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Comment by simlan | Hacker News Reader

And your point is ?

It doesn't work even though the article is trying to portray this as a functional model and a solution to the housing crisis.

> Money for maintaining the village comes from investments in forestry, real estate and entrance fees.

It is just a charity with religious requirements.

If shortage means it "doesn't work", it's not clear to me how exclusion based on income is any better, or indeed if these are actually substantially more than just two names for the same fundamental shortage problem.

> exclusion based on income

Exclusion based on price.

No, when there is any housing shortage it is a matter of empirical fact that landlords select on the income prospective renters can prove.

>If shortage means it "doesn't work", it's not clear to me how exclusion based on income is any better

because it provides some sort of objective measure for how badly you want it, and incentivizes/finances more housing developments.

Ah, my shortages are good, your shortages are bad. Makes sense.

I have a feeling you're being sarcastic, but that's exactly what I'm arguing for. If your city only has enough housing for 100,000 people, but there are 150,000 people who want to live there, there's going 50,000 who can't get a house. In other words, a shortage. That's bad, but that number is going to be the same regardless of how you're redistributing it. The question then becomes, can we make the best out of a bad situation? Distributing by price has benefits that I mentioned. What benefits does giving giving it for below-market prices to people whoever's first on a waiting list provide?

Except, if you'd ever paid any attention to housing markets in any major city they don't work this way. There are too many other factors and incentives at play. Not least of which is that the profit motive drives developers and landlords to keep costs as high as they possibly can, and they all share that motivation, so you end up with convergent price fixing - where they all just naturally compete on things other than price with out actually colluding to do that.

Markets rarely actually work as advertised.

They do though. It's just that there's so much regulation and other problems that they can't adjust fast enough.

I've lived in Hamburg, Germany, adjacent to an expanding hipster area. Rents rose steadily and every vacant lot was being built upon, industrial zones were repurposed for more housing etc. It's just that that still only gives you a fraction of the apartments you'd need to satisfy demand.

If there was no incentive for investment, I'm sure we'd see even fewer new houses being built, because there's no incentive for the state to move, neither fast nor at all.

It only works though if income distribution is somewhat sane and people actually buy the housing to live or for renting out. The issue is that a small part of the population is so rich that they can afford many apartments/houses without living in them or renting them out. Those individuals have often enough market weight that they can distort the market all by themselves. Creating an arbitrary shortage to drive up prices for example

In the article, if you can't get in, you're out.

In a price defined shortage, there are always alternatives, it's not so black and white:

- you can get a smaller apartment

- you can get a not so nice apartment, but with space

- you can get an apartment further away from points of interest, meaning it's cheaper but you have a longer commute

This is very similar to free market for groceries: in communism you don't get groceries on the shelves. You get them only if you are lucky enough to be around when a delivery is made.

In capitalism, some groceries might be more expensive, but you can always buy cheaper ones, or travel longer to buy from cheaper stores.

You talk about these options as if they are selection dilemmas rather than an optimization problem, and discussing trading time and effort for price as if time and effort are unlimited resources. If you're going to pretend time and effort are unlimited, why not pretend funds are, also?

time is not unlimited, where did I say that? But you can commute 1 hour away and get much cheaper rents in almost any location on Earth. You trade off one extra hour each way for some cash.

if you are poor, it makes no difference how much you want it if you are fundamentally unable to afford it.

You're right. That is a flaw with the free market. A rich person mildly wanting something will outweigh a poor person desperately wanting something. That said, the alternatives aren't much better. A wait list doesn't have any concept of neediness. self-reporting is unreliable (everyone will just say they really want it). A neediness assessment (ie. auditing each applicant's neediness) could theoretically work, but requires time/resources, and still has biases (eg. people with "visible" problems probably will look more needy than someone with hidden ones). Moreover, none of other distribution methods incentivize further supply. A sibling comment covers this:

>What makes dollars unique is that if you inject more dollars into the free market for a good, then ceteris paribus, you will cause more of that good to be produced. Whereas if you injected more bureaucratic know-how into the Canadian patient population, you'd merely cause more intense competition for the same fixed number of physician-hours.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28367611

>What makes dollars unique is that if you inject more dollars into the free market for a good, then ceteris paribus, you will cause more of that good to be produced.

If the video card shortage has taught us anything, it's that this is not always true.

I think you need to factor in timeframes here. The demand shock for silicon started less than 2 years ago. The time it takes to bring a fab online is much longer than that. More of the goods will be produced eventually, but the market can't materialize it out of thin air.

I certainly hope that is the case, but I remember the Nvidia CEO (it has been a while so things may be different now) saying they would not increase production because they were worried the demand surge was temporary. So long as crypto is profitable I don't see where any amount of production increase is going to stabilize the price. Maybe Ethereum PoS will fix this? Or will another PoW cryptocurrency just take its place?

The article made no such claims of being able to solve any housing crisis, merely that 160 people can live in a way they otherwise wouldn't be able to.

I think their point is that this isn't really social housing, it's a perk for a very exclusive group of people. Not all that different from a waiting list for membership to an exclusive golf course.

Exclusive being the community of poeple who paid taxes (i.e. the church tithe) for at least 2 years before they fell on hard times?

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

Things cost money.

Things that don't cost to buy at least as much as they cost to make, are not sustainable by definition and will be riddled with systemic problems like shortage, rationing, etc.

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