with my housing policy through a federal solution to solve their own self-inflicted problems. It’s a recipe for exporting insane SF/NYC housing policies to the rest of the country.

Yeah it's a local problem. You need border control to keep people from other towns and states from moving in

Housing affordability is a nationwide problem[]. You're merely aloof to how widespread and severe this problem is.

[] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/great-affo...

These policies you mention are already everywhere. You just haven't been obviously effected by them. Perhaps you're even a beneficiary.

Ok? I think all the large cities should do this. If there is a huge influx then so be it. At least my region has plenty of money and space.

Below market rate housing is, by definition, always in short supply.

This isn’t true if the government generates more via subsidies.

That will just push down the market rate so that it's not below market rate any more, won't it?

I don’t think so, why would that happen?

I would expect it to actually increase the market rate because setting aside some amount of the supply at below market rate / subsidized means that there is a smaller remaining supply than if they hadn’t done that.

Market rate is the price where supply and demand are equal. If you set price below market rate, the demand will be higher than the supply. So if you create enough below market rate housing that there is no longer a shortage, then it must mean that the supply and demand are equal at that price, which means that it is no longer below market rate.

This may depend on where you are, but around here I’d have very low confidence that the government would be capable of efficiently delivering quality housing at a low price.

Edit: Ah, I’m realizing now that you may have meant delivering it to the occupants at a low price out of their pocket, and not necessarily at a low cost overall.

> supplying government housing to anyone at a low price

Singapore does exactly this with the HDB flats.

Not quite a “low price”. A 2 bed HDB costs around $500k SGD. And the median salary is ~10-15% lower than the US.

Way cheaper than a private condo ($1M), but still a significant barrier to many people in Singapore especially since you can’t buy one if you’re single until you’re over 35.

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