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Comment by andrewmcwatters | Hacker News Reader

I want Biden to use brute force to make homes a commodity like they were 50 years ago or prior.

Create a bunch of jobs to just compete directly with the private sector and plummet home building costs into the ground. Work with some great designers across the nation and create a renaissance of home design. Dirt cheap 1500 sq. ft homes. None of this 300k nonsense. Cut it directly in half or more.

Take undeveloped land by eminent domain unless the owners can document that they’re going to do something with it, and just build a shit ton of homes WWII style, and allocate unfathomable amounts of taxpayer funds from existing appropriation categories into that instead.

I want a home for under $150,000. I want REITs outlawed from buying them. And I want investors national and foreign prohibited from purchasing them. I want a new golden age of home ownership to combat the slow march to neo-feudalism.

Won’t ever happen, but I’ll dream.

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If the government starts taking homes from one person and giving them to another, there will be war. This is not Germany 1933, i’m not saying that’s what you’re talking about, but it sounds like it. Taking from one and giving to the other is not a solution.

Maybe, maybe, although if a neighbor was going around gathering a posse because the government took his extra homes?...well I don't think I'd pick up arms for that cause.

That already happens and it's about to happen to millions of people in the US: it's called eviction.

No, I think you’re confusing literal taking by the government, with a private action of eviction backed by government enforcement. The government generally isn’t the one to initiate an eviction action, it’s the owner, bank, etc.

I guess you don’t realize that eminent domain already happens today and very frequently.

I’ve read Little Pink House, and know very well the bastardization of eminent domain for private gain, corruption, and outright theft by government. I abhor it but eminent domain, and eviction, are not the same thing. They may lead to the same outcome, but they are two entirely different processes of government. Perhaps you might find the same read educational.

(1): https://www.amazon.com/Little-Pink-House-Defiance-Courage/dp...

Intended (in the US at least) to be exercised only in the public interest, like to build a dam for flood control or a railroad right-of-way to facilitate commerce.

I fully recognize that "public interest" can be twisted in all sorts of ways, but I agree with the GP comment that taking land from some people to give it directly to other people does not conform to my understanding of the spirit of the eminent domain law.

Take undeveloped land by eminent domain

Swap that part out with Government owned land and I think you would get more support. The U.S. Federal Government owns a tremendous amount of land in each state [1] with varying degrees of usability for urban development.

[1] - https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_land_ownership_by_state

As a renter looking to buy I want that too, but most people are already property owners. Which means if all property prices drop their equity will fall below 0 causing way more problems than before.

Where do you put them though? Good land is hard to come by & most of what you're describing here is already done by commodity housing developers in the outskirts of (e.g.) many big cities in Texas.

New housing creates new infrastructure problems, and our government is insanely bad at dealing with these kinds of things.

Here's my equally unlikely but also naively aspirational plan: inflate the US dollar until housing is affordable again.

Chicago has loads of vacant land[1] and unused buildings[2] not far from the city center. Also, the land for "the 78" is still mostly undeveloped[3].

[1] https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/7917749/Sc...

[2] https://chicago.curbed.com/2016/3/9/11185730/chicago-eminent...

[3] https://www.78chicago.com/

Apologies if you’re joking, but inflation increases housing prices and reduces the effective minimum wage.

housing prices (and asset prices in general) are already in a bubble - you can either deflate that bubble (unlikely to happen given the state of things), or you inflate the rest of the economy to match.

You joke about that being equally unlikely. But looking at the current inflation rate it is much more likely to be held true compared to any other economic plans or lack there-of.

> But looking at the current inflation rate it is much more likely to be held true compared to any other economic plans or lack there-of.

No, its not; even if you naively project the current inflation rate into the future instead of expecting a reversion to the mean, since the current inflation rate is largely driven by housing prices (that is, housing prices are inflating much faster than overall price levels and, more importantly, wages), it would never make housing affordable; in fact it is doing the opposite.

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