There are some commodities we choose to operate as natural monopolies because competition and profit seeking leads to bad outcomes for society. My argument is fundamentally that housing is the same.
No, not at all. We don’t choose natural monopolies. We recognize them. The whole point is they are naturally occurring whether we want them or not. Housing shares nothing in common with the other services you mention which are anything but commodities!
The natural monopoly of the electrical company isn’t electricity, it’s distribution. Power is a commodity, and delivery is anything but.
Your argument that housing is the same is not well informed.
Public services are not a "natural monopoly". They are a deliberate political choice (that was paid in blood by the lower classes, see also Haymarket Affair for example). We could very easily make housing free for all, or just affordable (see also HLM program in France).
As you note, there are other ways to pay for things than money. Whether it's "paid in blood" or other barter system, there is always a cost to pay.
> We could very easily make housing free for all, or just affordable (see also HLM program in France).
Would love to hear your very easy solutions. Affordability is relative. If you have more demand than supply (as we do with housing) the only way to increase affordability in real terms is to shift the supply curve. This shift is not free, and somebody has to pay for it. This is where the "omg it's so easy" arguments typically fall apart.
I meant the social rights/protections had to be paid in blood. But nothing in itself requires payment. We just happen to live in a society which commoditizes everything. If everyone worked some field they're passionate about (and people are passionate about many things) and we evenly shared the work for undesirable jobs (eg. cleaning) we could have everything for free.
> If you have more demand than supply (as we do with housing)
This is highly uninformed. In many countries around the planet, empty dwellings easily outnumber homeless people so we don't need to build anything at all to house everyone. Moreover, if we just stopped tearing down housing and started renovating them, that's also much less work/resources. Finally, if you really want/need more housing, a government run program (such as the HLM i mentioned before) shows you can build affordable housing for 10-30k€/appartment and rent them for a final user cost (after government help for housing) of under 100€/month.
It's a shame like all public services across France the HLM system is being corrupted and coopted into money-making machine. The buildings in popular neighborhoods go unmaintained while administrators pocket all the money, and the little that's left goes into developing higher-classes "HLM" housing which we popular classes can't afford.
Nothing is free. As you say yourself, everything requires work. This is just physics.
> This is highly uninformed.
Ok sure, I'll bite. Your understanding of supply and demand is extremely naive. An empty dwelling does not mean excess supply. If I own two houses, it's because I want two houses. It's not because we have too many houses. In fact, hoarding is a classic sign that we don't have enough of something.
I think you ought to step back and understand why the things you mention exist. You will find out more by doing that than you will shouting into the void on HN. If it were as easy as you proclaim, we would be doing it. The world is not stupid.
You could reward developers for lots that have long wait lists and lots of interest, incentivizing developers who build places people want to live.
Yes.
Start from a position of "everyone gets a home" and then ask "in that case, how do we make sure folks who end up in less desirable homes are compensated?"
I suppose you could frame it in the language of prices, but in this case the price is paid to the tenant.
I would also hope that we would tend to build fewer mansions in favor of more multi family complexes, cohousing, coops, and small community oriented housing on the beach.
We can improve things, we can do social good, and never slide to authoritarianism. (I assume you are talking about authoritarian communism vs, eg, council communism.)
I think it's easy (well reasonably) to do if resources are plentiful, but what do you do if there are more people than resources available to support them, who starts making the hard choices?
And now they are “clawing back” future price appreciation because it’s literally like winning the lottery if you get a place in a prime location as public housing is heavily subsidized.
If you get selected for a prime area apartment it’s a huge financial win 5 years down the road when you sell at market prices.
And oh yes, Singaporeans game the hell out of the system. From carefully falling under household income limits, to bidding on a new public housing unit despite owning one now.
The government is constantly trying to keep up with all the new incentives each new rule creates.
You can have a regulated market that still has prices. OP only proposed incentives to build and disincentives to hoard. Homes would still have prices, there would just be less scarcity.
On the basis of geography alone, housing can not be a commodity.
When you take the other things, like job and where you want to send your kids to school it becomes a hell of a lot more fungible.
Given that commoditization is a scale, I would say it could be toward that end of the spectrum if we wanted it to be.
Commoditization is only a scale inasmuch as the underlying goods are fungible. Corn is a commodity because nobody cares about differences between individual kernels, but if some process came around that only worked with super-specific kernels, then you'd be reducing the commoditization of corn.
I can, however, think of nothing that would make housing even close to fungible. Views, neighborhoods, neighbors, noise, history, location -- the list of things which are entirely unique per property is higher than basically any other market I can think of.
If you're without a home, one house is very much like another. It's only once you have money and ambition that you might want a better view, better schools.
You might say "your right to choose between houses is a privilege", but literally every culture in the world is going to observe differences between two houses, regardless of how they're allocated.
Even considering buildings where every unit has an identical layout, and all residents have access to the exact same amenities, one unit might be closer to the elevator and one unit might be closer to the garbage chute. These are fundamental differences between these units which make them not interchangeable.
> Endless rows of apartment buildings, each identical, supplying everything you could need.
"Providing everything you could need" is not how we define commodities. Fungibility is how we define commodities. One can argue that we should just be thankful with whatever home we get, but trying to act as if they're equivalent is just wrong.
Particularly if you're poor, location matters a lot.
The very rich will build a mansion in a beautiful but inaccessible area and commute to work by helicopter. The merely rich have the nice cars to get to work. But the poor have no car so need to be either very close or within public transport (mostly nonexistent in the US) to get to that job.
Fungibility is the absolute incontrovertible likeness of two separate units to the point where they are entirely interchangeable across all parties in the economy.
US dollar bills are fungible. Even BTC are not entirely fungible anymore. Houses are not even remotely fungible.
That's why houses a priced individually. When you go to the grocery store, they don't individually price each cob of corn. There might be two different buckets with a differentiator (organic vs non organic), but within the bucket each cob is fungible. It doesn't matter which one you grab.
Each house gets its own bucket.
Similarly, one unit of electricity from solar is the same as a unit of electricity because a kilowatt hour is a kilowatt hour. You could say well my unit of electricity is better because Elon Musk sold it but for the most part they do the same thing.
Housing is not that very interchangeable. For example, in the Denver area in Colorado apparently the Cherry Creek area commands a higher sticker price because of the school district.
Some homes are just more desirable than others. For me, I desire:
* Excellent public transit
* Excellent symmetric high speed fiber optic Internet connection to the home
* Costco or Sam's Club within half an hour or inexpensive grocery stores within walkable distance
And there are unspoken assumptions like somewhere an ambulance can get to me in time if I am dying and take me to a hospital so good roads and proximity to a good hospital.
Those payments are the equivalent of rent in the housing market. The thing that isn't a market and isn't being bought and sold is the right to provide those services, it's the power grid and generation plants, or the garbage infrastructure. The monopoly on those is what is anti-market and is the equivalent of not being able to buy and sell property.
I'm not making a political point there, I happen to thing some thing are natural monopolies and that markets have their limit. Housing is a complex issue in this respect. Flats in big city blocks are much like a commodity and limited urban building space naturally reduces competition, while nice houses in the suburbs or country are very much a market with lots of options suiting different needs.
It's not a market for you, but it is to your provider. And it naturally impacts the cost that's layed upon you, whether directly through electricity bills or through taxes if it's subsidised.