Comment by nobody9999 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nobody9999 | Hacker News Reader

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>How about we just let real estate developers build housing. Full stop. We can use policy and public funding to fill in the cracks, but "building affordable housing" doesn't actually make any sense at scale. Not unless you do something like Singapore, which sells their affordable housing, permitting individual purchasers to leverage private market financing. You get significantly more bang for your buck that way as private finance markets have much more money than is available from the government.

An excellent point.

This was successfully done with Mitchell-Lama[0] housing, which provided more than 100,000 housing units (both rental and cooperatives) in New York.

This program was begun nearly 70 years ago and has been quite successful.

Unfortunately, similar programs have not been implemented elsewhere and the rate of new Mitchell-Lama housing development has slowed to a standstill.

Revitalizing Mitchell-Lama and creating similar programs elsewhere could spur development of lots of "affordable" housing.

Sadly, governments in the US seem to be more interested in maximizing real estate values than in housing its residents.

I should have included mention of this type of development in my previous comment[1] about revitalizing small towns. I'd posit that such programs could be quite helpful in those types of efforts too.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell%E2%80%93Lama_Housing_...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29223502

> Sadly, governments in the US seem to be more interested in maximizing real estate values than in housing its residents.

This is the real crux of it from what I've read. Housing can either be affordable, or an engine of wealth creation, but not both simultaneously. Guess which politicians and our laws pander to?

And which one makes sense to do as costs go up… property taxes fund things. If you build a $100,000 home it’s hard to charge $8,000/year in property taxes on it.

>And which one makes sense to do as costs go up… property taxes fund things. If you build a $100,000 home it’s hard to charge $8,000/year in property taxes on it.

That's true. However, if you build a $5 million apartment building with 15 apartments on 2 or 3 lots (or even just one) the same size as that $100,000 house, you could charge significantly more and it would be perfectly viable.

What's more, you could house 15-20 times more people.

And the places[0] where a whole house costs $100,000 aren't the places we're talking about.

And those places certainly aren't the ones where increasing the density of housing will do much good.

Note the distribution of median house prices in the site I linked. The really expensive places are clustered around densely populated urban areas (and ski resorts in Colorado).

Increasing housing density to match the population density makes a lot of sense there.

Longer term (as I mentioned in another comment[1]), building out infrastructure and housing of all types in poorer, low population density areas can make them more desirable and provide an economic boost, while taking pressure off more densely populated areas.

[0] https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/housing-stat...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29223502

Only because we have decided to consume 16,000 a year in city service on that same house, and finance the rest with the urban development Ponzi scheme.

I suspect the appetite for suburban living would dry up if we all paid the actual maintenance costs of those streets, water and schools on a land-value basis

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