Landlords are the reason housing is unaffordable, but in a world without landlords if homeownership is out of reach for a segment of the population there should be public housing to accommodate that need.
Zoning laws are the reason housing is unaffordable. Landlords lobby for zoning laws, but if you have the political power to prohibit renting then presumably you have the political power to reform zoning. Moreover, you should do that anyway, because if all you do is prohibit renting without allowing new housing to be built, you're going to have a bad time.
> if homeownership is out of reach for a segment of the population there should be public housing to accommodate that need.
So if you make 110% of the median income but don't have a downpayment yet the government pays for your housing? Do you get free housing forever as long as you spend everything you make and never save anything up?
What if you have plenty of money but you know you're not going to be somewhere for more than two years and don't want to buy property there?
Added benefit would be less traffic, congestion, and waiting in lines for anything
Whatever the solution is, it’s damn sure is not public housing.
Also Sanhedrin 38a: https://www.sefaria.org/Sanhedrin.38a.8
Our diversity is a complexity that is not addressed for in the working model, so it’s not that we shouldn’t try…but we shouldn’t assume that a model that works well in one environment will work well in another, significantly different, environment.
Housing is unaffordable because demand outstrips supply.
Economic illiterates who blame “greed” making public policy tend to make it even worse.
A large portion of the supply is being held by investors like landlords which restricts the supply. Removing them from the equation would increase supply and decrease prices.
The free market used to work better before it got handcuffed by zoning laws everywhere. If you prohibit the free market from working, don't then mock the free market because it's not working.
> A large portion of the supply is being held by investors like landlords which restricts the supply. Removing them from the equation would increase supply and decrease prices.
True - if you mean landlords who hold but don't allow occupancy.
> A large portion of the supply is being held by investors like landlords which restricts the supply.
Because they expect the value tomorrow will be higher than the value today, because they expect demand to increase over time while the government continues to inhibit new construction. Stop inhibiting new construction and they'll want to sell now before the price comes down. (Which will make the price come down sooner.)
The incentive to not rent existing units is also a predictable consequence of things like rent control and laws that make it hard to evict non-paying tenants. Don't increase the risk of providing a thing and expect that to lower the price.
As a landlord I’d be interested to understand your proposed mechanism to “remove” me.
Could you also elaborate what happens to my capital and what I should be doing instead with the excess capital my productivity generates over my chosen needs and wants?
This attitude is so incredibly economical illiterate that it’s shocking we have HN commentators that don’t understand.
Who I am selling to? at what price? Do you support state confiscation of private capital?
Are factories that produce cereal next?
It’s an embarrassment to western education that educated people have such poor understanding of basic economics.
The real problem we have is exactly what you labeled “economic illiteracy”. This is a serious problem and issue with education systems worldwide.
In the future I hope one day humanity realizes that it’s equivalent in the past to failing to teach reading and writing or denying evolution.