Hacker News Reader

Comment by eliaspro | Hacker News Reader

...if you see housing as a market and not as a fundamental right in a civilized society.

If you declare housing "a fundamental right" then you still need more supply when you have a location (like Berlin) that doesn't have sufficient housing for the number of people that want to live there.

The problem is not that there isn't sufficient housing, the problem is that a lot of the housing is too expensive.

While I can't speak for Berlin specifically, I can say that in most places with very expensive housing this isn't true. You can see this because other problems tend to occur when housing gets very expensive:

- Overcrowding

- People being forced to move out of city centers

- Very long commute times to work

- Reduced fertility rates because people want more room for kids

All of these problems are due to insufficient housing and not just too high prices.

How does adding more housing fix the lack of room issue? If anything, all of those subdivisions and upzonings shift the market preferences to people without kids.

Adding more housing means there is more room for people.

Your question is almost non-sensical?

No, by "room" I mean space per person, which is what young families often want for their kids.

If housing is too expensive for you it simply means other people have a greater desire to live there than you do. If you still want to live there you will have to suck it up and either build more housing for them or build more housing for you.

This is only true in a free market. Housing shouldn't be a free market.

If you don't use price to determine who receives a scarce good, then you're stuck with other bad mechanisms. In Stockholm, for example, waiting lists for apartments can be over a decade long.

Much better to recognize that "The problem is not that there isn't sufficient housing" is wrong and legalize building more housing.

What's wrong with waiting lists? Sounds much fairer than to give all housing to rich folks. I'm not advocating that 100% of housing should be run this way, but for sure more than what is now (in most large EU cities).

I'm not saying social housing is bad. We should definitely have more social housing.

I am saying "The problem is not that there isn't sufficient housing" is wrong. Very very very wrong. There are massive supply shortages of housing in many many places. Governments need to fix their oppressive zoning policies so they stop preventing people from living where they want to live (either because of $, because of waiting lists, or any other mechanism).

That's what people say until they are on the shitty end of the deal. The distorted housing markets in Germany are pretty rough for newcomers -- think immigrants (not a minority group, refugee, etc), international students, seasonal workers...

Those people either don't know enough about the system to take advantage of it, or don't have enough time to wait in waiting lists, so they end up paying twice what their native peers pay. But hey, they don't have a vote anyway, so it's all good...

A fundamental right it may be but it has to be built by somebody and that costs money. So it’s a market

Regarding the "fundamental right" ... does that include "at the location one wishes", "of the size that one wishes" and "for the price that one wishes"?

Because there's no shortage of housing in Germany, it's just not hitting all three of those. People want to live in sought-after areas, have large apartments and pay very little. Understandable, but everyone should be able to see why that doesn't work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com