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Comment by tehjoker | Hacker News Reader

It's crazy that we live in an economy where you have to pay just to live somewhere, but when the eviction moratorium ends, there's going to be a huge financial reckoning as there's no way anyone is paying all that back rent.

Biden is going to have to either bail out tenants or landlords and banks. I'll be taking bets on which one he does.

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??? In what economy do most people not have to pay just to live somewhere?

Our highways are free for everyone to use and maintained using tax money. It's not inconceivable that housing could work the same way.

I grew up in an economy where it was. When I was born, we were living in a 4-people, 3-generational, ~500sqft 1.5 room flat (the large kitchen was subdivided to make a tiny bedroom); later, the govt decided that we deserve better and I ended up growing up in a 4-people, 2-generational, ~650sqft 2-room flat. I wonder what my parents, two engineers, would have been able to afford in the USA?

I think I had a very happy childhood but comparing these things kinda allows you to reflect. Interestingly, the low standards stick; when we bought a small 1100sqft house with my wife (in the USA), some of my friends back in Russia were like "oh, a big house, are you planning for kids?" ;)

I lived in a country where housing (at the time) was provided by the government. It's not as great as it might sound. Want to move? Do the paper work and wait for a few years. Want a bigger place? too bad. Not to mention single room for the whole family, shared kitchen and washrooms.

The quality of the housing is going to be proportional to the wealth of the country per capita. In the US, we simply allocate quality of housing based on ability to pay, so many people have incredibly bad housing conditions.

It doesn’t take very many years of communism to reduce the wealth of the country per capita until everyone has equally bad housing conditions.

Great point, we should continue to make people sleep on the street

Right, of course the only choices we have are government provides housing or everyone sleeps on the street. Not like we have any examples of any other system.

Gas taxes pay for roadways.

And so the reasoning goes: income taxes should pay for the general welfare, rather than the general hardship of various Middle Eastern countries.

Our highways are free because they're a public good (in the economics sense) and prone to monopoly pricing due to geographic constraints on competition.

While it isn't inconceivable that housing could be public, the same underlying economic rationale isn't there, and private housing works really well. You'd be solving a non-problem (or, to the extent that there is a problem, it's one that's easily addressed by simply increasing private housing stock) and risking a lot to do so.

> Our highways are free because they're a public good (in the economics sense) and prone to monopoly pricing due to geographic constraints on competition.

And homes are not? Certainly not at the same scale, but we are seeing the same problems with landlords that we see with monopolists.

Landlords are able to charge extremely high rents and there is not enough available/affordable land to build competition, especially in cities experiencing NIMBYism and gentrification.

> You'd be solving a non-problem (or, to the extent that there is a problem, it's one that's easily addressed by simply increasing private housing stock)

It's clearly a problem. That's why we're here talking about it in the first place. It's also clearly not "easily addressed", or that would have happened already. Sure, we need to remove barriers to increasing housing stock, but that isn't likely to be enough; especially in the short term.

Homes aren't a natural monopoly. Highways largely are.

  "there is not enough available/affordable land to build competition"

There definitely is in the large majority of places. The only city that can possibly say that honestly is Hong Kong, but even there they could go a bit more vertical and more dense if they needed.

  "It's also clearly not "easily addressed","

Whatever lobbying hurdles you need to overcome to reduce regulatory interference on increasing the housing stock, you're going to face those same hurdles (and then some) if we're talking about public housing. So it doesn't make sense to immediately go for the radical and untested solution when an easier and proven solution is waiting. If we build vertically and it doesn't work (which it will, but nevertheless) - only then does it make sense to consider something more radical and more difficult to push through.

Im just guessing there are several orders of magnitude greater quantity of housing rather than highways despite the apples and oranges difference.

Utopia

It's crazy that we live in an economy where all you have to do to live until 80 years is pay to live somewhere. We don't even have to hunt our own food.

Unlike food, land simply exists. That's why rents are so abhorrent. You are taxed by nobility simply because its theirs, not because they render any service. For food, you are paying because someone had to perform labor for you.

Land can be parceled out using any system people can devise. Rent is completely artificial. Strangely, the people that do nothing for you charge FAR more than the people who hunt for you.

An interesting metric to consider is how much would at-cost rent would be if land was free and only construction, repairs, and utilities needed to be paid for. If you run the numbers over the lifespan of a building, you'll be surprised.

Rents are not completely artificial, and you do get services for paying them. Part of it goes to paying property taxes to fund things like 911 services, local schools, libraries, public parks, sewers. Other part is for maintaining the property, things like roofs and furnaces eventually deteriorate and need to be replaced. Your landlord will replace those things for you, but it comes at a cost and it's called rent.

You could argue you don't get your moneys worth, but you do get services for them...

If you'd like you're welcome to lobby for the homestead act again. That would solve your lack of land without having to violate other peoples rights

The homestead act was part of westward expansion. The free "unclaimed" land (it was Native American land) provided a relief valve for the American system. When the poor became too uppity, the government would provide them with an escape valve of free land and adventure. When we finally reached California, that escape valve disappeared.

What you claim are rights, I dispute. The ability to control other people's living situation and extract rents is not a natural right. If anything, it's an abomination.

...either bail out tenants or landlords and banks.

Not quite. This crisis will be handled just like the last one. No tenants, homeowners, or landlords will be bailed out. That they go bankrupt and have their property repossessed is the whole point of the exercise. Big lenders will get the bailout on top of the collateral.

You're probably right. The banks are the ones the bet on.

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