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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

I find the economic reductionism in housing planning really irritating. It's not like other public utility functions, but it is damn close to a fundamental and is included in human rights declarations.

What kind of state throws up it's hands and claims "it can't" fix housing when states can do precisely that?

Thatcher's revolution in council housing is a cesspit of counterfactual outcomes. It made individual householders deliriously happy, enshrined them as Tory voters for decades and from shelter statistics left 1.5 million families functionally homeless. Millions live in penury, in squalid hotels because councils are disincentivised from fixing things, penalised even.

Australia's housing crisis is just as bad. Truly sordid tropes about rent caps and freezes are trotted out again and again, as if simply reciting them makes them axioms: they're not. All statements about effects on housing stocks are contextual and depend on other social policy, including (surprise surprise) building more rental homes by the state.

I'm a home-owner at the end of my working life. If I was a young person, this above all other things would radicalise me. Our elected leadership are captive to stupid market force arguments. I'd rather they tried and failed than sat on their hands.

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1. Politicians and the bureaucratic class have deep investments in real estate

2. Foreign money keeps flooding into western economies to find a safe haven and lack of capital controls. A bulk of it goes into real estate.

3. Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners.

The entire system is rigged against anything that would impact home prices - such as an increase in supply or change in zoning laws. Entire countries seem to be perfectly okay with watching its young people be priced out of cities and areas they work in as long as "number go up".

All the hand-wringing about political gridlock is just a cover for basic greed. Detestable.

> Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners...the entire system is rigged

Homeowners, irrespective of age, vote more. This is in part enabled by material comforts. But there may be other layers of causation.

The first two are problematic per se (though I'm uncertain of the effect size). But the last is fundamental--if someone can vote but can't care to, they're not going to have their interests represented.

> But there may be other layers of causation.

Having a permanent, of sorts, attachment to a location incentivizes people to vote to protect their interests in that location.

The real question is, if you are profiting from this system: How can you stop people from caring, or alternatively how can you make them vote against their interest?

This is ofc a rhetorical question as you can see the answers play out very clearly in nearly every conservative party in the world (and much more subtle and convoluted in the parties left of them).

> How can you stop people from caring, or alternatively how can you make them vote against their interest?

Voting against their interests: nothing. That said, I've often found folks deemed to be voting against their interests to be doing nothing of the sort.

Those who don't care are, for me, also fine. They're self selecting out of having a voice. If they want to have one in the future, they can engage. The tragedy is those who want to engage but can't. Due to registration requirements, ersatz poll taxes, difficulty of getting to and from poll sites or keeping tabs on the election calendar.

(Apathy is unlikely to be solved with reforms versus education. I've never met an apathetic voter who cast a blank ballot in protest. If they show up, they tend to find something to vote on.)

> The tragedy is those who want to engage but can't. Due to registration requirements, ersatz poll taxes, difficulty of getting to and from poll sites or keeping tabs on the election calendar.

I hear about this every now and then, but is it an issue in any real number? Maybe the problem of the "difficulty of getting to and from poll sites", which I can see arising due to the nature of this country being large, spread out, and automobile-centric.

Even Georgia, which was recently under fire for so-called voter restriction laws, hands out voter ID cards for free or a non-driver state ID card for under $40 that lasts nearly a decade. I can only imagine that anyone who is unable to obtain one of those has much bigger problems than voting every few years.

So things depend on the state, but IIRC some states have been way more brazen about others.

For example, at one point a proposal was floated to force changes in Texas polling center distribution, but only in counties with over a million people, which was pretty nakedly partisan. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/23/texas-voting-polling...

Abbott, Paxton, and Patrick are the 3 horsemen of the "woke" apocalypse. They will do anything to prevent anyone who isn't an old, white, Xtian (those who profess to believe in Christ but do not follow his teachings) from voting, especially in Harris County.

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/06/01/harris-county-electi...

> Maybe the problem of the "difficulty of getting to and from poll sites", which I can see arising due to the nature of this country being large, spread out, and automobile-centric.

It's not just distance and cost, but time. Someone working 3 jobs simply doesn't have time to stand in line for hours.

Nobody has time to stand in line for hours to vote. Not even retired people would do that!

> Someone working 3 jobs

According to the BLS[0], less than 5% of working-aged people hold more than one job, and presumably a fraction of that have three jobs. Surely society shouldn't optimize for a small minority of the population.

> doesn't have time to stand in line for hours

Data on this isn't great, but one source I found[1] puts a cursory total average across all states in 2020 at around 15 minutes, with the worst average wait time being Indiana at 42.1 minutes. It's confirmed by a 2020 academic paper[2] which puts the nationwide median at 14 minutes.

I can imagine that there are outliers who have to wait unpleasantly long, and that same paper referenced above indicates that people may have unequal voting wait times based on where they live. Ideally voting should be easy for all those eligible to vote.

[0]: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat36.htm

[1]: https://www.lgbtmap.org/img/maps/citations-polling-place-lin...

[2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.00024.pdf

Countries like Australia have compulsory voting and are still suffering the same issues. You are right - there are other layers of causation.

We even have preferential voting. The problem is nearly two-thirds of MPs - out of 144 of them - own more than one property. Which is more than three times the national average: less than 20 per cent of Australians own more than one property.

Even the so-called "left leaning" party are landlords.

We are run by the landed gentry. They'll continue looking out for their own. Houses are the safest asset as they're practically 100% Government backed.

Migration to bigger tier one cities is partly to blame. Many young people want to live in NY and rent a shoebox flat for life. They think that they can become Friends protagonists when in fact they become broke and blame government.

Or, it's where their job is, which requires them to come into the office on some sort of basis.

Or at least in North America, younger people don't want to live in soulless suburbs where there's literally nothing to do apart from visiting the same big box stores, chain restaurants and bars in exactly same looking plaza.

Real estate isn't immune to the law of supply and demand, which mandate that you can only pick at most two out of size (or quality) of the housing unit, location (and the quality thereof), and price. Most places in the US are either affordable and boring or the other way around.

> soulless suburbs where there's literally nothing

This is a bit of a reductionist take on those younger people's part. You can have just as much fun at the TGI Friday's at your local strip mall as you can at the hippest restaurant no one else has ever heard of in Brooklyn. It's just a matter of who you spend that time with, and how you perceive that time, in the Stoic tradition.

> You can have just as much fun at the TGI Friday's at your local strip mall as you can at the hippest restaurant no one else has ever heard of in Brooklyn. It's just a matter of who you spend that time with, and how you perceive that time, in the Stoic tradition.

It's not just about restaurants. I'm not going to be able to go to concerts or events. There will be no specialized stores. Even in the example you gave, many of these chains are absolutely terrible now. Going to a local place means better food. It's not all pretense.

As the saying goes: It's hard to have fun with dogshit in your mouth.

How often do people actually go to concerts or events? Why do I need specialized stores if I have the internet? Eating out is expensive and generally not good for you, calorie-wise.

Cities are fun, but people fail to realize that rural places are also pretty great. You just need to make your own fun, but you actually have the room (and money) to do so. I can go out in my yard and do archery, target shooting, etc. I live surrounded by woods and can go for a walk or just sit in there whenever I want...mosquitoes permitting. My house has room for any new hobby I want.

I will say that suburbs are probably the worst of both worlds, but I suppose you're closer to those concerts and better restaurants if you want.

>suburbs are probably the worst of both worlds

hit the nail on the head right there.

And what if you are not rich and you can't work for home? Would you spend hours per day commuting? That translates in loosing some years from your life.

classic hackernews shut-in that doesnt understand that people enjoy culture, i go to a concert/show at least once a month and they are the best things i spend my money on.

Yeah, OP is hilariously myopic. Lots of people would jump off a cliff during one of those walks if they had to live like that.

Once a month is so infrequent that you can afford to, you know, just drive there. Nobody is saying live in the boonies 4 hours from civilization.

How does suburbia stop anyone from going to concerts? I live in a very suburban area and go to shows about once a month too. Sometimes those shows are downtown and sometimes they are in the burbs (sometimes the even further burbs).

Yeah, and depending on location, you might not even be that much further from the happening spots. In city it's like 20 min for me, vs. previously 30-40 minutes; sure it's both ways, but this isn't that crazy.

Also you have more people and diversity. If you hate your neighbor there's plenty of others. In a smaller society, if you don't get along with ~3-5 people your fucked.

That's fine and dandy, but most people probably don't approach anywhere near that regularity. I enjoy culture just fine, but I'm a busy father and I also enjoy my hobbies.

All I'm saying is that most people that act like rural areas have "nothing to do" probably don't do all that much regularly anyways - and there are simply different things to do. We live 5 minutes from a state park with great hiking and have two public beaches within 5 minutes as well.

Some people have little interest in those things. You've also really only listed solitary activities. Sure you can do some of these things "with people", but it's a far cry from more social activities.

To answer your first question: a lot. There's people that are very different from you, that really don't do well without these interactions. They expect to go out 1-3 times a week or at least monthly. Small area community events can be awkward if you aren't from town, don't know everyone, who all grew up together.

Yeah, you're buddy might come over now and then for target practice. However this is very different from social events city dwellers rely on.

That's true, but I'd argue those that go out monthly could easily live an hour or two from the city.

Don't get me wrong - if I were still single I'd probably move to a city, if only for the dating prospects. Once you have a family though and limited free time the pros and cons change a bit.

I live in a suburb of a B-tier (at best) city, and have been to half a dozen concerts this year and at least two more coming up. Including several in objectively A-tier cities.

The idea that if you live in a suburb you can no longer go to concerts or events or "specialized stores" whatever that means, is just ridiculous.

> "specialized stores" whatever that means

I coined the phrase, and am now not so sure myself. It doesn't really need to be that special, either. If you live in a small area you'll have eg. 1-5 stores.

There will be a big box supermarket, a local one, and maybe some other wildcard option. Then there will be a couple local stores (hardware, outdoors, etc.). However, if you want anything specific or just don't like the shop, you have to go to a different city.

I don't know if you've lived in a small town, but this would include things like electronic. With no Best Buy or Circuit City, you were stuck with Walmart, or a local shop for almost twice the price.

It's true that fun and interesting cities would still command some kind of premium under more liberal permitting regimes, but that's not an excuse to be amplifying it artificially with policy.

Let me offer a counterpoint: I live in LA because it is home to the largest immigrant population in the US from the country where my parents were born. When I go to the grocery store, restaurants, concerts, festivals, etc. I am experiencing that cultural connection.

There’s numerous spaces I’ve been in where English is rarely spoken and it gives me the opportunity to maintain my language skills.

Do you think I could have that in generic suburbia?

I'm an immigrant myself, having moved around the US quite a bit and currently living in a part where there aren't very many people from my country of origin. I've never once considered proximity to a large community of people sharing my ethnic background as important in choosing where to live, but of course YMMV.

It's funny because I've always thought of LA as a conglomeration of suburbia, but perhaps you're referring to "generic suburbia" as one that's composed primarily of typical white Americans? Then naturally by definition you're not going to have the same kind of access to whichever cultural group that is missing from that town. But I disagree that those kinds of places are entirely devoid of "soul", as the GP put it. It'd be like criticizing Los Angeles (plurality Hispanic, approximately 0% Danish[0]), for not having Danish festivals and grocery stores, or Jackson, MS (roughly 80% black and less than half a percent Asian[1]) for not having enough authentic Asian restaurants.

Sure, there's an argument to be made that you can find representation of anything in a big enough city, and that holds in places like NYC or LA. But that's a truism.

[0]: https://www.statimetric.com/us-ethnicity/Danish

[1]: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/jacksoncitymiss...

LA is not Manhattan but it’s not a generic sunbelt city either. It’s comprised of dozens of neighborhoods and cities many of which are dense by any American standard (10000+ people/sq mi). A number of neighborhoods that were previously oriented around the yellow and red cars still have walkable “main streets” (albeit each of these main streets are individually difficult to reach without a car).

But that’s kind of beside the point. What I’m pushing back on is the notion that you can live anywhere in the US and it’s just as good as anywhere else so you might as well live wherever it’s cheapest.

It’s not about suburbs per se since Orange County is as suburban as it gets and also checks some of the boxes I mentioned (although I’d argue not as many as LA). It is also extremely expensive.

I don’t care for the “soul” argument since it’s vague. I just specified something that is personally important to me and justifies living in an very high COL city.

There is something fundamentally different about the cultural life in cities. The suburbs are actually "soulless" in comparison.

https://www.iwritewordsgood.com/apl/patterns/apl010.htm

Worth pointing out that every Stoic I can think of was an upper-class city-dweller. Epicurus—Athens. Marcus Aurelius—Rome. Zeno of Citium—Athens again, but perhaps apocryphal. Seneca, Cicero, Epictetus—Rome again [0].

[0] I'm reminded now that Epictetus was not particularly wealthy, and did live an ascetic lifestyle. Perhaps the exception that makes the rule.

… You can have just as much fun at the TGI Friday's at your local strip mall as you can at the hippest restaurant…

Have you actually eaten at a TGIFridays? The food is awful. I suppose if the actual meal is completely secondary to your enjoyment of the experience, you might be right, but for me, eating out is as much for the food as the company.

In my early 20s I used to sit at the bar at TGIFridays 3-4 nights a week and play trivia with my girlfriend (now wife) and other friends. It was less than a 10 minute walk from our suburban condo and across the street from our work so we would have lots of coworkers stop in and hang out. I’d usually eat some of their shitty wings and fries but the experience was definitely hanging out, drinking, and playing trivia. I’d imagine this type of experience is common whether you live in suburbia or NYC.

In a city, that 10 minute walk encompasses several bars and restaurants. Competition increases quality or decreases price.

> This is a bit of a reductionist take on those younger people's part. You can have just as much fun at the TGI Friday's at your local strip mall as you can at the hippest restaurant no one else has ever heard of in Brooklyn.

I'm one of those younger people. The main difference here is, "the hip" restaurant in Brooklyn will have vastly different food than a hip restaurant in SF. Can't say that about TGIFs

I haven't noticed that there is "vastly different food" in SF vs Brooklyn. TGIF has bad food, but that's a different question.

    Most places in the US are either affordable and boring or the other way around.

This isn't saying much. Isn't this true in all highly developed countries?

Until they get married/have kids and do the same thing their parents and their parent's parents did...move to the suburbs.

One difference with "younger" kids now is they're getting married later...but once you have kids the suburbs look completely different and it's been that way for as long as there have been suburbs.

This often comes up, and I'm genuinely curious, is space really that much more important when it comes to kids? I grew up in an apartment sharing a bedroom with my sister, and tons and tons of kids grow up in an apartment all over the world; all the older European cities, Asian cities (Mumbai, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc).

Netherlands has the happiest kids in the world, where in Amsterdam a lot of kids would be growing up in an apartment. The flip side is, they get their freedom where they can go to places without needing their parents to drive them everywhere.

In the States that seems to be the case. I surmise that's due to our strong sense of individualism in our culture. Hard to see whether prosperity causes individualism or the other way around.

Define prosperity though. If it's strictly financial prosperity, then sure. But various studies have found people in western countries to be lonelier and less happier than their asian/european/south american counterparts where sense of community is higher.

The U.S. doesn’t generally build a lot of multi-bedroom apartments suitable for families. The emphasis is on single bedrooms and studios.

Furthermore, people also prefer the suburbs for raising a family because that’s where all the nice schools are built. For better or worse, inner city schools are avoided like the plague for parents with the means to buy a house in the suburbs.

> Until they get married/have kids and do the same thing their parents and their parent's parents did...move to the suburbs.

My parents moved to the city when they had kids. Specifically to enable a better life for us. More access to friends, better schools, more independence, better extracurriculars, more family time because no commute, etc. It was pretty great.

Living in the city also made college affordable because we could just live at home and walk to school.

I do notnthink suburbs are better for kids or parents. They can't go anywhere unless being driven, so they are either stuck at home or parent have to drive then around. There are less other kids to play with, kids are limited to backyard. Same for after school activities, much less is going on.

Unless you are talking about literal toddler, it is nit that awesome.

But how much time you have to spend in traffic each day?

Possibly none because WFH is a thing.

There's lots to do outside big city centres if your life doesn't evolve around consumiption of services provided by others. Big cities suck for most physical and creative outdoor activities.

No, people move to cities because of jobs and because the countryside is dying. No need for weird theories about Friends.

> Many young people want to live in NY and rent a shoebox flat for life.

Nobody wants to rent a shoebox apartment in NYC for the rest of their life. But if you're not rich your only choices are to rent the shoebox or to leave NYC, and people choose which one matters more to them.

And if not already rich in NYC then you're probably there because you're trying to become rich.

Do you think all 8+ million residents of NYC are trying to get rich? It’s not all investment bankers and engineers.

Big cities are not created because of dreams of "Friends", but because they have lots of jobs. That's why NYC is still attracting people. If it had zero jobs, it would go broke in less than a year, no matter how many TV shows are shot over there.

I grew up in NYC, when big parts of it were still affordable. That was a time when people migrated there without assuming an impoverished lifestyle and locals didn’t get priced out. It breaks my heart that we now accept that big cities are for the rich or the masochistic. There was a lot of magic in my childhood, that will now become a thing of the past, unfortunately.

You should read about Vienna, which is a relatively large city that’s bucking the trend.

At least where I live, the difference in wages between big cities and even tier-2 cities is night and day.

And forget wages, sticking around in small cities is often career suicide. As a young person, you can’t be blamed for wanting McKinsey in NYC on your resume instead of Acme Hardware Store in random town, Idaho.

Mck pays the same in all cities in NA :)

It’s even worse because there’s an adult social care crisis, a pension crisis, and in some areas a rundown NHS and school system. So all the incentives are towards not just home ownership but also additional buy-to-let ownership so that those with the means can afford private health care, dentistry, school fees for their kids/grandkids, inheritance for the kids who are priced out of the market, and retirement.

It’s a gravity well of incentives towards absolute property gluttony and creating an overheated housing market and massive social inequality.

> adult social care crisis, a pension crisis, and in some areas a rundown NHS

I remember about 10 years ago, "the idea" was that retirees would, as their health starts to decline, do equity-release in their homes to pay for their care needs (on the basis that the NHS would start to means-test care based on the value of all assets, including housing, so that if an OAP has £1m locked-up in their house and they probably have less than 5-6 years to live it's only fair that they liquidate some of that wealth instead of expecting the NHS to pay for everything - while those who don't own their own houses, would still benefit from free NHS care).

I left the UK just-over 10 years ago (but I still visit my parents a few times a year and do the WFH-thing-but-abroad) so I'm not as clued-in on subtler points of public policy, but I'm curious if that's still the case? ...or if the Tories reversed that decision in the 8 years they've held power? (after-all, it would be anathema to Daily Mail readers, who give me the impression that they fully expect to enjoy their house-prices even after they're dead).

Theresa May tried to sell this as part of her election campaign. It was a disaster. No one wants to be forced to give up some of their personal wealth to pay more for an NHS they've already paid into.

That may not be fair, but when most voters are property owners you're not going to get a different outcome.

This is an interesting topic because it highlights how the political and economic culture is broken and incapable of effective national strategy. I don't think housing, health, industrial policy, education, or anything else can be fixed without a complete overhaul of the UK's political parties, media, and systems.

It seems like maybe they didn’t pay in enough - baby boom demographics meant there were relatively more productive workers paying for relatively few old people, so each worker was paying a fraction of what it would cost to carry themselves through old age.

Also, not enough kids, and of those, not enough who wanted to go into medicine.

It seems like baby booms have a way of making things seem artificially good for a while, and then there’s a hangover.

> It seems like maybe they didn’t pay in enough - baby boom demographics meant there were relatively more productive workers paying for relatively few old people, so each worker was paying a fraction of what it would cost to carry themselves through old age.

Right but manufacturing technology better and more efficient, we produce far more "per worker" now

Yeah, but I don’t think we’ve seen commensurate gains with healthcare workers, except by perhaps reducing visit time per patient.

Perhaps the inference is that the owners of industrial technology should be paying more taxes on their profits, since the proportion of labor as an input is shrinking.

But getting people to pay twice for public services is a core way to increase tax revenue!

The core way that pushes this cost onto the working class.

> Theresa May tried to sell this as part of her election campaign. It was a disaster. No one wants to be forced to give up some of their personal wealth to pay more for an NHS they've already paid into.

It's not as simple as "give up some of their personal wealth to pay more for an NHS they've already paid into". If you have 20K in your bank account and no property, you have to pay for your care. If you own 2 flats worth 1M each and have 10K in your bank account, you pay nothing. The so-called "dementia tax" would have make this situation fairer. Besides, they wouldn't have to release equity while alive, but the cost of care would be paid by the heirs upon selling or inheriting their parent's property.

Imagine a scenario where you have 20K in your bank account. You child inherits only 10K, because you had to pay for your care. Now imagine you have 2 flats and 10K in your bank account. Your child gets the whole lot. Does this look fair?

Theresa May, that, as far as I'm concerned, should be sent to the Hague for architecting the hostile environment for foreigners, had only one non-demented idea in her entire political career: making social care fairer, and that's what killed her premiership. I can't think of a more emblematic example of what is going on in the UK.

> Does this look fair?

No, but because we should end means testing completely. I thought NHS meant you didn't have to do all the things we have to do here in the US.

A few years ago, I had to do an annual wellness exam so I could keep my health insurance "discount" at work. There was some miscommunication within the three parties: 1. Doctor's office 2. Lab 3. Insurance and I had to act like a mediator between them. I thought that was bad enough but NHS sounds worse now.

The Conservative government that's been in power for 13 years has consistently underfunded the NHS. While the current vogue is to blame Covid, it's only been the final crack in a dam that's been bursting for years now.

They already paid for NHS during their active period. Why should people have to pay again, once retired? If you request them to pay for healthcare, after they are retired, then you shouldn't ask them for money during their active period.

Welcome to the beautiful world of empty, overconfident political promises that are smashed against the rocks of reality 30 years later.

This is why I plan to finance my own retirement and consider a minimum social security pension a happy bonus.

Because they paid £15k for their house in 1974 and it's gone up to £1.5 million through no special skill of their own. Their life expectancy has also increased 10 years in that time due to NHS advances so they will be living longer and costing much more than before to care for. The calculus as to what they own and what they owe has changed dramatically just during their life span.

This is obtuse; you're ignoring the observation that people with sufficient cash have to pay now, and the contrast with property owners. Sure, you may think it's unfair that anyone has to pay after having paid taxes, that's a legitimate opinion I happen to share. But just stating that and ignoring the rest of the GP post isn't helpful.

It’s I my broken because our electoral system favours conservative outcomes. If we had proportional representation then many of the issues that seem impossible would suddenly become easy to solve.

Edit: in before anyone asks for evidence of favouring conservative outcomes: Boris Johnson had a landslide 80 seat majority with only 43.6% of the popular vote. PR would mean more coalition governments, but those would largely be left leaning Labour/Lib/SNP even when the conservatives have higher than historically average vote shares.

So people are expected to pay twice for healthcare, just because they own a house?

No. At the moment it's people who don't own a property and have savings instead who "pay twice". People who couldn't get a mortgage to buy a house so saved instead are expected to pay more towards old age care than those who did get a mortgage to buy a house. The proposed policy change was to rebalance the current rules which greatly benefit property owners over involuntary renters of similar means, to make the rules fairer.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36489768

>It’s even worse because there’s an adult social care crisis, a pension crisis, and in some areas a rundown NHS and school system. So all the incentives are towards not just home ownership but also additional buy-to-let ownership so that those with the means can afford private health care, dentistry, school fees for their kids/grandkids, inheritance for the kids who are priced out of the market, and retirement.

It's also about rapidly declining population and people not willing to work. The result of welfare state.

If you incentivize people to develop themselves, acquire skills and knowledge, work and make kids, then they will be able to afford housing, medical care and pensions.

How would you incentivize people to have children?

Make it seem to be profitable, obviously. France’s system is genius - supposedly, income can be shared between all household members regardless of age.

So the marginal tax rate becomes very low if you have three kids. Even incentivizes one parent to work less.

If there's a finite resource, you can't just say "if only the population worked harder, they'd have more money to spend so they can buy the thing we're discussing". Money is used as the tool to ration in our society, but it doesn't therefore mean that insufficient money is the problem behind rationing. This financializing of everything is the problem with too many analyses these days - fundamentally we need to think about provisioning before financing.

Hi, the Cradle to Grave Welfare state has existed since the 1940s.

Were people not willing to work in the 1940s?

There is a problem that the age demographic has changed.

There is the ever increasing problem of more people drawing down state pensions, using the NHS and social care, than there are young tax payers to support them.

Working hard doesn't influence housing supply vs demand in real terms at all. In fact it makes it worse because all those hardworking people will demand higher quality housing in exchange for their sacrifice. So end up with more people being unhappy with their current housing, not less.

> If you incentivize people to develop themselves, acquire skills and knowledge, work and make kids, then they will be able to afford housing, medical care and pensions.

I don’t know if this was sarcasm, but this is the sort of absurd nonsense spouted by conservatives who’ve already gotten “theirs”.

Home prices that are astronomically high relative to average wages means that most people can’t afford to buy a home no matter what they do (other than becoming millionaires).

"Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners".

Sounds like democracy?

> "Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners".

> Sounds like democracy?

Young people might get their first chance to vote at age 23 - assuming they paid for the right kind of ID, or navigated an impenetrable web of underpaid bureaucrats to get the mythical free ID. And if they manage to get off work on election day. Meanwhile the elderly are reliably on the register (because they're not being forced to move around, because again they own a home) and encouraged to vote even if they're expected to die before the results take effect.

>Young people might get their first chance to vote at age 23 - assuming they paid for the right kind of ID, or navigated an impenetrable web of underpaid bureaucrats to get the mythical free ID.

uhh what? we're talking about britain here. I don't know what kind of yank(?) political dysfunction you're alluding to, but nobody has any trouble voting because of a lack of ID here. you don't need one to vote. you notify the electoral roll when you move into a house or flat, then a few weeks before election day you get a bit of paper in the post, you can bring it to the polling station to prove you live there.

You’re a little out of date with your info

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/about-14000-people-england-...

The article says that 70% of them hadn't bothered to bring their ID. Hardly the result of draconian laws, is it?

It also doesn't say how many of the 30% actually had the right to vote. It only says that they "brought a type that was not accepted".

That is not correct.

During the recent elections in England about 14,000 people were denied a vote due to lack of ID.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-65988959

Though since the correct ID is basically every kind of ID that's valid to buy age restricted goods like alcohol and stores have become more and more strict at checking that over the last few years that mostly seems to have been older people. (The government also permitted some other kinds of ID that older people are more likely to have access to in order to reduce this, but it didn't completely eliminate the problem and I'm pretty sure it wasn't expected to either.)

The press has, as usual, not been entirely honest about this. In particular, there was a talking point about how only one non-passport and non-driving license form of ID that young people are likely to have compared with much more forms of ID that older people will have, but that one form of ID is a blanket scheme that providers of ID sign up to in order for it to be valid as proof of age. There is no equivalent blanket scheme for ID that older people are likely to have.

Great Britain has 67 million people. 14,000 people is unlikely to swing any election, even if they all voted in lockstep.

14,000 in the right places could easily topple a government in a tight election because of FPTP - although one can obviously not choose in reality.

In 2017 for example the minimum number of votes across the country needed to take down Theresa May (or more realistically have her form a true minority government) was something like 2500.

We have an extremely disproportional electoral system.

That would have been 2500 in exactly the right places. 2500 in exactly the right places could also have given the Conservative Party even more seats.

If we are talking about 0.25% on average then I doubt it could have changed much in these local elections (back in May in England and Northern Ireland).

If anybody wants to play with the data from the General Election in 2017 they can do so here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2017_United_Kin...

Sort the table by "Mjrty." in ascending order. Right at the top we see wins for SNP, Labour, SNP, Labour, and Labour that easily could have been wins for Lib Dem, Tories, Tories, Tories, and Tories.

67m is the UK population, not the GB population.

And 67m is nothing close to the size of the electorate of the local elections that number comes from.

And as another commenter wrote, a small number of votes can matter a great deal.

This article says that 70% of them just didn't bring any ID with them. That's on them.

It also says nothing about the remaining 30% except that they "brough a type that was not accepted". We don't actually know if they even had the right to vote.

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/about-14000-people-england-...

Those who did have the right to vote could have gotten a free Voter Authority Certificate before the election:

https://www.gov.uk/apply-for-photo-id-voter-authority-certif...

The government has introduced a requirement for photographic ID for all UK parliament elections, as well as local elections in England. This has been quite heavily discussed, so I'm surprised you haven't heard about it.

> yank(?)

To be clear, it’s not a real problem in the US either, but some people like to pretend it is. Don’t believe things you read on Reddit or wherever.

oh I already know it's not, you don't even have to be alive to vote let alone show ID

I was referring to the idea that in an aging country, even if young/old people would equally show up to vote, the older people will have more votes.

Which is democracy. It is fair in that sense, although surely it will not feel that way at all times.

You could imagine a system where similar to how we split votes into geographical regions via things like electoral colleges or having a locally elected representatives, there could be a similar splitting of votes into age ranges to ensure each group is sufficiently represented

(Not advocating for this, just an interesting thing to think about)

Indeed, democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for lunch. It's just an unusual and new idea to see young people as a minority as this never was the case to this extend.

As it comes to housing though, I remain convinced that the issue is not as political as many make it out to be. See my other comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36486626

Meaning, even if the young seize more political power, there isn't going to be a law they can pass that says "cut rent in half".

There is also no law they can pass to reverse climatw change. Once some things are fucked, they are really hard to fix

California is one of the worst affected states for housing, and yet

> they paid for the right kind of ID, or navigated an impenetrable web of underpaid bureaucrats

Pretty much everyone starts driving around 16-18 and has a driver's license

> manage to get off work on election day

CA is an early voting state where ballots are mailed to you ~1 month in advance. You can drop them off at your convenience at one of the numerous drop-off locations.

Really, CA makes it as easy to vote as possible including same-day registration. There is no excuse for young people to not vote, except for their apathy.

I'm glad to hear we've finally put down that 1776 nonsense and restored California to the British crown.

Make America Great Britain Again!

This is a wholly imaginary problem.

Oh come on. If there was the mass of people who couldn't get registered to vote, the Democrats would pull out all the stops to get them registered.

You mean the SDP? They haven't been an independent party since 1983, and have been politically irrelevant for even longer.

Does the UK not have any equivalent of the US “motor voter” system? When we update our info at the department of motor vehicles, there’s a checkbox on the form to automatically register to vote. So getting on the register is mostly automatic once you have the paperwork in order to get a driver’s license (which is a necessity to function as an adult in most of the US).

I would guess that few countries have the type of situation that exists in the US where a driver's licence is almost essential in order to go about daily life.

Many people in the UK don't bother with a licence. It can be prohibitively expensive when you consider the costs of lessons, a vehicle, and of the licence itself.

    Many people in the UK don't bother with a licence.

Eh. "Many" is such a vague term. Like, 5% could be considered many. UK is a driving country, period.

    where a driver's licence is almost essential in order to go about daily life.

This is true in all highly developed countries if you live outside the largest cities. You need to drive. It is baked in the cost of your life. Renting is much cheaper outside of the city, but somewhat offset by the cost of driving.

“in the 5 years from 2015 to 2019, an average of 74% of people in England had a full driving licence“

The provisional licence is enough as a voter ID though. I just used it in the last election.

I note your statistic refers to "people" and not "adults". Usually, some proportion of the people of any given country are ineligible to receive a drivers licence on the basis of their age. It seems that age is 17 in the UK, although I'm not sure whether that counts as full or provisional until they've got a bit more experience. I'll assume full.

According to https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati... there's about 1.2% of the people in each age group <17 in England, which means 1.2*17 ~= 20 of the people in the England are ineligible for a drivers licence. So there's only about 6% of people in the England who could have a full drivers licence, but don't. So either they give licences out in the cornflakes at Tescos, or almost the whole adult population of the UK wants a drivers licence.

It's 74% of eligible adults, not 74% of the population.

https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/culture-a...

Such problems only exist in third world countries, such as US or UK.

My country solves this by issuing a plastic ID card to each citizen. You apply for it at your local town hall, and it is free of charge. You can use that ID for voting, or any other interaction with the government when they need to confirm your identity. Hell, they even issued a smartphone application recently, that can be legally used as ID.

And in the US if you don’t want/need a driver’s license then you just get a state issued ID card. Easy peasy.

Does that card allow you to vote? Is it free to obtain? Do people know that such option exists?

I need a Google Chrome plugin to block all HN comments that include the term "third world countries". That term is so grossly out of date. Read about it on Wiki. Yes, in wealthy countries, it is a proxy for very poor countries. Still, I do not like that term in 2023. It feels lazy.

And more HN vagueness in this post: "My country" Why not just say your country name? After all, most of the world is developing. You don't have much to lose.

A provisional driving licence costs £34 (though you could also pay for the photo). I expect some young people get one primarily in order to be able to buy alcohol.

A passport costs £82.50 and is rather less useful as ID inside the UK because it doesn't show an address.

Every household gets sent a form once a year to register those people who are eligible to vote - ours is pre-populated with details of the current registrants

Thanks. I assumed there was something in place, and that the post above mine was a bit off the wall.

We usually have checks and balances in democracy so that a majority can't vote to say, take all the money from some minority group that has less voting power than them. What is happening now is that a "loophole" has been discovered wherein instead of just directly taking all of the money from some minority class the property owning class just instead condemns them to a lifetime of renting whereby just enough rent is charged to ensure that they are by and large never able to move out of renting, but not so much as to sow the seeds of a violent revolution (yet). Its democracy in the same way that voting to end all medical benefits for people over 65 would also be "democracy", which is to say it would be naked inter-generational and inter-class warfare.

I get what you're saying and I'm against inter-generational hate.

There is no plot against young people. Remember that most old people have children. If today's young people would time travel to some decades back, they'd too make the most of the conditions then. I would not imagine any young person that owns a home to sell it at a discount out of solidarity, they too would self-optimize without any consideration for anybody else.

Young people today aren't especially targeted, they are at the end of what was a demographic/economic/infra/building boom. Those conditions cannot be recreated.

I don't think that the older generation "hates" youth, I don't think they think about them at all really. In the conversations I've had with Boomers and older people, although there is the standard derision for youth that is stereotypically expected of older generations, I would say there is more an immense blindspot and unwillingness to consider even a slight sacrifice of any type, even for their own children. The expectation is that the youth will just have to work hard like they did in there day and a complete unwillingness to confront any sort of conversation about what hard work could buy in their day vs the present one. I've watched boomers talk to each other about their kids or grandkids being unable to buy a home amongst each and other and I would describe the overall vibe as being one of detached "oh well, sucks for them" type acceptance, and trying to console each other that their kids are doing fine in other ways (they buy a new iphone every other year!!!). Your comment actually mirrors a lot of their attitude, especially the part about how the youth of today would definitely do the same things, so why feel guilty about doing it, a hypothesis that has no way of being disproved and which exists largely as a balm to soothe their conscience as they try to deal with the cognitive dissonance of watching their children suffer, and then voting for parties and policies that will prolong that suffering.

You wouldn't imagine any young person doing something to help another person out in some sort of solidarity and yet I generally see this exact mindset in terms of voting for left wing parties that will raise taxes, including theirs, voting and campaigning for increased density which will affect the character of their neighborhoods and possibly decrease their property values. Hell I have never voted for a party that would decrease my taxes and I am pretty up front about needing to be taxed more as I am very fortunate with my employment and income situation. I've had conversations at length with boomers advocating for tax cuts which would cut funding to education, arguing that it is pretty convenient that they want these cuts right around the time that they have no children in public school and asked if we should also cut medical funding, funding that they disproportionately draw on and the response has been universally "No", that funding is good and necessary.

So I don't think that they young are "especially targeted" and more that anyone who is not a boomer and up is targeted and that happens to include the youth. We can tell ourselves a bunch of stories but stats around home ownership, lifespan, healthspan, median income, etc, etc, etc, a laundry list tells the actual story of what the current relationship is like between generations. You don't have to hate someone to harm them greatly...

This pretty much sums it up. I doubt it's some special boomer mentality as much as a "people" mentality. People are fairly selfish and don't want to reduce their quality of life.

What's shifted over the last few decades is that people live longer. Boomers basically just got lucky - they didn't have a huge older generation above them, so the cost of social security was fairly low when they were young. They managed to buy houses at a time of massive urban expansion, meaning their total lifetime cost of housing was pretty low.

And now they're heading towards retirement, with vast unearned housing wealth and having spent decades with housing as an almost insignificant cost, they've got no incentive to change things.

You forgot to mention that boomers had high mortgage rates. According to https://themortgagereports.com/61853/30-year-mortgage-rates-... my parents, boomers, would likely have had 16%+ and 12%+ rates when they bought their first homes. Contrast this to myself, a borderline Millennial/Gen X, who bought houses after the 2008 crash and currently have a 3% mortgage. Makes me wonder why Boomers are the always the primary target of younger generation's ire.

The interest rate at the time of buying is actually fairly irrelevant. What matters is the total lifetime cost of housing. Even though interest rates were high, purchase costs were much lower in terms of multiples of income. It's pretty clear that many boomers have benefited from a very low total lifetime cost of housing.

The low interest rates/high house prices is now turning into a double blow - at least here in the UK (and for anyone that needs to move house in the US) - as low interest rates meant low monthly payments, which has inflated house prices further. Now people are having to refinance massive mortgages at higher rates, the cost is becoming even greater.

Ultimately you just have to look at statistics of home ownership rates by age to see that things are getting worse for younger people. https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/economic-research/resbull/2022...

Step on a bus sometime. The hate towards younger children (below, give or take 10 years) is easily noticeable. Oh and the hate towards male youngsters starts again at 17 or so, especially if there's somewhat more color on the skin, but of course nobody really dares to treat them like they treat a 6 year old.

young people are absolutely targeted - education was fre for older generation, and young people get a lofetine of debt.

In boomer time government probided free milk for babies, now baby formula is the most stolen items and is kept under lock and key in super market

Todays politicians talk about growijg up ina. councill home as a market of being through hard times. They dont even get thay councill homes are gone, and if they were growing up today, they would be on the street

Yep, democracy in action. Although I suspect if polities were smaller and more independent then certain areas, with more poor and young people, would vote to prioritise policies to incentivise housing construction.

Large polities result in the same policies being applied to regions that are fundamentally different in ways that make policy good for some and bad for others.

I think housing issues present a good case for confederalism or even anarchism. States rights in the US or Swiss Cantons are examples where different regions have more control over policies and thus can suit them to their own specific needs. The smaller the polity the better. Also why special economic zones tend to produce good outcomes.

> Sounds like democracy?

Here is an example -

16 year olds who have a keen interest in their futute, are not allowed to vote.

A 90 year old, who does not even remember that USSR has already collapsed, votes for a war-Mongering government.

18 year olds are drafted into the army and sent to fight a war, and they never had a chance to vote at all. Maybe their entire experience of democracy is getting sent to faraway land to die.

Their experience is indistinguishable from tyrany

The last time the United States had a draft was 1973. The last time the UK had a draft was 1960. Who is the 18 year old who is drafted into the army and sent to fight a war and getting sent to a faraway land to die? I mean. Russians, for at least some value of faraway. But I don't think they're the central example that you're thinking of.

That's 50 years ago. It's literally not even one lifetime ago.

Given that you'd have to be 18 to be drafted (maybe 16), the minimum age of those people would be 68.

> Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners.

This doesn't explain the constant increase in property tax levies being passed in Washington State.

If you're going to cherrypick a single example to rebut the existence of an overarching trend in the UK, you could at least pick a state with an income tax. Or, perhaps, not beat the dead horse at all and talk about Britain.

Washington state just decided that capital gains were not income, and imposed a 7% tax on them.

Besides, I don't see how the age demographics in Wa state would be materially different from Britain's.

If you're so fixated on Washington state, you should really learn its history. And also British history. They're very different places with very different politics. You're comparing a flyover state (speaking as somebody born there) to the center of a colonial power.

And a 7% flat tax is a trifle.

Exactly. 20% is also very low. Maybe consider complaining when it’s progressive up to 90%.

That’s also the set castigating young people who want to live in expensive cities. Prudence dictates you must live far far away. Why are you even thinking of living in New York City, you fool?! Why live in a cesspool like you goof!! It’s become a culture war, too.

The purpose of real estate development is to make real estate more valuable.

So if you have laws restricting that development you need to look further than just "real-estate investors don't want development."

Even ones not doing the development benefit financially - landlords love being able to raise the rents cause other people in the area built a bunch of new shit.

The better off - and therefore more politically-connected - you are as a homeowner, the more you care about "I don't want the wrong people living next to me" compared to "I need to maximize short-term property values." (And the long-term property values trends clearly shows that cities with more development, that more people want to move to, are where you find ROI.)

> The purpose of real estate development is to make real estate more valuable.

Nope. It's to make money for the developers.

> Even ones not doing the development benefit financially - landlords love being able to raise the rents cause other people in the area built a bunch of new shit.

Gentrification is a result of shortage. When wealthier people are priced out of rich neighborhoods, the only place for them to go is poor neighborhoods. It just so happens that poor neighborhoods with the least amount of political power are the first ones to be redeveloped when there's a shortage of housing.

> And the long-term property values trends clearly shows that cities with more development, that more people want to move to, are where you find ROI.

Reversed causation. It's literally just supply and demand. Places with high demand and not enough supply have growing property values. Places that are actually able to build housing to even kinda meet demand are doing much better.

You can see a ton of development but that doesn't really mean anything. Often there's not even enough development to meet the rate of growth in a given city, let alone reduce prices meaningfully.

> Nope. It's to make money for the developers.

Sure.

Let's look a simple condo case: Developer pays X for property. Developer spends Y to build a building. Developer sells N units for Z. To make money, NZ has to be greater than XY aka the total value of that parcel is now higher.

> Reversed causation. It's literally just supply and demand. Places with high demand and not enough supply have growing property values. Places that are actually able to build housing to even kinda meet demand are doing much better.

Yeah, short-term, why was that parcel before the condo building worth less? Because there was less demand for what was there before than for what was there after it. Development increase short-term values by providing immediate units with nicer amenities or better condition or more size or whatever. Probably pretty uncontroversial.

But also development increases long-term values by continuing to grow long term demand. Development, residences, businesses, services - in the most successful cities, all that flow of money produces more and more demand and value over time. Not a lot of demand to live on an empty lot in the middle of nowhere where there's not a nice house and there's no nearby jobs...

So flip the causation: if there hadn't been development to allow all the people in [popular city of your choice] in the first place, it wouldn't be so popular and have such high demand today. That's not completely separate from geographical factors like rivers, but it's also got a lot to do with development - take, say, the land where a river meets a train line and compare it to the land downstream without the train.

When you build new housing (as in, increase the number of units of housing that are available in total), you make your lot more valuable, which makes other lots less valuable. So a developer makes makes money by making their lot more valuable, but they do not "make real estate more valuable" generally.

This is much like, you know, every other thing in the world. When a shoe manufacturer makes shoes, their shoes have value, but the value of all other shoes are slightly less because there's now one more competitor for demand for all those other shoes.

With shoes, sure.

With housing, it depends. There can be a proximity effect. The old house next to all the nicely redeveloped new houses is now worth more, even if the total number of bedrooms hasn't changed during the redevelopment, because it is in a nicer environment (and a buyer might want to redevelop the old house, and live in a nice house in a nice suburb).

That's been repeatedly empirically shown not to be true. New housing depresses the price of existing housing (very slightly), even hyper-locally.

That's purely short term.

Long term development is good for everybody's property values, in the exact opposite way that losing businesses and residents is bad for those property values. Phoenix vs Detroit, say.

"Demand" is a dynamic thing, it responds to changes in the built environment of a city, region, or nation. London didn't spring into being fully-formed and fully in-demand at today's levels. It found a virtuous (for property-owners financially) cycle of both increasing housing units and increasing population and demand for certain areas.

There are in-demand cities that have relatively affordable housing (like Tokyo), that allow lots of housing to be built, and cities that have extraordinarily high costs of housing (like London) generally have a hard cap on housing development.

While there is obviously some amount of this whole thing where more housing allows more people to come to a city which can in some circumstances drum up more jobs or whatever, I think it's a significant oversimplification to say that more housing increases property values in the long run. Ceteris paribus, more housing depresses property values. It is possible for there to be a feedback cycle where more people in the area increase the overall prosperity -- and thus property values -- of the area, but I do not think that generally more housing is the most important factor there.

The thing is that large developers love restricting development because it limits competition.

If there is only a limited supply of land to build further on, it is much easier to corner said market of land and sit on it if the prices are not high enough for your liking. The cheapest development is the kind that larger developers do not bother with (one house to two or three on a single plot of land, rather than large complexes)

This is not the case in SF. Developers want to build, but entrenched interests fight and delay, often using the rhetoric that doing so only makes developers richer and the only reason developers want to develop is so the developers themselves make money (as if this is some kind of purity test of intent).

As much as I hate giving NIMBYs any credit, it's important to remember that developers don't want to lower the price of housing - they want to make money, but the higher the cost of housing the more profit they make.

For instance, suppose they build 100 apartments in the suburb of X. They know that for every $1k the price of housing in X drops, they lose $100k. So weirdly, they tend to leave housing vacant and sell it at a drip-feed so that they're always selling less houses than there are buyers - there is a huge difference between selling 3 apartments to 4 buyers, vs selling 4 apartments to 4 buyers. This particularly bad when there are few, large developers instead of lots of small developers, as the few large developers can collude to price-fix much easier.

Please don't interpret this as contradicting the fact that California needs to massively overhaul its zoning/construction permit system - the fact that it can take years to receive permission instead of weeks is a big reason for the price of housing (and raises capex requirements which results in fewer but larger developers, see previous paragraph). Ditto for all the zoning that mandates exclusively single-family homes, and other such pointless exclusionism.

Yeah, developers acting in their own interests isn't going to magically fix everything - there's no shortage of examples of how "chart goes up forever" thinking leads to nasty externalities and tends to run into a brick wall at some point, and how manipulative the big players in the real-estate market can be.

But painting NIMBYism in such reductionist (and long-term economic-investment backward) as "development would make real estate investors and developers lose money" would just result in people fighting entirely the wrong battles with entirely the wrong message to actually have a chance at changing things in a useful way.

SF is not the only place with a housing crisis. In fact I would say SF is a pretty extreme case.

Seattle and NYC are both examples of places that funnel all development into a select few areas where the market for land is cornered.

> the more you care about "I don't want the wrong people living next to me"

Then, by some modern definition, you are a nazi and a bigot.

Greed is exactly the right word. There is a flat unwillingness to acknowledge or reason from the fact by so many homeowners that they are sitting on giant, completely unearned windfalls. There’s a huge sense of entitlement around these inflated prices.

It is an unearned windfall, but people deserve to keep their homes. It bears noting that the issue is caused by property investors, not homeowners. How about we go for the individuals that own more than 3 properties and let grandma keep what she earned?

She may have earned the house to some degree (the article outlines a number of government subsidies which make this doubtful), but she definitely didn’t earn the land value increase.

I’m reminded of this quote:

> Landlords grow rich in their sleep without working, risking or economizing. The increase in the value of land, arising as it does from the efforts of an entire community, should belong to the community and not to the individual who might hold title.

Marx or Lenin couldn't have said it better. Marxists have a fetish with seizing private property and forcefully equalizing people in poverty.

Sure but most people just want to live in that house, not capitalize on it

Grandma, living in the same house she’s lived in since 1972, collecting a fixed income pension cheque once a month, is not what I’d describe as a “rich person.”

Look instead to the people who own golf courses, sports stadiums, super yachts, private jets and the like.

Everyone knows all property is owned by grandma.

Yeah I have to agree- all that increase in value doesn’t mean anything unless she sells it, which she won’t do until she dies anyway.

Yup. I think a 90% tax on real estate capital gains would be the solution. That would also disincentivize housing speculators et al.

In addition, a 90% tax on real estate income (rental income minus costs like mortgage, interest, maintenance, property taxes, etc) would also disincentivize people who buy properties just to rent them out.

> Landlords grow rich in their sleep without working, risking or economizing.

They are risking. Land value can go up or it can go down. It just has been mostly going up (in real terms) in the past decades, but it's far from certainty. You can lose money by investing in real estate, just like in everything else.

The question isn’t: does grandma get to keep living in the home, there’s no one that’s against that.

The question is who, if anyone gets the million bucks, that she didn’t pay for or earn, when the house is sold.

This isn't true. Homeowners vote in favour of policies that benefit landlords as well. It will look like the landlord is conspiring against tenants but landlords hardly have any political representation compared to tenants.

>The entire system is rigged against anything that would impact home prices - such as an increase in supply or change in zoning laws.

The prices in high demand areas, are going to be high, whether residents can legally oppose new developments or not. How much does a house cost in California or New York?

> Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners.

This is just a self-defeating excuse. "Monopolised" implies that they're somehow preventing younger people from voting. The only way in which this is a thing is by scheduling elections on days that are inconvenient for younger people to vote.

If you want change in who represents you, the first thing you need to do is vote. The second thing is to get others to vote.

While true, check out this demographic map for the US: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...). The majority of people are over the age of 30, and most of them live in owner-occupied homes. In fact, 66% of all Americans live in owner-occupied homes. I imagine these statistics look similar or even worse in the UK.

There is a real demographic advantage for the elderly, and those who own homes, even if we ignore the propensity for young people to fail to vote.

now compare how many people are in age of 18-35 vs 35-90

> 3. Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners.

This, in my opinion, is the biggest factor compared to the other two. Politicians that want to win power have to win votes. Older people (and homeowners) vote more than younger (renting) people. A party that prioritises younger people over older people will be referred to as His Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition.

The reason Liz Truss was kicked out of the PM's office by her party wasn't because her spending plans were economically illiterate. It's because her plans started rapidly increasing interest rates, so higher mortgages, which is starting the process of fucking over Tory voters.

It's basically The Wire in the making here in the UK. In 10-20 years, if not now already, we are going to have full blown ghettos I'm sure. Whereas 10 years ago I felt safe in most parts of London.

Crime has noticeably gone up and I'm sure it's just going to get worse as gangs increase. Even in safe areas, muggings and knife violence are on the rise.

My children went to a really terrible comprehensive which I had to move them out of. The kind of stuff going on there is just making the next generation of criminals possible. And it's not the school's fault - they just don't have the resources to manage with bulge classes and staff stretched to the mental breaking limit.

It's an utter shambles the state of this country. Without strong leadership it's not changing either - we need an Obama or similar charismatic leader with progressive (or hell, even moderate) ideas at this point to make some change.

One thing this country has going for it over the US is that governments have a mandate to make large changes. In the US, nothing can ever change because of gridlock in congress with filibusters. So we still have some hope here, although lack of proportional representation makes it very difficult to get proper representation.

It’s the whole western world at the same time. The same policies, the same social outcomes. It makes me question whether there is any real democracy; did we all just happen to make the exact same decisions in lock step since the 70s by incredible coincidence?

And it’s not as if the eventual negative outcomes of housing costs continually outstripping wage growth weren’t obvious and growing year on year. Who is actually in control here? Is it blind forces pushing us to an inevitable outcome? The Illuminati? Lizard people?

Is there any free will or are we just doomed to follow this course to who knows where? Can’t we figure out what we actually want as societies, and make policy that matches it?

It seems to me much more about group incentives than some nefarious lockstep plan. Existing homeowners incentives are liking things as they are and increasing wealth on paper. What’s more interesting is what changed since the ~60s inflection, since before, things were built. People literally experienced NYC grow into a megalopolis. I’d say it’s more likely that more democracy was the problem in stifling things, when every environmental review and city council meeting blocked things and threw out city mayors that were pro building. China is totalitarian and they are the ones who manage to rapidly build cities and bullet trains out of nothing.

> It seems to me much more about group incentives than some nefarious lockstep plan.

Yes, probably, but isn’t this worse? Group incentives favour those that already have capital (material and political), which creates a feedback-loop increasing the rich-poor divide until… what exactly? What’s the end-state? A return to feudalism? Bloody revolution?

It just seems like there was a “once upon a time” where politics was about “this is the society we want”, and they tried to build it. Now it seems we’ve all just given up.

Meaningless! Meaningless! Let’s deconstruct society until we can argue that a future of 1% home ownership is somehow better.

It's an interesting observation. I'm part of a few UK and Canadian regional subreddits, and the topics of conversation are often very similar. House prices are too high, we need to build more, the government is favouring boomers, the economy is stagnating, we need more manufacturing and less real estate speculation etc. What's particularly interesting is that often in the UK ones people paint Canada as being far better. The Canadian ones seem to idolise the US.

It's clearly a global structural issue. Low interest rates are a pan-national commonality - and they can take a lot of blame for part of the situation we're in now. But they don't explain housing shortages.

Population growth probably plays a big part - housing is always going to be lagging population growth. The various stories I've seen about Japan - with low rents, falling house prices and large numbers of abandoned houses - seem to map with the falling Japanese population. "Things were better in the 70s/80s/90s" probably partly just means that the ratio of houses to people was better. The population of most major western cities was falling or flat through much of the 70s and 80s - leading to the situation where my parent's generation all seem to have snapped up large, well located houses for not very much money.

I'm fully supportive of the idea that, with all things equal, if we build more houses then supply and demand will drop prices. But if you allow unchecked population growth (which in the UK and Canada seems to be primarily caused by immigration) then the amount of building required is effectively infinite.

I've visited the Toronto area from the UK more or less every year since I was a child, and the overwhelming story is one of huge development. The change in the suburbs of Toronto over the past 30 years has been vast and unlike anything I've seen in the UK. Yet that clearly hasn't been enough to stop house prices going crazy as well. The net effect, though, is that there's miles and miles of sprawl and 6 lane streets dominated by cars. The answer definitely isn't to build more of that. The population of Canada has grown by 40% in the last 30 years.

Population growth combined with an ageing population and the kind of rights purchasing a house gives you in the west create increasing inequality driven by land. That seems to be the underlying issue that's driving city house values up everywhere.

There are possibly some answers. In the UK in the 60s-80s we built entire new cities, with the land purchased by the government at agricultural value so that the entire uplift was captured by the developers rather than speculators.

Which Canadian subreddits idolize the U.S? Generally both countries have pretty similarly horrible development patterns with a tiny amount of exceptions. My impression is that the U.S just does sprawl and car-centricity to an extreme, like Toronto, but I can't say I've come across anywhere more compelling.

I have noticed the same thing as the person you're replying to.

I think the reason is there are a lot of tech / tech-adjacent workers on Reddit and they know people less than 100 miles away (in the USA) are doing the same job as them, possibly at the same company even, but are getting significantly higher compensation packages.

People have been saying this for years. Why do Canadian techies stay in canada? Tough immigration to US keeping them trapped? Seems like that's been the drumbeat of the central US tech scene for years and its resulted in all the engineering grads from those schools trying to flock to the coasts, and there basically being not much of a tech industry at all in the wake.

Canadian techie here :) I moved to the US for work super early in my career, and recently moved back to Canada after nearly a decade (mostly just for a change in scenery). I work in games, so I never made the super high FAANG wages I see talked about everywhere on here, but it's true even in games that you'll make significantly more in the US than in Canada. I make more than I need for the lifestyle that makes me happy though, so the pay disparity is honestly a non issue for me.

US immigration laws are a complete non issue for tech workers (at least in my experience, you still have to fill out a boat load of paperwork, but if a US company wants you, things move pretty quick). Mostly, people I work with seem to not want to move the the US for the same reasons people don't want to move to another state: they're happy enough where they are, they'd be leaving friends/family, they're worried if the move that their life will be worse, they already make enough money to be comfortable (if not inordinately wealthy). If they're parents, they usually are also wary about uprooting their kids' lives.

The latter half of your comment is much more important to me personally, even as someone who's usually up for an adventure, but if you don't have a degree my impression is that it's pretty much not feasible to cross the border and get a job, or at least sufficiently annoying that I'd need to want that a whole lot more than I do. Aside from that though, I only tend to like the U.S in small doses; it's an extremely work-obsessed/stuff-obsessed place that feels a little culturally hollow in some way, but that is a cool place in other ways.

I suppose my consideration could be different if I got a job that paid > $150k or something and could actually take it, but the recession is here and the job market is dead, and so far it hasn't crossed my mind to try and make it possible, so I'm going to continue draining my savings while I look for a job here in Vancouver that will probably be below $130k CAD

Fwiw, I don't have a degree (just a diploma from a college in toronto) and it has been a non issue. It mattered slightly when I had less than 3 years of work experience, but after that no one has cared.

We have very different views of the US though. I felt the same as you when my only US experience was in the Bay Area, but after living in Chicago for 5+ years and having visited a bunch of places around the country, I miss a lot about American culture now that I'm not there.

I've visited Chicago once, and hope it's not too long before I visit again. I actually love many bits of the U.S culturally and physically, I meant to say that I just don't know that I'd prefer to live there for an extended period of time.

Regarding the degree, it was less a matter of whether people care, and more about the actual visa. Perhaps a two-year diploma is more workable; I only have a 1 year technical diploma from a Uni, and although I haven't aggressively pursued getting across, it doesn't seem like I'd meet the requirements with it. Would be curious though, because the job market is truly shit here atm.

Just took a short road-trip down through Washington and Oregon, and really enjoyed my time. You're right in that I didn't think much about the difference until I got down to the Bay Area. I do think there is some sort of imbued mega-capitalist eat eat eat buy buy buy nature to many other places though that just sort of vibes me out sometimes, and maybe some airports are an example of this; almost a volume difference.

I noticed it for the first time when passing through the Minneapolis airport of all places. Felt like there was a hundred neon signs flashing at me to eat some burger or get a pedicure while waiting for my flight. Every table at a particular restaurant had an iPad right when they came out. While we have Cabela's and Bass Pro Shops, there's are basically theme parks. That kind of thing; it's not everywhere, in-fact it's probably a rare feeling I get, but it's a level of excess that's hard to feel comfortable around.

Family commitments, in some cases.

Housing in Japan is affordable even in the big cities that are not shrinking (yet). The main reasons why are very liberal zoning, ubiquitous and functional public transport that makes continuing long distance feasible, and tolerance for tightly packed apartments and houses that would be considered far too small in most of the West.

And, perhaps, a vicious but lasting lesson taught to property speculators at the start of the 1990s.

>The various stories I've seen about Japan - with low rents, falling house prices and large numbers of abandoned houses - seem to map with the falling Japanese population.

What you're hearing isn't accurate. Rents are going up in Tokyo, not down. Sure, there's a bunch of abandoned houses way out in remote rural areas, but no one wants to live there (for good reason). Housing prices do seem a lot more stable than in Anglosphere nations, however, and they're constantly building new housing (and knocking down old buildings to make way for them). Just like many other places, the population is concentrating in the big cities, so the population is generally rising there. However, unlike the US in particular, the Japanese yen has fallen a lot in value during the pandemic, and combined with recent inflation, this might have something to do with the recent rise in rents.

Sure we can. But many of the younger people most negatively impacted by housing policy don't bother to vote at all. Or if they do vote they do so based on social issues. I've never seen housing availability come up as the #1 issue in any voter survey.

> Who is actually in control here? Is it blind forces pushing us to an inevitable outcome? The Illuminati? Lizard people?

less blind forces, more "well, what would you do in their situation": the people who first paid money for a given square of land were also the first to try to convince someone else to pay them more for that same land

natural resources aside, land only really has the value that other people are willing to pay for it, like currency. so if you want the "growth of your asset", the only thing you can really do is convince people the land is worth more than what you paid for it, for whatever reasons you dream up

globalisation just made everyone's marketing messages go 'round the world

> less blind forces, more "well, what would you do in their situation": the people who first paid money for a given square of land were also the first to try to convince someone else to pay them more for that same land

It seems a bit silly to argue that increasing land prices is principally a result of marketing. The amount of earth on the planet in the last 10k years essentially hasn't changed but the number of humans has increased almost 2000%. Population growth is surely a "blind force", right?

that's true, market forces like supply and demand affect everything in the economy, and while we've grown, our landmass has remained static.

which parts of the land are worth more than others though, I think the article does a good job of providing examples too: people living closer to each central city had higher wages, which meant they could pay more for the land pieces... so they did, which meant they had to ask more when selling in order to 'break even' or 'realize on their investment'

i guess the bigger question is: why did we tie our need for shelter into the economy? in order to achieve constant growth (ensure someone isnt left 'holding the bag'), we have to either be willfully ignorant of a growing population, or maintain a fantasy of there always being viable room for ever more people

i hope we start colonizing the moon or even mars before we have to deal with fallout from the above...

> which parts of the land are worth more than others though, I think the article does a good job of providing examples too: people living closer to each central city had higher wages, which meant they could pay more for the land pieces... so they did, which meant they had to ask more when selling in order to 'break even' or 'realize on their investment'

I don’t think that’s a very compelling explanation for increased market prices for city centers either. It doesn’t address the rival (and more likely IMO) claim that prices increased for economic reasons (maybe city salaries increased even further or even something as nebulous as “Hollywood portrayed cities as vibrant, desirable places to several generations”).

The thing is, we used to respond to such growth easily in a way that prevented land prices from being so out of reach for average workers. Here is the population of Los Angeles over the years:

1850 1,610 —

1860 4,385 172.4%

1870 5,728 30.6%

1880 11,183 95.2%

1890 50,395 350.6%

1900 102,479 103.4%

1910 319,198 211.5%

1920 576,673 80.7%

1930 1,238,048 114.7%

1940 1,504,277 21.5%

1950 1,970,358 31.0%

1960 2,479,015 25.8%

1970 2,811,801 13.4%

1980 2,968,528 5.6%

1990 3,485,398 17.4%

2000 3,694,820 6.0%

2010 3,792,621 2.6%

2020 3,898,747 2.8%

As you can see, the city used to experience massive decade over decade growth. It also used to be zoned for 10 million people in the 1960s, today though, its zoned for a little bit over 4 million people, creating the housing crisis we see today because not a lot of properties are even able to be built up even if they are available for sale and potentially a turnover. There's no shortage of land, its just mismanaged.

Sure, I was remarking narrowly about the “forces vs marketing” claims. I don’t have a position on land prices have adapted with population growth (although I’m not sure looking narrowly at a single city is particularly compelling).

Is it really true that there's no shortage of land? I lived in the LA area and rarely saw empty plots. What is obvious is that we could improve density by encouraging more mid-rises and high-rises.

>It seems a bit silly to argue that increasing land prices is principally a result of marketing. The amount of earth on the planet in the last 10k years essentially hasn't changed but the number of humans has increased almost 2000%. Population growth is surely a "blind force", right?

But in some places population is the same or even declining and prices are still going up.

Sure, there are definitely other factors as well—for example, the local economy may be growing such that there is more intense competition for housing in close proximity to downtown. This is also a pretty “blind force” (rather than homeowners marketing their homes).

There's a little more to it. If it was merely about getting all the profit you could out of land, there's be no sense capping a bay area neighborhood at single family home densities, when you could probably build a 25 story condo on each single family home lot and sell each story as its own luxury condo for the price of that 1930s single story california home that sits there today.

I think nimbyism just appeals to the monkey side of the brain we all have. If you are happy and surviving, there's probably millions of years of biological evolution in your behavior that's telling you to keep up what you are doing where you are. There's probably a side of your brain that subconsciously gets irritated at seeing more humans move into an area competing for resources with you, even if today that just means a parking spot at the grocery store and not an appreciable dent on game populations. Stuff like cities and dense living on top of many different "tribes" only happened within the last few thousand years, that's only like 50-100 generations and that's only considering those ancient cities that were around then, plenty of places have been rural for all of human history. Not nearly enough time to expect a significant amount of adaption, and that's only if there is a remarkably strong selective pressure favoring adaption.

I can't see a problem here. It only happens because (slightly) more than half of voters are happy with their housing situation and prefer it stay the way it is (that is, perpetually increasing prices, so they can earn equity => retire). They consciously vote for people who ensures just that.

There is no failure of democracy here, but rather a good indication of it's strength.

It's true that the people are getting what they're voting for, but I wouldn't call this "not a failure of democracy", when the voters are causing their society to decay and die slowly because of their own short-sightedness.

However, we haven't exactly seen better systems of governance, plus not all democratic societies are filled with such short-sighted idiots like we see in the US, and those societies are doing much better long-term and stability-wise.

How is this short-sightedness? Voters are voting for what's best for them, and it is indeed best for them. There are only two ways of fixing it: cancel democracy (in a dictatorship no one gives a damn about what people want, and developers make max profit by building everything they want), or cancel market economy, so the housing can't be sold or bought and the Party distributes it as it sees fit. Both looks to me worse than what we have today.

Cruel explanation: there is no way of organising society that's good for more than a half of people.

Nice false dichotomy you got there.

It's not coincidence, and it's not conspiracy. It's zeitgeist, and people seeing one place do something and decide that's a good idea, and people following everything from scientific (and pseudoscientific) studies that came out around the time, to philosophical works published around the time, to all of the above that were old but re-popularized around the time.

You can just as easily ask "why was there a rise of right-wing nationalist and fascist sentiment throughout the Western world in the mid-to-late 2010s?" There's no grand conspiracy to any of it, and looking for one is likely to lead you down exactly the road that far too many conspiracy theorists have gone recently.

And, um, closely related, be aware that the "lizard people rule the world" thing isn't just a funny joke. It's deeply and inextricably rooted in a raft of antisemitic tropes, slurs, and propaganda going back...I forget exactly how long, but at least many decades. In fact, in general, when you encounter any conspiracy theory that posits a shadowy group of people secretly ruling the world, the chances are nearly 100% that you can trace it back to a version where that "shadowy group" is explicitly Jews. This is a big part of why conspiracy theorists have a tendency to find themselves in a pipeline to fascism.

The entire world was (and still is, to some extent) horribly racist. Every nation, institution and venerable principle you hold sacred has horrible racism lurking in its very bones, if you dig deep enough. You can’t, therefore, dismiss anything on that basis alone. Argue with an issue on its merits alone; to attack the supposed secret origin of an issue is equivalent to an ad hominem argument.

Also, alternative explanation of the lizard people thing: <http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8600>

What if the entire world is mostly rational, and it is the HN crowd / snowflakes from the richest US suburbs who are bonkers?

Ah, yes; the good old "everything is impure, which means that everything is equally bad, so it doesn't matter if I do/support bad things, because I have no choice!"

Yeah, no. That doesn't fly.

There's a massive difference between, say, "the fact that I am a person of European descent living in upstate NY is only possible because of the genocide of and racism against generations of Native Americans; therefore, my entire existence is predicated on structural racism" and "many, many groups have vilified Jewish people for centuries for a variety of reasons (that are out of scope of this discussion); that vilification has led to ostracism and genocide on numerous occasions and still does to this day, frequently based entirely on completely false stereotypes; the propagation of those stereotypes still to this day leads real people to choose to ostracize and murder Jewish people; "lizard people who rule the world" is one of those stereotypes, and participating in its propagation does actual, measurable harm to Jewish people."

You are willfully mischaracterizing my statement. Of course everything has different degrees of badness. But everything has enough badness for it to be dismissed just as easily as you dismissed the lizard people theory as a secret racist conspiracy.

I’m curious how far this stretches. Do you claim that “They Live” is antisemitic?

Recommend this book: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/164-democracy-agai...

> did we all just happen to make the exact same decisions in lock step since the 70s by incredible coincidence?

Not US, and for reasons, the housing crisis is not _that_ bad where I live, but: in principle our country is exactly like our parent's generation imagined it. It's perfectly aligned with their interests. Where they'd hike to a hut in the mountains once, there is now a paved road, so they can still drive to the hut, even though they're not able to walk anymore. Somewhere else they built a cable car, for exactly the same purpose. They have houses. They have cars. They dominate every political institution there is. They voted to keep the conscription, so enough poor young people who alternatively chose community service would be available when they need care, eventually. They go on vacations three times a year. And heaven forbid they'd need to give up _anything_ they once had. Political parties that suggest anything like that would have no chance in elections.

> Who is actually in control here?

I think they are.

This is definitely it. It's a question of demographics. The developed world used to be for young people because people there were mostly young. Now decisions are taken by and for old people, and those of us who aren't are afterthoughts.

A good example of this is the age at which our constitutions were drafted vs how old politicians are now. This is also the case in Norway but I think the US is a more relatable example on HN: Biden is twice the average age of the delegates in 1787.

The millenial generation is now the largest cohort in the United States.

The issue is that generally, it takes a while for a cohort to build up political power.

Especially when political power is almost exclusively financial.

Gen X matters though as they’re almost as big and are split on who won the housing/education lottery and who didn’t. Its oldest members are 58.

EY wrote a good book about that very topic: "Inadequate Equilibria -- Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck" https://equilibriabook.com/

> did we all just happen to make the exact same decisions in lock step since the 70s by incredible coincidence?

It might have been a combination of circumstances and intellectual tides turning. The 70ties saw stagflation everywhere, which led to a decade of economic problems that couldn't be fixed with existing, socialist policies. Finally, voters everywhere (starting with Thatcher in UK ) decided it's time to try something else.

Part of it might also have been a disillusionment with big leftist ideas in general - in the late seventies, there was enough reliable information coming from USSR and China to make it clear that anything resembling communism (a holy grail for much of the left back then) is an unmitigated disaster. People started to realise that capitalism, much like democracy, might be bad, but is better than all the alternatives.

The interesting thing is that Russia and China are capitalistic now, and they both manage to output a huge amount of high rise housing for sale.

Makes one wonder whether capitalism is actually compatible with democracy.

If you believe Karl Marx then the answer is no: capitalism is incompatible with democracy, because of the basic human nature. If you allow people to vote, they will vote to take money from the rich and give it to them for free. Or for government to create money out of thin air, and give them away.

Karl was proven wrong recently by the Swiss though, who voted against UBI in a referendum.

> since the 70s

Is part of the problem that we think the 70s was normal and not the outlier?

https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco...

Certainly there have been a couple recent bubbles, but even as recently as 2012 we were basically within the bounds of the long-term normal.

I'd like to say it's a supply problem, and demographics does support that argument to some extent, but the fact that it involves most of the western world makes me think it may have to do with monetary policy.

> I'd like to say it's a supply problem

It is to the extent that various laws and regulations prevent or strongly disincentivize new construction, yes.

> the fact that it involves most of the western world makes me think it may have to do with monetary policy

It does. Mortgage loans have always been one of the primary places that governments choose to put newly printed money. The ostensible purpose of this is to make it easier for people to own homes, but what it actually does is bid up home prices to the point where consumers are no better off than they were before, but financial institutions and other corporate interests make a nice extra profit. It's similar to the way the easy availability of financial aid for college has not actually made it easier for people to go to the college of their choice (indeed, admission rates to many colleges have sharply declined as financial aid becomes more available), it's just transferred more wealth to the colleges from taxpayers.

Hahaha. Man wants to be fit, swears on his diet routine, sees a chocolate bar on the kitchen table literally 3 seconds later and reverses his decision. Is he under the control of his rational mind? Will? Does an alcoholic choose to continue to drink alcohol after he is an addict?

There is will, and there is will.

Pretending that this doesn't apply to whole societies and that today's secular societies are not driven mostly by a deterministic mechanism consisting of human nature combined with the environment (technology + physical world) is a fool's act, and the ubiqiotus internet commenter attitude. Man yelling at the clouds, clouds of human nature and environment.

It's not really the entire world: See Spain [1]: Until the financial crisis in 2007, the country liberalized building, often quite dense as opposed to plain sprawl. See, for instance, the growth in the towns surrounding Madrid around train stations. The crisis slowed it down massively though, in part because a lot of builders lost their shirts, as the building became massive overbuilding. But when demand goes up enough, it's still possible to build, and build high. In my home town in Spain, people can still afford homes. If there's an issue, it's still just jobs instead.

So yes, this is all something that is politically solvable in the west. We just need a unified legislative recipe, and strong advocacy. Other lobbying groups manage to get through very unpopular legislation. Why not for something that would actually help?

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WSCNDW01ESA470N

Some latin american cities are starting to make even nyc look small. I expect in 30 years that a lot of latin america will look like southeast asian cities while American cities look the same as they did 30 years ago for another 30 years.

It not nearly as universal as you think.

There's a pattern I've noticed of outsourcing code requirements. Most municipalities seem to adopt the international building code, and then because that code book is updated all the time, and none of the local officials actually understand it, they start to require that applicants prove that they meet the code. Planning commissions start to believe that they need to control everything that everybody does, but they shouldn't. Because everything is a shifting target, and proof is almost impossible, everything gets road blocked.

For the most part, I agree with building codes. They serve a purpose by ensuring that unsafe buildings aren't created. But they've become so esoteric, that meeting them is an exercise in futility.

I can't wait for the day that a "safe building" AI just watches everything, and tells people what to do. That way even unskilled labor can do work, and the work will be up to a safe standard.

Code officials are the worst sort of power tripping bureaucrats. I can't wait for them to be eliminated.

There's an essay written on this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

It definitely seems to be more of an Anglosphere problem than elsewhere. I've been learning other languages with the long term view of permanently escaping the Anglosphere in the next 5 years, unless I finally manage to land a job that pays enough to allow me some stability.

Yes, the homevoter mentality is much worse in the English speaking countries than it is in continental Europe or in developed East Asia.

> Anglosphere

In my opinion, this is an underutilized term that could be used to group trends/behaviors and consequently policy decisions.

There may be entire regions without this problem, but it is absolutely not restricted to the Anglosphere.

In all these systems where "the world over" we have the same end result, what do we have in common? Shareholders, for profit companies, consultancies, an entire sector of the economy is just consultancies. Its death by a thousand cuts set up by the incentives. You don't know what the hell you are doing, so hey lets act like you do by bringing in a consultancy who does know what they are doing because that's their job. In effect, you get to be bad at your job but be good at your job since you rubber stamped "bring in a consultant" on the project.

Then what about these consultants? Well, they don't need to actually solve the problem either. They just make various plans and present a slide deck to management at the end and collect a check. Whether the plan works or not doesn't even matter here, because the consultants got paid already and are on to the next job, the manager looks good because they brought in a consultancy, and if shit fails in the next three years well its no ones fault, because management will act like they did everything right bringing in the consultancy and will cut other staff first.

Consultancyism is everywhere these days. Its the next big thing in emerging markets which is even scarier and only a fig leaf away from imperialism with the terms of how some of these deals are struck, always to the benefit of capital with the people seen as a resource for extraction or exploitation. Consultancyism probably also encourages an unhealthy mercenary outlook on life. Never taking pride in projects because they are never your projects in your community, they are just jobs elsewhere to make some money.

Disclosure: I am a very senior data science consultant in an infrastructure management consultancy

Consultancy can be a good thing - or a bad thing, depending on which consultants are brought in, and why.

It is one of the oldest tropes that consultants are brought in to tell people what they already know - and there is some truth in it. But when it comes down to it, consultants are asked to do this job because they are external - and they can tell truth to power without being seen as having an internal political agenda.

As consultants, we are brought in by clients to provide skills that they don't have in house. There tend to be two reasons for this. Either they want us for a short period to do a specific task which wouldn't be worth them recruiting for, or they are looking for a longer term relationship - in which case we can offer them access to a wider pool of talent than they would get by recruiting in.

Finally, I have worked with a great number of talented folks at all stages of their careers. Almost without exception, every one of them has been passionate about their work, and determined to do the best job possible for the clients. And a number of them have left us to work directly for clients.

[edited for typos]

Something like 10-50 of the population worldwide, depending on where/how you measure, moved from rural areas to cities since WW2. This completely upended the large scale population density situation that had existed for millennia. Also, as I'm sure anyone in California or Texas will tell you, there are 1) only so many good places to build and/or 2) so far someone is willing to commute. There is lots of land available to build on 4 hours from San Francisco at pretty reasonable prices (I looked at a 2.5 acre triangle of land with a seasonal creek on it for $40,000), but nobody will pay $900/sq ft for a house that far from their office, even if they WFH 4 days a week.

almost trivial to build upward, yet it's prohibited by zoning.

also, people getting surprised by the continuation of urbanization is ridiculous (but also a complete fucking tragedy).

Whether or not there is real democracy anywhere (I'd say "no"), there has been a deep cultural homogenization imposed by the media since the 70s. And a really strong deviation from fact-based bottom-up world modeling.

It's technically possible that people just decided to vote the same way in half of the world for decades. Besides, the local plutocracy wanting the same things everywhere isn't easy to explain either.

> Can’t we figure out what we actually want as societies, and make policy that matches it?

Not in a democracy, not when respecting free market and property. But they are able to do it in China.

> It’s the whole western world at the same time. The same policies, the same social outcomes.

Cities were pretty similar to how they are now for all of human history except a brief period where things were weird after WW2 - see A Farewell to Alms and everything by Ricardo.

The US has one of the lowest Price to Rent ratios in the entire world.

And it's not like the US is rosey. There's really no where to look on the planet for somewhere that's doing things right beside maybe Singapore (which is a single city and has somewhat socialized the entire housing market) and Japan (which suffered through a lost 30 years and has a pretty rapidly declining population - possibly mainly as a result).

In both cases, I'd argue the US has a better housing market than either of those places. And again, it's still pretty sucky in most places in the US.

It’s just the natural development of capitalism, as its internal contradictions generate worse and worse crises. The ruling class (the ones that own most capital) are disincentivised from changing the system, since any effective change would require them not be the ruling class anymore.

The way out is revolution, where the working class become the ruling class. We may yet see that in our lifetimes in several countries.

>Who is actually in control here? Is it blind forces pushing us to an inevitable outcome? The Illuminati? Lizard people?

Nobody. If you wanted to point fingers though, then the reason nothing gets done is because "grandma". Not because grandma is some evil conspirator but rather because this is used to silence arguments by saying "you are hurting the weak, don't you feel ashamed?"

Honestly, I don't believe there is a solution that can be achieved through democratic vote because the only people that are being hurt are people who don't get to vote, aka children who will need a home in the future or migrants who are about to move.

Some form of private land trust will have to do a georgist experiment and reimburse tenants as some form of UBI. 50% of the profits will be reinvested, 50% reimbursed.

The developed world has one great example of functional housing policy: Japan.

A single policy that allows for unique neighborhoods, affordable houses, supports small businesses, and enables walkable cities.

Just.... do what we know already works.

For anyone not familiar, here is a primer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfm2xCKOCNk

Singapore also has a functional housing policy, not perfect but pretty good:

https://youtu.be/3dBaEo4QplQ

Housing has become more affordable in Japan about the same time as the country completed its demographic transition and its population began to decline.

Personally, I'd prefer my country do something that works faster than waiting for people to die. But yeah, on the other side of the curve, anything you try works like magic.

This is a terrible example as Japan is demographically imploding. If you buy a house in Japan it’s worth less over time.

That's exactly how it should be. Housing is a consumable, not an investment.

Why would you think that? A well built house can last hundreds of years. Why should it not be an investment?

It makes absolutely no sense to put any kind of money into something that one day will be worthless - like I read that it happens in Japan that on average a house is worthless after about 40 years.

> It makes absolutely no sense to put any kind of money into something that one day will be worthless

Cars, TVs, bicycles, the vast majority of furniture.

> like I read that it happens in Japan that on average a house is worthless after about 40 years.

And if you rent a place you "lose" all your money the moment you move out of it.

If my mortgage payment was cut in half but in return my house didn't appreciate in value, that would be a net win for me since I could dump more money into other investment vehicles.

Heck, just reducing the amount of friction of moving would introduce huge positive changes.

If houses in nice cities didn't cost over a million, people could move away from bad lawmakers!

> Cars, TVs, bicycles, the vast majority of furniture.

These are consumables. Except maybe for the car if its something that one day can be worth a lot of money because it is nice. Like a '67 Mustang :)

> If houses in nice cities didn't cost over a million, people could move away from bad lawmakers!

I don't understand what you are trying to say. I see a benefit having a nice city and somehow a high house price is what you pay to live in a nice city.

>These are consumables

What do you think housing is? Some perpetual motion machine? Of course a house is a consumable.

> I don't understand what you are trying to say.

I own a house, because houses cost so damn much, and are so hard to find, and mortgage rates have increased, realistically I cannot change a house for a long time.

This means my job mobility is limited, I am stuck finding work in my local area.

It also means if I disagree with local politics, well too bad, I can't vote with my feet.

Many people are in this same situation.

People who are poor and stuck in cities with few prospects, cannot realistically move to coastal cities with higher paying jobs because of how high housing prices are.

Traditionally if people wanted to have better opportunities, escape corrupt small town politics, or just get away from abusive situations, they moved to a big city.

Housing is so absurdly expensive, none of that can happen anymore.

> I see a benefit having a nice city and somehow a high house price is what you pay to live in a nice city.

That is a new thing. For ages NYC had cheap dives artists could rent out, Seattle had basements musicians could rent out.

Heck for over a century NYC was a beacon around the world for people who wanted a better life, better opportunities. Now you'd better be in finance, tech, or already have a rent controlled unit.

People traveled across the country for the opportunities that San Francisco offered, a fresh start in a beautiful state.

That hope, that potential for a brighter future, is gone, largely because housing is so damn expensive.

Historically good cities have been affordable in America, but the problem with housing policies it is benefits current homeowners (such as myself!) to have housing stock stay small and limited.

But those policies hold back the entire country.

While I wouldn't call it consumable, you do have to put money into it if you want to keep it working and in good state

But the house part is not an investment. It's the land that appreciates in value, the value isn't in a bunch of bricks and boards that sits, it's the location of the piece of land.

The most highly valued residential land only has high value because of supporting infrastructure and other people.

Be it incredible schools, or a high quality of life from density, or proximity to culture, value comes from the things people build around houses, not the houses themselves.

Proof of this is trivial, huge mansions in the middle of nowhere cost less than a studio apartment in a desirable area.

Europe and America are also demographically imploding, but real estate just keeps getting more expensive. Japan is a great example.

So much is possible in Japan due to the high trust and high conformity culture. I've lived in JP and Australia and the type of dense living that can be very nice in JP would be absolutely miserable in AU, due mostly to the people.

Another primer if you still have any doubt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUFZ1_fC3Kw

Note: I originally said Britain built 30k houses last year, which commenters have corrected. Thank you!

I don't really understand all this. Surely the main reason for a lack of housing is the difference between house demand (e.g. Britain took in 606k people in net immigration last year) compared to house supply (Britain built I think around 200k houses last year).

The state shouldn't need to build houses (in fact it doesn't; it just uses your tax money to pay private companies to build houses). It should just make the building and zoning rules simple enough that it's possible to make money from building houses and selling them, and let people get on with it.

The state does need to make houses to provide for lower paid people who do critical jobs.

Lower paid... critical jobs... State.

Hahaha. Can't we just ditch capitalism altogether? It can't even pay and provide housing to people who perform critical jobs.

Or are we discussing building barracks for slaves?

Yep, and people who don't do critical jobs or earn much at all tend to want somewhere to live too (and subsidising their private sector housing costs in areas with housing shortages usually costs more in the long run)

Not really discussing the slowdown of building and mass-selloff of council owned housing since 1979 is a curious omission from an otherwise detailed description of public policy on housing. Private sector housebuilders have different incentives from public authorities, and maximising the profit from a site need not mean maximising the number of available homes (especially not given Britons with purchasing power were the original suburbanites). Nor does it mean building on all the limited supply of local land suitable for development at once, when it can be released in tranches (homebuilders have several years worth of plots with planning permission for every home they build in a year)

Which jobs are critical? What would happen if those people decided to take higher paid but less "critical" jobs?

NHS workers such as nurses and porters are the obvious example. Hospitals can't function without them, but they are paid very little.

If the UK is the same as the US then Agile shaman is mission critical.

That doesn't make sense: if your job is indeed "critical" you have enough leverage to negotiate higher pay, don't you?

Agree about the supply/demand difference causing the difference but I think your numbers are off. The UK build around 200k new 'dwellings' last year (financial year ending March 2022) according to [1] but I don't know whether that accounts for demolitions.

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...

> Britain built I think around 30k houses last year

The latest house building statistics show that in the financial year ending March 2022 there were 204,530 dwellings completed in the UK.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...

When you consider there are decades of under supply to make up for, this is still a paltry figure.

Still doesn't excuse quoting a wrong figure. I for one appreciate the correction.

Oh - fair. I can't remember where I got that figure from. It might've been a quarterly average.

I'll amend, but noting the change.

Not really. It would also have to tax hoarding them to prevent driving rents higher. Which would hurt landlords sitting in the Parliament. All 100% of them.

The problem is land. Land is not a normal commodity. Nobody makes it - all land rights are derived ultimately through legal fiat and violence, not labor.

Somebody who consumes a lot of high value land doesnt create the conditions for making more like somebody who, say, buys a lot of cars. They just create more profits for nearby land owners. Hoarding drives more hoarding and higher prices in a positive feedback loop unless arrested via a tax.

The elites can accomodate their market dysfunction by building public housing. They can neuter this market dysfunction by applying a steep land value tax (or by increasing property taxes).

Or they can sit back and profit, parasitically extracting ever higher land rents from the real economy.

Land is fixed, but only valuable because of the location it is situated in. And what happens as the location is not fixed. You cannot make more land, but you can alter the value of locations with incentives and taxes and government programs.

Part of the solution could be governments shifting people and jobs around to secondary less popular cities.

Almost every company doesn't employ people in incredibly high price locations. They can't afford to. And some of the ones that can will sometimes move, but they'll do it for bottom up reasons, not for political, state-led ones.

Also, the big contributor is Zoom. If you can work from anywhere, as some jobs can because of Zoom, you can live anywhere.

> The state shouldn't need to build houses (in fact it doesn't; it just uses your tax money to pay private companies to build houses). It should just make the building and zoning rules simple enough that it's possible to make money from building houses and selling them, and let people get on with it.

This is the modern wisdom in the west - it's the approach taken by many governments since the Reagan era (not just in the UK) and it's demonstrably unsuccessful in almost every metric except one: votes. Which is the only reason it continues. It panders to those who already hold assets, while doing very little to move the dial for those who need shelter.

Migration is not a new phenomenon; citing it as an excuse for the utter failure of modern housing policy is disingenuous.

I cannot comment on other countries, but this is clearly not practiced in the US. The US has not simplified building and zoning rules or made them more permissive. The US follows the third option: do nothing and hope it fixes itself.

I'm confused... Are you arguing that zoning, red-tape, and generally anti-development politicians and voters aren't the fundamental problem here? How exactly do you envision a government housing program to side-step all of the above issues? Do you think voters who fight relentlessly to block development feel differently about public housing? How do you expect it to get funded even, when a single unit of "affordable housing" costs ~$1m to build in a place like San Francisco?

> Are you arguing that zoning, red-tape, and generally anti-development politicians and voters aren't the fundamental problem here?

Minus the leading language (as I presume these so-called "anti-development" politicians don't self-define as such), yes, this is what I'm arguing.

> Do you think voters who fight relentlessly to block development feel differently about public housing?

I believe the tales of such voters are highly overstated, a really common red-herring used by advocates of private developer subsidy to deflect criticism. Do NIMBYs exist? Of course. But their impact is overstated, and overconflated with genuine concerns: there are valid reasons to object to new developments, though these have a tendency to be lumped in with less valid objectors for political gain/expediency.

> How do you expect it to get funded even, when a single unit of "affordable housing" costs ~$1m to build in a place like San Francisco?

Have you ever stopped to think about why it costs $1m to build such a unit in SF in 2023? About what system of incentives lead to the current status quo? I can assure you it wasn't decades of publicly-run projects.

> I believe the tales of such voters are highly overstated, a really common red-herring used by advocates of private developer subsidy to deflect criticism.

I'm not familiar with Ireland or the UK, but for the US at least, this is absolutely false. I'm most familiar with San Francisco so let's look at that as an example. Why do you think it takes nearly 2 years to get permitting done for housing here? Why do you think you need to pay $100ks in fees just to break ground? Why do you think all of the housing built over the last 20 years has been located in one part of the city (SOMA)? Why do you think our Supervisors are so reluctant to adopt by-right zoning and ministerial review processes? Why was huge swaths of the city down-zoned in the 70s? Hell, why do you think California literally has an amendment to their constitution (article 34) prohibiting the construction of low-income housing without explicit approval from local residents? These aren't the demands of private developers, but the demands of influential neighborhood associations, unions (SEIU, CBTC, etc), and average homeowners who like their neighborhood as it is and don't want it to change.

> Have you ever stopped to think about why it costs $1m to build such a unit in SF in 2023? About what system of incentives lead to the current status quo? I can assure you it wasn't decades of publicly-run projects.

Absolutely. There are of course many factors, but a big one are the various road-blocks politicians put up, and the concessions (rents) they extract from projects for their preferred special interests. These are things that don't just go away once private developers are out of the mix.

Have you ever stopped to think why the market hasn't been able to produce the necessary supply of housing? It's not because they aren't interested in making money.

> Hell, why do you think California literally has an amendment to their constitution (article 34) prohibiting the construction of low-income housing without explicit approval from local residents? These aren't the demands of private developers, but the demands of influential neighborhood associations, unions (SEIU, CBTC, etc), and average homeowners who like their neighborhood as it is and don't want it to change.

I may get downvoted for this, but if I were to live in a nice neighborhood with a nice view I will be damned if I would say yes to any construction that I see it could ruin my neighborhood or take my view away. Yes, NIMBY attitude, but a lot of people desire to live in nice places.

I think the abstract point is that you bought something at a certain price and would like it to not be devalued, by whatever criteria you used to value it at that price in the first place.

> Migration is not a new phenomenon; citing it as an excuse for the utter failure of modern housing policy is disingenuous.

You say it's a failure but for those who own land or have tenants - including the average homeowner, it's a success. It's also a success for house builders, of course.

From [1]:

> In total 115 MPs across all parties are landlords, accounting for 18 per cent of the House of Commons. This compares to around three per cent of the UK adult population who are landlords.

It's in their interests.

On top of that, the supply is dwarfed by demand even before all that migration, which drives the "success" I outlined above, the high inward migration has kept wages low and reduced the need for the kind of large capital investment that would be needed to replace cheap labour.

Again, the kind of wealthy people who are landowners benefit from this, perhaps in this instance not the average homeowner, though there was that woman on Question Time who wondered where they'd find people to make her Pret coffee[2].

The real failures here are the failure to understand the interests of all the parties involved: those with land (high migration drives demand, increases wealth and suppresses outgoings like wages and R&D), and the interests of those without (stronger negotiating position in labour market, lower demand for housing). The average Joe should oppose large scale unskilled migration with all their might, if they want a home, enough doctors, better working conditions etc.

Strangely enough, the media, largely owned by very rich people or run by government aligned interests, seem to be against that. It's a mystery how so many people are called racists for being against migration levels unparalleled in history with so many deleterious effects. A total mystery.

[1] https://www.landlordtoday.co.uk/breaking-news/2021/7/reveale...

[2] https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/bbc-question-time-pre...

> It's in their interests.

More complicated than that. You should try reading Isabel Hardman's book "Why we get the politicians we deserve".

Running for MP can bankrupt you if you haven't got a passive source of income.

> More complicated than that. You should try reading Isabel Hardman's book "Why we get the politicians we deserve".

I'm left thinking "why?"

The book covers what is necessary economically to run to be an MP.

> Running for MP can bankrupt you if you haven't got a passive source of income.

MPs become landlords for the passive income that is necessary given that running to be an MP can leave you destitute.

Landlords aren't (usually) becoming MPs in order to vote for more favourable conditions for landlords. Indeed, there have been many policies detrimental to landlords e.g. removal of mortgage interest income tax relief.

Landlords don't need to become MPs in order for MPs to become landlords or for their interests to emerge as it would with any other contingent with shared interests making up 18% of sitting MPs.

> Indeed, there have been many policies detrimental to landlords e.g. removal of mortgage interest income tax relief.

For all we know there would have been more legislation of this kind if they hadn't been there.

Aside from that, why is it that, since the majority of MPs are aligned with major parties and major parties pay for prospective MPs to run, and since MPs are remunerated well above average and have lavish expenses compared to the rest of us, that they would become bankrupt?

On top of that, they can earn big money if they get into cabinet[1], and they don't even lose that much when they leave[2]:

> For MPs defeated at the 2019 election, the average loss-of-office payment was £5,250 – equivalent to just under one month of their £84,000 salary.

The average UK salary for that year (2019):

> The Office of National Statistics has released its provisional update of the UK Average Salary 2019, showing that the average full-time salary is £36,611 and average part-time salary is £12,495.

[1] https://news.sky.com/story/mps-second-jobs-why-it-pays-to-le...

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/mps-medals-pa...

[3] https://www.findcourses.co.uk/inspiration/average-salaries-u...

Migration at these levels is absolutely a new phenomenon.

Most men have the capability to build a house themselves and with help of friends. What is needed is the release of land, plain and simple. The landed gentry have enormous amounts of real estate and they want high prices to release any part - this is their retirement plan for them, their children, and children's children.

Let workers buy land cheap and you will have a lower base level of housing cost, bringing the cost for all other housing down. Why would I want the government to rob me to build a house, when I could have built it myself if I hadn't been robbed?

It's easy to just down-vote my post and move on. But stop for a moment and think about it: Why is the lifetime output of even a highly skilled professional worth just a tiny fraction of what a land owner in the same community is worth from doing nothing? The land owner can sell a tiny piece of his estate every 20 years and live his whole life without contributing anything. And on the opposite side, those who are not landed will have to work hard their whole life and usually with nothing to show for it.

Go talk to everyday people and ask what their dream is. Except for winning the lottery, the dream of everybody is to buy real estate and live of rent and price increases. Not having a career, not creating a big and successful business. Those are fools errand and a waste of your life, because laws and governance are now all-in on making every aspect of the economy having the purpose of transferring wealth to the landed gentry.

Also depends on the average number of people per house, and rate at which houses are destroyed.

Why are we still building houses like it's 1800 though? Hand crafted houses built by local artisans are always going to be expensive

Construction costs are usually less then land acquisition costs. Housing developers are extremely efficient when they are allowed to build hundreds of identical units on a single large parcel. Most of the work can be done by unskilled laborers with artisans only doing the critical bits.

There's a limited amount of space and a non-negligible portion of society are unable to afford market rates. When the state doesn't build accommodation, citizens end up transferring ludicrous amounts to private landlords to house foster children, asylum seekers, the poor, or the disabled.

The UK experimented with selling off it's social housing in the 70s. It was a colossal failure that has lead to the country having some of the worst housing stock in Europe, with renters paying more for less. Private landlords have been enriched at the expense of the wider society.

Without state intervention in housing regulation/supply we'd see shanty towns spring up fairly quickly, followed by violence. Refer to Champlain Towers, Grenfell Tower, or the collapsed luxury apartments in the Turkey earthquake to see what happens when the state does not do enough to ensure builders aren't building death traps.

> There's a limited amount of space and a non-negligible portion of society are unable to afford market rates. When the state doesn't build accommodation, citizens end up transferring ludicrous amounts to private landlords to house foster children, asylum seekers, the poor, or the disabled.

Space is limited by regulation and zoning. 90% of the UK is rural. Market rates are high because of the supply not matching the demand, or being allowed to match it. Asulym seekers make up a small amount (3%?) of the people who we take in - e.g. in 2022 we took in 606k people, but under 20k of them were asulum seekers.

> The UK experimented with selling off it's social housing in the 70s. It was a colossal failure that has lead to the country having some of the worst housing stock in Europe, with renters paying more for less.

The same number of people would need housing, regardless of whether the houses were privately owned or state owned.

> Without state intervention in housing regulation/supply we'd see shanty towns spring up fairly quickly, followed by violence. Refer to Champlain Towers, Grenfell Tower, or the collapsed luxury apartments in the Turkey earthquake to see what happens when the state does not do enough to ensure builders aren't building death traps.

I don't understand this. I didn't say no regulation. But there's a huge gap between that and making it incredibly difficult to build. Citing some basic anti-zero regulation argument in response to what I said is disheartening.

> Space is limited by regulation and zoning. 90% of the UK is rural. Market rates are high because of the supply not matching the demand, or being allowed to match it.

This does not square with the fact that private builders are leaving nearly half of approved developments unbuilt. It's almost like private builders are incentivised to squeeze the market rather than bring prices down.

> The same number of people would need housing, regardless of whether the houses were privately owned or state owned.

Publicly owned housing: The state makes an initial capital investment which it recoups through a low monthly rent payment. After 30 years the state only pays maintenance costs for the property, covered by the monthly rent. Any excess rent can be reinvested towards the cost of another unit.

Privately rented housing: The state pays market rate rents forever, burning the money. The private landlord pays off the mortgage and gets to pocket more of the money. There's no benefit to the state.

It's the same with social care. The government could build social care, instead we're paying up to £50k/week per child[0] towards some cunt's yacht.

And it's the same with the NHS. Nurses have a hard time and poor pay and some quit. The government then bring in an agency nurse, paying the agency 2-4x the salary of the NHS nurse that will have to babysit them because they aren't familiar with their ward and refusing to raise the rate of pay for their own nurses. The remaining nurses see this and some more quit, agency work pays more and you get to choose when you work. This spirals into a very avoidable staffing crisis.

> I don't understand this. I didn't say no regulation. But there's a huge gap between that and making it incredibly difficult to build. Citing some basic anti-zero regulation argument in response to what I said is disheartening.

I didn't claim you were arguing for no regulation, arguing that regulations should be made more lax in the face of those events is what's disheartening. Those disasters occurred because existing regulations were not sufficiently strict/enforced.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/apr/18/english-coun...

You highlight a bunch of examples where government policy/implementation has failed miserably in the backdrop of higher and higher demand from it. I wonder how far this needs to stretch before we realise that the problem isn't that the government doesn't behave correctly, but that the whole idea that a government is a good allocator of capital and resources is flawed.

> It's almost like private builders are incentivised to squeeze the market rather than bring prices down.

Yes - incentivised by government regulations to do so, and moreover too disincentivised to build. If you can't make money by building, it's better to wait. No builder wants to stop building - money now is much better than money in the future - but enough government and local intervention will cause this.

The housing thing you've gone on a while, but basically if you remember the context, two comments up, I was replying to something that you're not arguing for, as far as I can tell, which is that if the government hadn't sold some houses it would have enough houses. This is not the case, and I don't think you've said it is.

> I didn't claim you were arguing for no regulation, arguing that regulations should be made more lax in the face of those events is what's disheartening. Those disasters occurred because existing regulations were not sufficiently strict/enforced.

Companies not obeying regulations in specific instances doesn't mean all regulations are good. Regulations are not a tower, with fire retardation regulations being piled on the stupid ones, and so removing the stupid ones would cause the ones you want to fall.

My fundamental bewilderment with this and some other comments is you're complaining about government-caused things, and you blame the private sector for it, and want the government to be in charge of more things, despite the evidence of your own eyes of how well the government does with what it already has.

> No builder wants to stop building - money now is much better than money in the future

This is plainly false in every way. Firstly, buildijg is an expense - why would you build now if you can put off the expense? Seocndly, market manipulation is as old as markets themselves.

> This is plainly false in every way. Firstly, buildijg is an expense - why would you build now if you can put off the expense?

It might be worth considering how, if that were true, anything that has a capital investment required of it ever gets done. Building is not an expense to a building company. What do you think the company does to generate revenue, if it's not building?

If youre both managing a property portfolio as well as building on it, free capital gains for no work are a pretty good deal.

Sure, if you're a small builder you want to build ASAP for cash flow reasons. However over the past decade both the UK and Irish building markets have become dominated by REITs who do in fact benefit from increased land prices in the absence of building.

Yes, because of the regulatory and zoning environment. Of course they should do this - in an environment where it's more profitable to do nothing than to build, building companies should do nothing. The problem is the environment they exist in. Fix the environment, and they will build more.

> in an environment where it's more profitable to do nothing than to build, building companies should do nothing.

I mean, sortof. I get where you're coming from, but if a development has planning permission (i.e. it's allowed to be built) then it should be massively penalised if development doesn't begin pretty soon after this. As a society, it's problematic for a whole bunch of reasons to have companies sit on land that could provide housing when there's a shortage.

You don't fix government/zoning disincentives to do things with government disincentives to not do things.

It's just more time and money wasted on people to inspect and enforce and run appeals systems (what if they had a good reason for not starting?) and write and update rules (what do we count as a good reason?). All of this costs endless tax money that could've been spent on building or buying houses. Or, in 2023, just buying enough food.

Fix the underlying issues, and people will build.

> There's a limited amount of space

So build denser, taller housing. We sprawl massively compared to developments on the continent.

> a non-negligible portion of society are unable to afford market rates

If we increase supply, market rates will fall. That's how markets work.

Therein lies the real problem, of course: real estate investors with existing holdings don't want the rates to fall, and they have influence over how much new stock gets built.

> It was a colossal failure

To be clear, the failure was not in the act of selling itself, but in the decision to not reinvest the proceeds into new housing stock. This is the part that made the housing problem worse instead of better.

> the decision to not reinvest the proceeds into new housing stock

This wouldn't have mattered, I think. The houses were sold at a massive discount, IIRC.

> To be clear, the failure was not in the act of selling itself, but in the decision to not reinvest the proceeds into new housing stock. This is the part that made the housing problem worse instead of better.

The kind of mass sell-off that occurred could only be considered a massive failure. Selling individual properties at market value when the intention is to reinvest that money is clearly without objection. But to this day, the government offers discounts of up to 70% on social housing. It is a direct transfer of public wealth into private ownership and it has invariably led to worse outcomes where it has occurred. Social housing, royal mail, and water infrastructure are the obvious examples but less obviously there's PFIs, energy, and the nhs.

water companies have build Zero new water reservoirs in the entire 50 years of their existance. In 10 yeats London will start running out of water and we will have to bail them out like we bailed out the banks.

> It is a direct transfer of public wealth into private ownership and it has invariably led to worse outcomes where it has occurred. Social housing, royal mail, and water infrastructure are the obvious examples but less obviously there's PFIs, energy, and the nhs.

This is too broad a category. You can't criticise people owning homes by using examples of private(ish) ownership of infrastructure.

> Private landlords have been enriched at the expense of the wider society.

We are literally subsidising the least productive "profession" in society, to the tune of billions. It's an absolute joke.

They aren't being subsidised. They're being paid to rent out their property.

And what would happen if the government passed a law saying that housing benefit could no longer be paid to private landlords? Looking over the instant wide spread homelessness, you would get a sharp spike in landlords either selling their houses or going bankrupt because their business model is no longer viable. Without that government money, they can’t pay their buy to let mortgages and the whole thing collapses - so they’re essentially getting property for free, paid for by the government, all because they managed to have enough capital to get in on the racket at the ground floor. Not to mention all the other less indirect ways the government passes laws to benefit landlords and property owners at the expense of renters.

For comparison, Canada which has a population of 40M vs Britain's 86M built 286k homes in 2021. We took in 400K immigrants and 630K non-permanent residents in 2022. Not sure if those two numbers are additive, since I presume many non-permanent residents eventually become immigrants.

The average price of a house in Canada is CAD716K vs £285K (=CAD480K) in the UK.

you made a typo, Britain's population is 68M, not 86.

I don't live in Britain and I don't know why too few houses are built there.

I know something about the place where I live, which I'll not name because I don't think it's that special. Specifically, that houses are built if that seems profitable, or at the very least if the bank thinks the builder can earn enough to pay back the loan.

The organisation that build/rebuilt/renovated the buildings across the street from me expected to earn that investment back in very roughly half a century. They considered it possible that they'd earn their investment back in 30 years, but unlikely. They managed to secure financing, though, and did the building. Not sure how they plan to pay the bank on time.

You'll not be surprised to hear that this place too suffers from a lack of newly built housing.

> The state shouldn't need to build houses

What is the basis for this belief?

Every country that got people out of poverty, India, China and Singapore, has a massive state housing program. They work. We have results.

The worst part is that all of the new building projects are absolutely terribly built. It has gotten to the point where buying a house that was last worked on 20 years ago is more reliable than a new build, since so many new builds have borderline dangerous mistakes, and also huge illegal corner cuts that the government does nothing about. Not only is the construction bad, but so is the planning. Many of these new builds are completely car dependent with no plan made for access to the town centre or for building local shopping areas

I've lived in houses built in the 60s, 80, 00s, and 10s.

The ones in the 10s were by far the best build quality, however the plots were tiny, and they come with extra taxes. The estates were full of cars parked over the pavements because of the limited parking (claiming a garage as a parking space for example), and the green spaces were poorly maintained (due to the privatised companies that own them)

I don't know if it's the same in the UK, but in Australia 63% of MPs are landlords, compared to only 7% of the general population. Almost no MPs are renters, compared to 30% of the general population. These people are never going to meaningfully help renters because doing so harms landlords, and they are landlords. There's no legitimacy to a system like this, being ruled by people who have completely different fundamental interests to you and with no legal way to vote for anyone else because every major party is a landlord party.

It’s so rare that one of the candidates for my area in the NSW election even had “Vote a renter into parliament” on every one of her posters and flyers.

Yep, I took particular note of Max Chandler-Mather after seeing a particularly passionate and persuasive speech on housing affordability (this one: https://youtu.be/DD54fVtlUSA). Looked him up to see if he was himself a landlord, he's one of the very few that isn't.

> If I was a young person, this above all other things would radicalize me. Our elected leadership are captive to stupid market force arguments. I'd rather they tried and failed than sat on their hands.

I truly think it has radicalized a lot of us. My generation (millennials and younger) are one of the first ones not to slide further right politically as time goes on but remain staunchly left wing. That's culturally significant; a highly educated middle class is swinging a way they never normally do, outside of a revolutionary period (war/famine/etc). I see Socialist posters everywhere I go, and everywhere we're seeing strikes in almost every industry. There's inevitably going to be more civil unrest and eventual violence in our countries future.

It feels like we're sliding into some sort of capitalist feudalism, where the rich continue to accumulate property, and people who don't have the means already (through family, inheritance, or a very high paying career) are stuck to a life of renting, with no wealth to pass on to their children. Right now, even if I could afford a 2-3 bed house somewhere (maybe £300k, so a £30k deposit), I'd be paying £1800 a month in mortgage looking at a calculator from Barclays. That's nearing 100% of my take home after tax/student loan. It's obscene.

I work in the semiconductor industry and have done for close to 5 years now. I worked damn hard to get here. All my older colleagues (50+), who's career path I've followed pretty much 1:1, had a house, kids, and some decent savings by the time they were my age. Some were even building up a portfolio of investments. I'm years away from being anywhere close to that. I end up with barely anything left after bills/groceries/other expenses. I've just taken up a second job working three nights a week in a bar just so I can actually afford to go to do anything fun after I've maxed out my ISA so I can maybe get a house in 5 years. It's cripplingly demotivating, and if I had the time to do else but work myself out of this hole I'd probably be on the picket line too.

Please remember not to ask for a pay rise too, otherwise you'll be making inflation worse! /s

Yep it sucks. Many people I know cannot afford unless there are two people paying the bills. You need two to tango for kids of course, and some might argue why do you need a 3 bed house if you are single without kids (I am assuming here - you may not be). Of course that is no one's business apart from your own and shouldn't factor in to this.

> why do you need a 3 bed house if you are single without kids

Because the 3 bed house is a signal to potential mates that you are financially capable of starting a family. Don't get me wrong there's a lot that goes into picking a partner and not everyone is going to be bothered by it, but there's a substantial portion out there who are going to look at where you live as an indicator of whether you're a potential long term suitor. Which is sad really because I think people used to meet, fall in love with the actual person rather than a checklist, and then took on challenges together and grew as a result, like moving into a small or rundown house, renovating it and then starting a family. There is an insidious streak in dating culture now where getting with someone who hasn't already made it is interpreted as "settling for less than you deserve". Don't get me wrong, you've got to have some standards and dealbreakers, but if you watch any of the matchmaking shows on Netflix, the criteria most of the dates have for their potential partners is wild. There's a reason Sima Aunty is always telling them to compromise, she knows exactly what's up!

I want a 3 bed house because some time soon I'll probably need to have kids, else my partner be too old to conceive. I work from home most days, so a 3rd room would be nice for an office or if we want a 2nd child. We will likely make do with a 2 bed flat (still 200k if we're lucky in the arse end of nowhere - 250k in a place we'd actually enjoy living). I don't know any of my older colleagues or family that had to settle for that; again, following the same career path or worse. My parents managed a 3 bed house on the South coast on a nurse and chef salary. That would be functionally impossible today.

There was a poll posted on HN within the last week or two showing the expected slide rightward for your demo. I can’t comment on how it compares to previous generations.

Possibly the Nate Cohn thing from NYT in early June?

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/millennials-will-not...

This is a pretty good analysis. Yes, some rightward shift. Things to change, though sometimes they change back as well. Millennials are still far more left-leaning than boomers as they age.

> Critically, millennials are also much more Democratic than their predecessors were at the same age, as the chart above on the age gap in recent U.S. elections makes clear. And this exceptional partisan distribution is rooted in the generation’s distinctive social values, which do not typically change drastically over time.

Everything I've read on the subject suggests that both economically and socially, we're far more left wing and liberal than what we "should be" by this age. I'm not sure what poll you're suggesting; if it's only polling HN members I imagine it wouldn't represent the broader population at all. Be aware I am discussing largely British politics which is a different beast in many ways (from years of Tory austerity and Brexit catastrophe). Just a quick web search provides a lot of material harking the same story.

This data is particularly telling: https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/htt...

Other reading material: https://www.ft.com/content/c361e372-769e-45cd-a063-f5c0a7767... https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/generation-wars-ov... https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/21/age-not-cla...

>Truly sordid tropes about rent caps and freezes are trotted out again and again, as if simply reciting them makes them axioms: they're not.

Neither does insisting that these are sordid tropes make them so. In a vacuum, freezing rent disincentivizes the creation of new housing. You can negate this effect by subsidizing new housing, but that doesn't mean that the effect is fake news.

>Our elected leadership are captive to stupid market force arguments.

I wish. If that were the case, we'd replace property taxes with a land value tax, and it would be much easier for both the government and private developers to build new housing.

> Our elected leadership are captive to stupid market force arguments

Perhaps recently, but the state driven housebuilding programs have met similar failures. Local authorities and their residents seem equally hostile to housebuilding whether it's made by the private sector or public sector (see the backlash faced by Labour governments under Harold Wilson or Tony Blair).

Perhaps one of the better arguments against democracy in general is that it makes housebuilding so difficult.

> Local authorities and their residents seem equally hostile to housebuilding whether it's made by the private sector or public sector

In my experience (in Edinburgh) the vast majority of people I speak to tend to view the private developments (especially the insatiable appetite for student accommodation) and short term lets far less favourably.

Granted, Edinburgh is a special case with an incredibly high demand for short term letting and students.

Unfortunately it's hard to observe the public reaction to state led housebuilding without resorting to historical examples because there's so little happening at the moment.

Thatcher was a disease we've never recovered from. Shit, just look at water privatisation... Going sooo well. Or the utilities that have left us privatising profits and socialising losses

You must not remember the 70's.

The kind of state that is suicidally anorexic.

And all the companies then become little monopoly states within the state, bloated and unable to perform basic task. Which why the dysfunctional ideology has to be pushed worldwide. Any state not participating and not protecting the monopolies could easily out outcompete this mess and they do.

Worst of all it ain't even news, ambitious people disassembling the spaceship that keeps them alive is as old as time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Hungary_(1301%E2%...

I'm a homeowner as well and although I've benefited enormously to the tune of 100s of thousand of dollars in equity gains, I'm disgusted by the lack of will to fix this problem. I'm not the most selfless person in the world, far from it but I would never vote against someone else's right to build cost effective shelter (building regulations/requirements) or acquire the land needed (zoning/land use policy) to do so. I don't understand how people don't get that everyone should have a right to be somewhere on this planet: anything less is completely inhumane.

> Thatcher's revolution in council housing is a cesspit of counterfactual outcomes [...] from shelter statistics [it] left 1.5 million families functionally homeless

I'm interested by this analysis. I found some web sources that seems to deal with that matter: Any specific in-depth article you could recommend?

Neoliberalism seems based around the idea the government shouldn't do things, and this is the result, in housing and other areas.

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