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Comment by burkaman | Hacker News Reader

Anybody have an example of progressives advocating redistribution of something that we don't have an abundance of? I can't think of one.

You might say housing, but I don't think I've heard anyone call for the "redistribution of housing", because that doesn't really make sense. Progressives generally call for universal housing, and redistribution of wealth to achieve that goal.

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Healthcare is another example.

The general point here is: what good is a right to X during a shortage of X? As in "what good is a right to food during a famine?"

I understand and agree with the general point, I just don't think progressives need to be taught this lesson. Everyone understands this.

Healthcare is an example of something we have a shortage of, especially during the pandemic. Are there progressives calling for redistribution of healthcare? I don't think universal healthcare implies redistribution, I think it implies more healthcare that costs less.

Universal healthcare wouldn't really create more supply. It would just redistribute the supply more evenly. There would likely be longer queues for many non-emergency treatments.

I don't really understand what you mean, universal healthcare means everyone has access to healthcare. Increasing the supply of medical facilities and staff is obviously a core part of implementing that in the US. If the government pays for healthcare but there aren't enough beds for everyone who needs one, then by definition it isn't universal.

Most universal healthcare proposals essentially amount to expanding Medicare for all. That would do nothing to increase supply. The two issues aren't necessarily linked.

We have a shortage of physicians today. The primary bottleneck in producing new licensed physicians is a lack of federal funding for residency program slots. Congress could increase funding for that immediately if they wanted to.

Market demand for healthcare services is essentially infinite. Regardless of the funding model there will always be some type of rationing. Some patients won't get everything that would benefit t them.

The actual Medicare for All bill in Congress as we speak has plenty of provisions to increase supply. Minimum nurse-to-patient ratios, minimum physician staffing levels, maximum wait time standards, "health professional education expenditures sufficient to meet the need for covered health care services", a capital expenditures budget to improve facilities, etc. I don't think we need to debate the details here though, we all agree that more doctors and more hospitals would be necessary.

"Medicare for All" is a convenient shorthand, it doesn't literally mean "just let everyone sign up for Medicare and change nothing else".

> Market demand for healthcare services is essentially infinite.

This is kind of an insane claim to me, can you back that up somehow?

Setting requirements for staffing ratios is meaningless. It doesn't mean the resources actually exist, or that anyone will be held accountable.

Sick people generally want the best possible treatment with extensive personal care by expert providers. Obviously it's not feasible to give that level of service to everyone.

I can't paste the whole bill here but you're welcome to read it, your concerns are covered: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1976.... And yes I agree that not everyone can get personalized world-class care for any issue, there will be limits to what is universally provided.

Either you have long wait times for non-critical things with critical needs met. Or you have short wait times for non-critical things, but critical needs are not met.

I think the latter is a much worse situation, and it’s the status quo. I agree that increasing supply is necessary to solve both aspects of the problem. But keeping people alive should be the most important priority of any health care system, not keeping wait-times short for non-critical procedures.

Well how do you differentiate critical versus non-critical needs? Canada has universal healthcare but they ration care by restricting supply, which results in long wait times for certain treatments. If a patient needs a hip replacement and is in severe pain is that critical or non-critical?

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/podcast/2018/o...

Redistribution of wealth creates a redistribution of "everything" as a byproduct.

We do have an abundance of housing, though. Around 17 million homes are vacant: https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?t=Vacancy&d=ACS%201-Yea...

In places no one wants to live. Settlement patterns change! It’s an urbanizing world, and there will always be some places in ascendance while others are in decline. It is perfectly natural for gluts and shortages to occur at the same time.

Let's take NYC for example. According to census data [1], Manhattan (a place many people definitely want to live) had a 10.5% vacancy rate last year. At almost 914,000 total housing units, that's almost 96,000 vacant homes.

According to the Bowery Mission [2], in the same time period there were 80,000 homeless people in NYC. So just in Manhattan, there were enough vacant homes for every homeless person in all five boroughs to get their own — with over 15,000 to spare!

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/20... (change state to New York, click "Housing Unit Vacancy Rate" and then click Manhattan on the map)

[2] https://www.bowery.org/homelessness/

If we were going to make it illegal to sell or rent your vacant home to anyone but a homeless person, that might work. But there are probably a lot more than 15,000 migrants who can make competitive offers on those homes.

Then why are they empty?

One occupant moving out, cleaning, renovation, listing, showing, and getting to a new occupant's moving date is a process that takes some time. To the extent that apartments are turning over, some of them are going to be in this state at any given moment.

Again, in places nobody wants to live.

A janitors closet in NYC stops being a place you want to live when you have to be locked down in it

You may not want to, but there are objectively many, many people who do.

And progressives generally do not call for a total redistribution of wealth but only a more equitable redistribution.

Except where universal housing would change the character of the neighborhood or be disruptive to existing communities, which is everywhere with a housing crisis.

Areas of LA just got rezoned from single family home to multi-family homes. You just know there will be properties purchased for the sole intent of knocking down the existing structures to build apartments/condos/etc. That seems like redistribution of housing to me.

I guess I disagree with your definition of redistribution. That seems like increasing supply to me.

"Allowing market participants to more efficiently use expensive land" seems like allowing a (housing) market to work, rather than "forced re-distribution".

Land owners having more freedom to profitably use their land doesn't really seem like redistribution to me..

"purchased" and "redistribution" are kind of contradictory. That's just the market.

Well, upzoning, particularly in formerly single-family home single-use residential streets near major cities like LA and SF Bay at the moment would generally result in the transfer of properties from multimillionaire NIMBY retirees and mid-aged administrators down to more working class condo/townhouse/duplex/splitlevel owners. It's a market-based solution for existing systemic inequality.

I still don't follow. The NIMBY retiree would have to sell their property to presumably someone with a lot more capital than them to be able to build an apartment building.

If you are referring to tenants possibly being lower socioeconomic status than the previous owner.. that isn't redistribution. If anything its the opposite, since now the property owner is probably a corporation

Yes, single family zoning is an unfair redistribution from people renting apartments to home owners.

"properties purchased for the sole intent of knocking down the existing structures to build apartments/condos/etc"

That seems like a particularly cogent example of the Free Market/Capitalism/Invisible Hand at work, at least to me.

The curious thing, again, it seems to me, is the idea that other people who don't have an ownership interest in the "properties purchased" should have a veto in what the purchaser can do with said properties is presented as the Free Market/Capitalism/Invisible Hand just doing its thing.

If the new zoning regulations prohibited building single family housing, well that would be (again, it seems to me) bad too. Do they?

You have a fair point, in that pure redistribution rarely causes an issue. But the general point, that you need to make sure an abundance of something exists for the government to ensure it is available to the poor, very much applies to housing. . Rent controls and requiring new developments to include affordable housing lower incentives for developers to creating more housing, which results in the general market's housing prices being even worse in another decade due to static supply with increasing demand. Progressives trying to ensure both new and old housing is distributed to the poor has just made the housing situation worse in the cities it was attempted in. The government would have been much better off just building massive housing structures itself to deal with the issue, if it wanted to take a direct hand in it (the government producing things directly being the other way an abundance agenda can be pursued).

Where the quote goes wrong I think is bringing up progressives as if they're at fault for the current lack of abundance. The situation in the article is one where our attempts to create a massive economic surplus through global free trade have backfired. (Global free trade being a conservative/neoliberal plan where an abundance agenda is pursued by capitalistic methods.) This situation is a reminder that in capitalism, we optimize for profit, and optimizing for profit generally means having very little wiggle room for disruptions to a system. Making sure an abundance is available even during times of disruption is something that likely requires government intervention, not a lack of it.

This is reasonable, I guess affordable housing requirements and rent control could be considered a form a redistribution, because they take an already existing supply of housing and force them to be accessible to the poor. Good point.

It does sound a bit circular though - if developers are unwilling to build new housing if they're forced to make some of it affordable, why would they ever build any affordable housing at all if left alone by the government? I guess it depends on the details of the specific policy, so maybe too big a discussion for this thread.

The general the idea is that even if new housing isn't affordable, the existence of more housing overall lowers demand on older housing and therefore lowers prices. If you can encourage enough production of even luxury apartments, this forces the older apartments to lower rent as people capable of paying the old prices move to new locations. If enough houses are built, eventually you drive the price of the lower tiers of housing down far enough for the poor to afford (or at least the government to more easily fund access to.) Unfortunately, this is not a problem that can be solved quickly. The problem took us decades of under building new housing to get to, so it's not surprising it will take us time to get out of it either.

One big caveat here is it requires people to actually live in the housing. If real estate is being bought and sat on as a speculation tool (or used as something like an air B&B instead of a rental), it won't actually meet the demand for habitation. As such, some sort of regulation is needed to ensure that housing is actually either lived in or rented out.

Second issue is that, of course, NIMBYism is at least as big a threat if not more as price regulation. If things aren't allowed to be built due to local authorization either being impossible or the approval process taking ages to complete, requiring affordable housing be included is the least of your worries. Getting into the many flavors of NIMBY would indeed be too big a topic for this thread, but the overall effect on housing creation is definitely awful.

Edit: As a note, there is a massive incentive for those who currently own property to not want housing to be affordable. Lack of supply drives the prices way up, and the people who have seen the worth of their housing double in the last decade don't want prices to go back down to a reasonable level. Since homeowners generally make up a sizeable portion of voters in a given area...it's not too surprising that people constantly vote in ways that make building harder, no matter how hard that makes life for the next generation.

> if they're forced to make some of it affordable

How much does government regulation itself play in increasing the price of building a home to begin with? Some estimate 20-25%. Obviously we need some rules, regulations and standards, but I think we're also causing some of this issue and not factoring it in.

https://www.constructiondive.com/news/nahb-regulatory-costs-...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/09/30/the-verdi...

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/uw-study-rules-add-200...

Rent control seems like avoiding redistribution, since people aren't kicked out of their home to make way for someone richer. Neither does it kick a rich person out of their home to give it to a poor person. The distribution of the resource stays with the same people

Money. The calls for universal income of $1k/mo make absolutely no sense when you do the math.

Inclusionary zoning (which I support with caveats) is literally housing redistribution. The people renting at market rate are subsidizing the people renting at below market rate. If that isn’t redistribution I don’t know what is. Especially in cities that set an IZ rate so high it drives up market rate rents to luxury levels (looks at SF).

Why do you think that the people that rent at market rate subsidise the people that rent below market rate?

Developers won’t build an apartment that won’t financially pencil out. Roughly speaking the developers will take whatever cost is required for IZ, and then add it to the costs of building a market rate unit. If the costs exceed the market rate, the project won’t be built because it’s unprofitable. This in turn increases the price of housing that winds up on the market (this assumes there are projects on the tipping point of penciling out vs. not). It’s essentially a tax.

There’s a fair amount of research on this, here’s one paper if you’re interested in learning more: https://www.huduser.gov/portal/periodicals/cityscpe/vol23num...

We do have an abundance of housing. There are millions of empty homes/housing units. Housing redistribution would involve cracking down on the landlord class to release those homes from exploitative pricing and rental strategies.

We don't have an abundance of housing compared to past times. In desirable-to-live areas there are severe housing shortages, largely due to NIMBY activists opposing new construction of housing in those desirable-to-live areas because they want to protect and further inflate the price of their own property by using the government to artificially constrain the supply.

What are you proposing by "cracking down"? I disagree with your sentiment but do think that it is absurd the federal government subsidizes mortgages on second homes. But I haven't heard a single proposal from the left to eliminate that welfare program for the wealthy.

Probably because once you get away from the coasts, you realize that a lot of people with second homes are not what you'd typically think of as wealthy. Around here a second home is often a cabin "Up North" or a trailer home on a few acres where you go hunting a few times a year or spend weekends. Something your average electrician or plumber can afford.

Good luck to any politician that goes up against that!

Just to be clear, Landlords and Home Owners aren't the same. I do live in a coastal city, but I think even rural/suburban areas would agree that the real estate market has made home ownership less and less achievable. I suppose that the issue I'm concerned with is more generally about the American real estate market at large, landlords/the rent cycle are just a part of that.

I think positive rights like a right to housing(housing first homeless programs) and healthcare(people have a right to medical care) are a great example and I don't know why you are dismissing them as examples.

Redistribution in my understanding would mean taking away someone's housing or healthcare and giving it to someone else. I don't think I've heard anyone advocate for that. Since there are ways to achieve universal housing and healthcare without taking it away from anyone (which is what universal means), I don't think declaring them to be human rights means you support their redistribution.

To be clear, I'm sure you can find some random Twitter user who thinks we should eat the rich and then give their homes to the homeless, but I'm thinking about progressive politicians and writers and people significant to the movement.

I hear that quite frequently whenever somebody says they want to build more to reduce the housing shortage.

The first step is kicking out existing residents, and the second step is buulding, and the the third step is bringing in new, richer residents.

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