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Comment by ahelwer | Hacker News Reader

Countries with socialized housing, healthcare, and education do not experience the cost increases of those things seen in the US. So you have it backward. The US runs these things like a half-assed free market so public wealth is efficiently siphoned to the owning class.

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What is an example of a country with socialized housing?

Denmark has partially socialized housing.

The United States has public housing projects, and Medicare/Medicaid coverage of nursing homes.

We also have government provided halfway houses.

We also have government provided housing for orphans.

We also have welfare, which people can use to pay for housing.

We also have section 8, which allows low income people to live in normal apartments but the government pays part of their rent.

Would that be partially socialized housing?

In total, about 5 million US household receive some kind of housing assistance. So yes, very, extremely partial.

On the contrary, US housing is incredibly socialized, which is why we have some of the worst affordability in the world. The capitalist, free market approach would be to allow landowners to build almost anything they want on their land, but US housing construction is incredibly tightly regulated and prevents that. Consider that despite San Francisco having some of the most unaffordable housing in the country, it's illegal to build an apartment building in 70% of the city [0]. Deregulating construction and renting would result in an increase in supply and allow the price to come down. (Imagine a world where cars are too expensive – would you support making the production of new cars illegal, because those are "luxury" cars only the rich can afford? No, you'd want those cars to be produced so the rich buy them instead of bidding against a poorer person on a used car.)

Another commenter mentioned Denmark's housing is also socialized. To see how they're doing, I googled until I found an english version of their public housing department's website [1]:

> We rent out our 13.500 apartments on a strictly first come first serve basis. Our waiting list is very long, so expect to wait at least five years for your first offer.

As expected, there's no getting around the laws of economics. If there are 10,000 houses and 15,000 people who want to live in them, something will prevent 5,000 of the people who want a house from getting one. If you put the houses on the market and ban new housing construction (apparently the American way), the 5,000 people with the least purchasing power will be the ones unable to get a house. If you instead use a waiting list, the people without a house will be the ones least able to wait on a 5-year-long waiting list.

Meanwhile, Japan has a sane government and allows new construction, and the price of an unsubsidized Tokyo apartment has actually gone down in real terms even as the population doubled in the last few decades. Housing in Japan is considered a depreciating asset – it gets cheaper every year.

The reason US housing is so dysfunctional is exactly like you say, only you have the mechanism backwards. The owning class, who are much more politically connected, are able to use the government to prevent new housing from being built and devaluing their property. When encountering a problem caused by too much government intervention, I find it odd to suggest even more government intervention. Sure, maybe there's something the government can do to fix it, but the American people can't even stop the government from ruining the housing market right now, so why should we have any confidence that socializing housing further will improve things?

[0]: https://www.sbuss.dev/post/explaining-the-broken-housing-pol...

[1]: https://www.fsb.dk/fsb-in-english/

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