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Comment by cobookman | Hacker News Reader

I get the impression history is repeating itself. Are we repeating the same events that lead up to ww2? It feels a tad too similar for comfort.

It's saddening that our government hasn't treated housing becoming un-affordable as a national risk. Somehow we can spend trillions on bailing out businesses and corporations yet we can't muster the strength to build additional housing?

Is not the rise in housing cost the single largest contributor to many of our problems?

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Every US politician in my lifetime has had the brain disease of believing that you build wealth by owning a home, even though this belief is fundamentally incompatible with affordable housing. We have to break this belief, somehow.

It's the other way around. Every homeowner wants the value of their home to appreciate and the politicians they choose to elect uphold these values. Politicians listen to these homeowners over renters because turnout and political contributions are both substantially higher among homeowners.

> Somehow we can spend trillions on bailing out businesses and corporations yet we can't muster the strength to build additional housing?

Government "strength" doesn't encourage new buildings, it discourages it. It's extreme regulations which makes building houses expensive and unappealing for investors. So, a big rise in rents and housing prices is required to make it appealing again... which is happening... but it doesn't mean the rent is going to go down in the future.

Government "Strength" could offer zero down no interest loans for converting SFH to triplexes and duplexes. Government "Strength" could fund large scale public commuter rail projects to cheaper, more rural areas. Government "Strength" could inject cash to build lots of housing, similar to what we did with the national highways.

There's much the federal government could do to alleviate the situation.

One of the primary sources of the problem is that housing is seen as something "for investors", rather than for people to live in.

Government strength should be used to impose prohibitive taxes/fees/whatever you want to call it on people who buy extra housing as investments.

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