At the world's oldest social housing, rent hasn't changed since 1521

.. pretty sure you can set up religious sponsored/focused housing in NA as well

"The foundation deed specified that the housing complex was to exist “in perpetuity” and to be “further developed.” The philosophy behind it can be summarized as being to “provide assistance, not charity, to people in need so they can help themselves.” There are a total of nine foundations established by the Fugger family in Augsburg that have been in continuous existence since the 16th century. In addition to the Fuggerei, there are medical facilities, an infirmary, and a foundation to contribute to the salvation of the Fugger family, among others. According to an inscription on a tablet displayed at the Fuggerei, the Fugger family established the foundation to “reimburse God the money that he has generously bestowed upon the family.”

"Paupers or beggars are not eligible. A person that has been accepted for residence is required to say three daily prayers for the Fugger family"

https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2021/08/500-year-anniversary-of-th...

Its going for a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugger_family

And many foundations: https://www.fugger.de/en/foundations

I am sorry ...the business man in me...every time I see the word foundation I see only one thing. Only business vehicle where you are tax exempt... while at the same time still benefiting from the foundation assets.

"Forget about the Gates Foundation. The world’s biggest charity owns IKEA — which is not only devoted to interior design."

https://medium.com/@jurgeng/ikeas-tax-scheme-a-corporate-str...

https://ikeafoundation.org/

Scientology has an IRS tax exemption in the US as another religion, but it seems in Germany the state has made their life quite difficult. Does German law provides for a clear specification of how to define a religion?

https://www.settle-in-berlin.com/stop-paying-german-church-t...

That is true in theory but not in practice. To be recognized you need to be organized as a Körperschaft öffentlichen Rechts which isn't exactly trivial. In practice the Catholic church and the "Evangelical church of Germany" (a confederation of various mostly independent parishes, mostly Lutheran) are the two big ones and everything else barely passes as a rounding error (e.g. there seems to be only one Muslim organization and while they reflect a sect mostly originating in Turkey, they're hardly the largest Muslim sect in Germany).

Also for example the two primary public broadcasting channels ARD and ZDF have a Catholic and Lutheran bias (although this mostly manifests in a handful of very short theological opinion pieces paid for by the respective churches and clergy of the two religious orientations being invited every time ethical concerns are discussed).

Saying "all religions have the same benefit" is a lot like saying all people are equally forbidden from sleeping under bridges regardless of their income. It's not exactly an equal playing field and a lot of the influence of the churches comes down to not just the number of registered members but also feudal property rights and pre-existing contracts (e.g. the Catholic church is one of the few entities that legitimately "owns" land in Germany whereas normally legal subjects are only granted "ownership" conditionally).

And let's not get into public sector institutions like hospitals and schools being operated by one of the two churches and personnel being subject to church labor laws while the majority of the operating costs (in some cases even 100%) are footed by the state.

We only call it pluralism because Martin Luther was successful. Much like our so-called federalism (because Germany was still a lose collection of functionally mostly independent states until around the time of the American Civil War) it's really more of an accident of history that we later rebranded as something desirable.

The Church was replaced by an irreligious state and that was it.

> The printing press!

Not quite so new. At the time Luther published his 95 Theses in 1517 the printing press with movable types has been around pretty much as long as the computer has been around for us in 2021: for three quarters of a century.

It's hardly charity or a perk. It's basically a local government service.

Why does that seem doubtful? There are many people (myself included) who feel that way today.

Many people today believe in the power of prayer for the dead to help the state of the souls of the departed. Not a majority, but enough that you probably know a few who don't speak about it precisely because of the incredulity people express when people actually believe their religion, especially Christianity.

This sounds nice but breaks down because shelter is a human need, it is not a new iPhone.

I am aware that the solution to housing crises is build build build, and that the more profit is in developing housing the more there is being built, but pretending a place to live is like any other common good is cold and wrong.

"all one needs to do is find the money" is the mechanism that keeps some people out of the housing market, or at least makes their lives pretty hard. Middle-class families can find the money, but the poor do not and usually cannot (for whatever reasons) raise their value on the job market enough.

A case can be made for rationed housing at extremely low prices. If you let anyone in, you would get a cash-flow problem and distort the market, but not if you limit it to the poor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_(Arizona) has a rationing system.

> Due to the fragile nature of the formation and the large number of people wishing to visit it, a daily lottery system is used to dispense only ten next-day permits in person at the Kanab visitor center. Additionally, ten online permits for each date are available four months in advance of a planned trip.

There will be a perpetual shortage.

This is not a bad thing ... unless you don't care about preserving things for the future.

Do you still think rationing is bad? Or is my example not a case of rationing?

Bavaria is majority Catholic. "Demonstrate financial need" is likely a much stronger selection mechanism.

You didn't answer my question about why, if there's a wait list for this place, and since it's proven to be economically sustainable, other housing isn't built along these lines.

> corruption seeps in and becomes endemic

After 500 years, is the Fuggerei endowment fund corrupt?

Corruption can seep in whenever the person making the decision isn't the person making the profit. Even in a free market.

Only if they were capable of paying for it as well. That is a big assumption for something as expensive as healthcare.

I personally find it very comforting that (at least at in principle) both the rich and poor wait in the same line.

Note that this is one of the problems in the US too. Health care prices are pretty opaque, it definitely has a price - which you'll find out after you get something done, and I would argue people get overcharged - evidenced by the fact that insurance companies can come in and slash the bill to a fraction of what it was (literally saying "you aren't allowed to charge this much").

Markets don't actually work this way in practice. That's the theory, the theory rarely actually pans out. We could look at US healthcare, which is an insane mess, but it's pretty easy to argue that it's not actually a market due to insurance and opaque pricing and all the same problems. We've kind of got the worst of all worlds over here. But dental and vision care, which are closer to real markets don't actually work any better. They're still expensive, in accessible, and pretty non-responsive to price signals.

Instead, take something like food, where it's a commodity. That's a place where markets should be the cleanest and most responsive to price signals. We produce 1.6x the amount of food the world needs. And food is some thing where there's a literal cap on the ability of any individual to consume it. Our stomachs are only so big, there's literally only so much each of us can consume in a day. By market theory, prices for food should be almost negative and no one should be with out food given those facts. But that's not how it works out. As always, there are too many confounding factors and the profit motive causes rent seeking at every layer.

By market theory, there should be over production of food, which should cause everyone to have food and food producers to drop out of food production until prices rise to equilibrium where everyone has food and the people producing food have a good living.

Has that happened anywhere? No. Instead, you have corporations standing between producers and eaters finding ways to make food more expensive through value add and marketing. You have producers struggling to get by, buried under a mountain of debt, and often effictively in indentured servitude to the processors. And you have hundreds of millions of people food insecure, tens of millions even in a rich country like the US that massively overproduces food. Because markets in real life don't work according to the theory.

And that's why we can't just approach economic problems with the idea that we can just throw more markets at them. And why we have to think about when systems like single payer, for all their faults, are better than what we'd end up with through markets.

Trust me, if you'd ever had to deal with the American health care system, you would long for the Canadian one.

This just sounds like an instance of the fact that a sufficiently abstract system of reasoning can be always be forced to described any particular patch of the world. Though typically at the cost of considerable contortions of the terms that makes no sense in other bits of the world.

For example, you may well say that "ability to navigate bureaucracy" is a currency. But it's hard to understand how you put that currency in a bank, in which sense this currency splits into perfectly equivalent units, or how it represents equivalent value at many different physical locations since the specific bureaucrats are tied a specific location.

By the way, picking an instance of cheating as some sort of general argument of why a specific system is not to be trusted is just a straw man, since the problem of cheating is independent on the exchange mechanism. Alternatively, accept this argument: scammers on Amazon prove that free market mechanisms don't reliably give a fair price.

Isn't it often worse than that? Unless rationing can be perfectly enforced (e.g. require consumption of the entire resource under observation of enforcers, which is actually most tenable with housing by frequently checking to make sure only the authorized people are present) then secondary grey/black markets form when there is an opportunity for arbitrage.

Just because something is "priced" in a different quantity doesn't mean that it isn't cheaper or higher quality overall. That requires a more sophisticated argument than a simple observation that there's still some cost.

- in 2015 there were an estimated 118,290k housing units

- in 2017 there were an estimated 121,560k housing units

- in 2019 there were an estimated 124,135k housing units

(note that the majority of these -- more than 70,000k in each case -- are single, detached houses)

Those are quite useful starting factors - roughly one housing unit per three persons in the population, and roughly 5% growth in capacity over four years.

The next few steps would be to match those against population and property price trends, check for correlations, and perhaps narrow and regionalize the data to look for any notable outliers.

(not sure when I'll get to those, but it'll be a good learning experience I'm sure)

That is not market forces, that is government controls

Are you saying that if landlords are required to enact rent control they have the power to unilaterally raise future market rents in response?