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Comment by debesyla | Hacker News Reader

Why not? It makes sense - not every job is equal and some are both important and usually not paid enough.

Society or your local town won't collapse if there's not enough web developers but it may do if it lacks firefighters.

That would be a payment, just not with money, right? So why it's better than just paying this money directly and letting the person decide, rather than introducing an extra step by putting the money into a development and then giving the property instead? The direct payment looks more efficient to me.

That could be true indeed. I am just arguing in the scenario of "what if we build lots of flats", hah!

I do wonder how did similar scenarios worked out historically?

Speaking about historically, that was implemented in Soviet Union, and I don't think it worked well. Though it certainly gave extra tools to the government to control the people.

If you have a thousand people competing for 700 apartments, prices will adjust until 300 are priced out of the apartments. Giving the 200 of those people with socially recognized jobs enough money to not be priced out any more will still mean that 300 will be priced out, it will just be different people.

In other words, rents will just increase. The solution is to build 300 more apartments, and make them available at the bottom of the market, not the top.

But it's highly unlikely that all 200 of those people would choose to spend that extra money bidding up those apartments, and that's the whole point. Distorting another market as a proxy is worse than directly addressing the compensation issue.

The real estate market is extremely distorted by local governments, through imposing restrictions on where houses can be built, how large they can be, etc. To some degree this makes sense, because you want people to be able to enjoy nature or the city wants to be able to plan which roads to build out, but on the other hand, the focus on SFH urban sprawl plus the prospensity to avoid density increases leads to extreme price increases and losses to quality of life. There is huge demand for walkable high density neighborhoods, but the market cannot meet it because government.

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