Why on earth would anybody build apartments or rent out property under your scheme?
We can choose to pay for housing for everyone, we just have to adjust the formulas we use to decide who benefits.
That's just a loopback to where you started. When government pays, you pay.
Today, if I cannot pay, I get no housing. Taxes allow us, as a community, to decide that we should all chip in a little bit extra (commensurate to our means) to make sure everyone has a roof over their heads.
Also, government operated facilities do not have a profit motive, so there's less incentive to maximize the cost of housing.
Great, so the shit-show we have now, except without any incentive to efficiently spend. Sure that will go over swimmingly. Everyone knows that government construction projects are known for coming on-time and on-budget, and for the best value.
But I specifically believe in building more, smaller units. Places with eg 20 apartments. By building smaller scoped projects, costs are better understood up front, maintenance costs are lower, and you need less specialized construction expertise.
Building 50 20-unit complexes to house a thousand families is going to serve everyone better than building one mega project to house a thousand families.
[0] "Light-rail cost soars $1 billion" https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=20001213&slug...
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Edit: here's another one
"Sound Transit’s light-rail system, called Link, has also had its share of challenges. The 25 miles of light rail that voters were told would be completed by 2006 at a cost of $1.7 billion, have resulted in 23 miles of track which, when completed, will end up costing $5.2 billion."
"The $2.6 billion spent so far on the starter light-rail line takes the rider from Westlake Station downtown to an airport station 0.4 mile from the terminal in 37 minutes. "
https://seattlebusinessmag.com/article/why-sound-transits-pr....
This is the project I'm describing: https://mynorthwest.com/24890/university-link-light-rail-to-...
Zoning is your problem, not who is building.
Developers and landlords are working in the insanity that are municipal governments. Do you understand why we write people off when they say they want more of their involvement?
Loosen zoning and I'll take advantage of it. We don't need to pay some bureaucrat who has no incentive to do their job efficiently to sit in the middle of this. Zoning office budgets should be tied to number of permits approved or units built. Right now they get the same money for being impediments.
Oh, I almost forgot, I also need to have 14+ parking spaces if I build out fully. Again, zoning problem. Developers don't just love parking lots.
Additionally, there are numerous governmental restrictions on minimum square footage, sometimes onerous building codes, impact fees, and zoning restrictions to name a few.
Yes, there are many artificial constructs that prevent true free market, but I still do not believe that capital accumulation by capital overs is not an property of this idealistic system. Do You have any real example of invisible hand working (by which I mean not ending with the top dogs holding all the bones) ?
I do not believe that this is it - there have to be other better constrains combinations. It just that there is so much vested interest in current system that no one will dare to contest it enough to really try something different.
Is this a rebuttal to turtledove for introducing the notion of 'profit motive?' His introduction is the source of our discussion on 'profit motive.'
>(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charging_Bull).
The beautiful thing about art is you can interpret it however you want. You interpret it as a "golden idol" of the profit motive. I could interpret it as an angry bull sick of the ways of capitalism; a bull that wants to inspire free health care for all.
The advantage of a market in this context is two-fold 1) Private-losses, mispent investments should have the investors bear the cost of losses. Granted, we often bail out investors or banks, but that isn't a market phenomena, it is a political one. 2) Where there is more profit to be had (high prices) there is more incentive for more investment.
Now, one could argue that a market system is more likely to be corrupted such that the connected get bailed out or other advantages. But if you don't trust the political system to regulate the market, why would you expect it to better regulate a bureaucracy that more directly controls the relevant resources?
I think You are underselling it - that's just the mechanic through which it works. But at the same time too mamy people treat it as idealogy and sell it as a silver bullet and not merly a tool which it should be.
My main point is that we should not see markets as an end game - this is just a primitive human made system that should be evolved.
Private enterprise is good at projects where the project owner can (directly) capture the majority of the value created and is responsible for the majority of the costs involved in that creation. The mis-alignment is that this creates strong incentive to shift the costs outside the organization.
Government is better at projects where the majority of value created is diffused across a large share of the population and/or over a long time frame. They do have a strong incentive to keep costs down, because costs are paid by taxes and taxes are unpopular and lead to revolution.
This is simple economics.
There are numerous examples of government projects which may or may not have been under budget, but which created 10x or 100x or 1000x returns. Things like "public roads", "internet", "education" spring to mind.
>This is simple economics.
I'm sorry, but simple economics from where? By what authority is that some immutable 'simple economics?' I reject your thesis. Regarding 'costs' being 'taxes' and them going 'down', I invite you to study the change in federal taxes as a proportion of GDP in the past say 130 years.
>There are numerous examples of government projects which may or may not have been under budget, but which created 10x or 100x or 1000x returns. Things like "public roads", "internet", "education" spring to mind.
Yes now think about how much better return, and many other projects may have emerged, had the government not sucked that money out of the economy. "Muh roads" sounds nice but you can privately build a road without taking money at gunpoint from peoeple, and also get good returns. If I take $20 from you and buy you a $1 pen, I don't get to brag that because I bought you the pen you wrote a multimillion dollar book (even then it is true in some perverted sense the pen [road] had 1000x+ returns).
You’re basically taking a market that has an artificially constrained supply and trying to replace it with an entirely planned system.
Why?
And to be clear, I've proposed a system of adjusted incentives followed by but not necessarily required to be followed by a more planned system.
It's like rent control in SF or public housing in Singapore. Design a new system and you'll create loopholes to be exploited. Fix those and new loopholes are created. And on and on.
Easier to just remove government restrictions to supply and build until prices come down.
Which is a huge success.
Singapore is unique in that they have a massive well (proportionally much bigger than US) of workers paying taxes who are ineligible for much of the fruits of those taxes. Only the 2/3 with Citizenship or PR can meaningfully get public housing.
I'm sure about any nation could have more affordable housing if they have endless wells of guest workers who can shoulder the cost without yielding that benefit for themselves.
If you're talking about providing housing in a country that had little quality housing 70 years ago, then yes, it's successful.
If it's providing affordable housing for young people, then I'd challenge that. You can't even apply for public housing unless you are married (otherwise wait until after you are 35). The government overbuilt before, so now it's a 4-5 year wait after you win a lottery to get a house. People are still pumping real estate like crazy and the average home in the resale market is >$1M now (which is a 3 bedroom, 100 sq m apartment with a 99 year lease).
Singapore is stuck in the exact same situation as every other developed country - housing is an asset that the middle class expects a healthy return on, yet increasing costs are a barrier to new owners.
Haha.
But memes aside, no, there are many, many examples of public and social housing that are not concrete slums. Look at Singapore, Paris, the Marxhof in Vienna. Quayside Village in Vancouver.
If you'd like, I can provide links to many examples from many countries around the world of successful public housing that isn't Soviet bloc housing.
But I suspect you most likely just glean all of your political opinions from memes, which could explain some things.
There's a lot of people building straw men in the comments, and then pointing out how flimsy those straw men are, I'll grant you that.
We’ve also seen, during this pandemic, what happens to rental prices when landlords are powerless over tenants. They go up. And landlords discriminate harder against tenants who look like they’ll be bad tenants if they can’t easily evict.
And just as my ability to get sued is what allows me to enter contracts, my ability to get evicted is what lets me pay cheap rent.
We can make incremental progress here by just tweaking incentives. We can go further by reducing profits. It's not some binary all or nothing affair.
Oh, and to add to the utter inanity of what you're proposing, make sure that you sell it at your purchase cost and not the 200%ish extra that they tack on to a 30 year loan at 4% interest.
Go ahead. Chalk it up to a personal experiment and let us know how it turns out in 30 years.
And I've done what you describe. I was a landlord for a decade.
I paid back each of my tenants all the profit I made from them, thousands and thousands of dollars per tenant. Adjusted upwards by the amount the property had appreciated.
I now rent in a sliding scale, capped at the cost of the unit.
Granted, it's only been ten years, not the thirty you suggest, but it's worked out great. Nearly every tenant has used their time with me to build a nest egg or savings that enabled them to move into a house they owned.
You are discussing an entirely different issue.
This also means deadbeat tenants get kicked out, but I think that is intrinsically a good thing. Occupying somebody else’s home and not moving someplace you can afford is just immoral.
Manipulating people to buy stuff they don't need (advertising, marketing, hollywood) is immoral in so many ways. Weapons are very questionable, massive markups on basic stuff (cosmetics) etc etc if you go on about 80% of our economy is actually immoral. Even foods which are a basic good, are generally bottom dollar hollowed out poisons compared to what they could be if health was the primary concern. Don't get me started on the corruptions of profit to the medical process.
I don't know what your problem is about housing but it seems out of perspective if you're not going to campaign against profit from just about everything.