https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1510262323176374278.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30891217
Great comment from the above thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30897398
Building housing is expensive but we manage to fund the military today. We were able to build a massive countrywide network of roads and highways and train tracks a 100 years ago. So fuck capital too. Of course they don't want to build it, and this is a _necessary_ consequence of making housing not be an investment. It will not be profitable to build. But it will be good for humanity anyways. So it has to be atleast partially funded by taxpayers. That might even mean we all collectively get screwed by high rents and high taxes for a decade while we do that. As long as it actually does benefit future generations, so be it. There's plenty of room for efficiency in building as well so that's not necessarily the only way. Subways cost 10-50x more to build today than they used to and there are hundreds of companies that live off leeching public funds.
> We were able to build a massive countrywide network of roads and highways and train tracks a 100 years ago.
Building the first road/train track connecting A to B pays for itself (probably many-fold) in increased revenue from taxes you can collect because such a connection significantly increases the economy.[1] It's not clear that more housing will have that impact.
And for all the people complaining about zoning and NIMBYISM: That's a very local phenomenon in a few cities. Where I live we have neither of these problems, and housing is still a major issue. I'd wager that's true in most US cities that have housing problems. Preaching about zoning and NIMBYism is merely showing a disconnect with the rest of the country and is a red herring.
Solve the incentive problem - at current building prices builders cannot afford to make housing for lower income folks. Either make the cost to build cheaper or, as the parent says, get the government to subsidize building it so they can make a profit.
[1] Fixing up existing roads doesn't, which is why if budget isn't properly allocated for maintenance, you'll get poor infrastructure.
The wealth of most of our political class is also tied to their real estate holdings. 1/5 of our politicians are landlords in Canada; our housing minister has multiple properties. Make it make sense.
I know there was stuff like proposing to pay people to move away, but I don't know if that's a real thing?
If you reward people for conserving a scarce resource, they'll use less of it.
If you reward people for wasting a scarce resource, they'll use more of it.
There's some natural human value attached to space, but in the current system people are incentivized to own more than they need, because to do anything else would be giving up free money, but the fact that everyone else is doing the same, ruins things for everyone.
[1] https://robbreport.com/shelter/home-design/japanese-homes-ar...
Helps that the whole country is on a fault line; nothing is going to stand up for a while anyways so you may as well establish a culture of rebuilding.
https://gestaltu.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/120927-Japan...
Buildings always depreciate, and North America has its fair share of homes not intended to last generations. In Vancouver it's become common for wealthy homebuyers to knock down houses that are less than 20 years old to put up something fresh, but that didn't stop property values from appreciating.
And in China it's perhaps even more the case that homes aren't built to last, and they even have an oversupply issue if anything, as well as a much more advanced population decline than Japan did circa 1990. And yet real estate in China has still attracted so much investment speculation that it's even less affordable, and my guess is it's following the same trajectory that Japan did. Property speculation is a powerful force.
I think a much better explanation is that the Japanese RE bubble taught Japanese speculators a lasting lesson, and the subsequent demographic decline, universal zoning, and widespread availability of mass transit kept it cheap.
Land and real estate are also a huge income shelters for Chinese elites. They cannot appear too wealthy, so they buy real estate to hide their wealth. Only recently, last 5 years, has China instituted a national real estate registry. I wonder how much of the market disruption of the last few years is due to large players trying to divest themselves.
It's not clear that tilting the rent/own preference toward ownership results in a net increase of housing prices, because for every unit of homeowner demand it adds to the market, it also removes one unit of landlord demand.
And when they do stop, it’s only to tear down a building so they can build another one in it’s place.
Japan is a deflationary case study.
https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14538387#:~:text=Tokyo's%....
Things have changed a lot since then but it seemed to have been very successful at fixing the housing crisis of the time.
The main thing that impedes is is regulatory/zoning limitations
And while I'm mostly in favour of code limits (so, minimum size, insulation requirements, fire-proof requirements, etc) most of the impeding regulations are things like maximum height size, blocking developments based on the "character of the area" (read: NIMBYS complaining) etc
That's one of the reasons of past housing bubbles
"Oversupply" is also dependent on the actual target market. Several places lack cheaper housing but have an oversupply of more expensive ones (more bdrs, fancier areas, etc)