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Comment by codetrotter | Hacker News Reader

> Soaring costs across the EU are pricing out renters, deterring prospective buyers and preventing new homes from being built. As Europe’s housing crisis grows, so do homelessness rates across the bloc. What are the solutions to Europe’s housing crisis?

I literally do not understand why after all these years humanity has not yet worked out a system where every person would own a small house each, and instead we have this system that makes it super difficult for so many people to ever become homeowners.

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> a system where every person would own a small house each

If you really want to just own a small house it can be very affordable. It's just that it won't be a desirable place to live and there won't be many good jobs close to it.

The problem is "everyone" wants to live in big cities, preferably in the nice neighbourhoods and within a reasonable commuting distance of their job.

Part of what makes a neighbourhood "nice" is that it's not affordable for the lower classes.

It's because housing is very expensive to build, lasts decades, and people absolutely freak-out if you plan to build any amount of housing at all.

Most people would probably prefer to live in a cheap shack, if it was available and not in a crime-ridden area, if it meant getting back 50% of their income. Housing does not need to be expensive to build, it's just modern "standards".

Ford Model T cost $260 in 1925 ($4561 in current USD). But today's cars are closer to $40k.

Things don't need to be so expensive, it's not all inflation - it's scope creep and bloat.

We can build to modern standards fine. The problem is usually you're not allowed to build at all. Nearly every jurisdiction in the west has tight supply caused by nothing except laws and zoning; there's nothing about the air or the dirt preventing a bigger building.

I don't think people necessarily want to go back to the 1900s and share a ten square meter apartment with a 3-generation family, and then die in a fire because that's too many people to evacuate out of one door.

Where we live you now need sprinklers installed in most units. It’s overkill for fire safety

Sprinklers are not overkill and I really doubt they add that much to the overall cost.

What is overkill is parking. When I was looking at buying apartments, each car park cost $80,000 AUD.

This:

> Most people would probably prefer to live in a cheap shack,

Correlates with:

> if it was available and not in a crime-ridden area

In a system where economic advantages agglomerate in a few areas, it would be difficult to create a place that is neither losing to the agglomerating areas, nor is declining itself.

If it is an area where the economy is booming, then it will not be cheap. And if it is not an area that is moving upward, then it is moving downward, and with that comes a host of issues that can cause crime to proliferate.

> Ford Model T cost $260 in 1925 ($4561 in current USD). But today's cars are closer to $40k.

Far more capable and safer vehicles than a ford model T are available for far less than $40k. $20k cars are available, and while not quantifiably true, I think it is easy to say the $20k car of today is easily more than 4x capable and able to provide utility than a $4.5k model T.

Ironically, we make housing way more expensive than it needs to be by forcing homes to be heavily permitted and built to code, rather than just letting people build non-code homes and letting purchasers decide to buy it or not with full knowledge.

I don't think having regulations is the problem here, you can easily have regulations and have more housing being built, because regulation is not a binary choice.

> and letting purchasers decide to buy it or not with full knowledge

Consumers never have full knowledge of the quality level of whatever they're purchasing, much less in something like a house that is not standard and has to be adapted to the place it's built in.

At least with a law setting minimums, if you're lucky, you can sue if it doesn't meet them.

If you buy a home without an inspection you're either very deep pocketed and playing a numbers game buying stuff off the market quickly, or very stupid.

I had an inspection for the first apartment and then the first house I bought in Auckland (New Zealand) in the first decade of the 21st century. Both turned out to be leaky. Whose fault was it? There's plenty of blame to go around - the inspectors (for failing to see the problem), the government (for deregulating), the builders (for using materials they shouldn't have), the architects (for design that would never have lasted), the local government (for approving the housing), and maybe me for not having understood something I had no experience of, and had never happened before in my country.

"Code" is not what is stopping people from building, city zoning and regulations are. There's some things that add a bit to the cost, like GFCI outlets, multiple egress points for bedrooms, and inspections. Mandatory setbacks, minimum lot sizes, height restrictions, ADU rules, etc are what dictate what is possible to build.

You could easily describe a moderate house you desire to an architect, hire a GC and have a house built to code for $75k-$150k if it weren't for permits, zoning and regulations.

> people absolutely freak-out if you plan to build any amount of housing at all.

This. Europeans voted for this situation, hard, like really, really hard, for years on end. They did everything they could to ensure sky-high property prices. Now they have it. I'm not entirely sure that I see the problem.

> Europeans voted for this situation, hard, like really, really hard, for years on end.

How so? What specific voting behaviour did directly lead to increasing housing prices?

Zoning codes, building codes, and grandfathering.

Many places have extremely specific rules about building housing. You need 'X' ft around the outside of your house which means lots must be massive to have a house on them. So you require that people need to purchase a large amount of dead space to add character to the home.

We also don't retroactively apply building codes to houses. So you have a house that would cost $500k to replace due to building code, but it doesn't meet code. But you can still sell it for nearly that price because the alternative is the $500k new house. If people were forced to follow building codes in as-built buildings they would be much less likely to press all costs on to other people.

They wouldn’t because nearly everyone would be homeless

it's not dead space if the house is positioned correctly with respect to the sun. On the roof, solar panels, in the basement batteries, in the yard either rewilded yard or garden to support local birds, insects and small animals. if you have a parking spot, again positioned correctly So you can build a carport covered with solar panels. and don't forget to turn off the lights at night so that nocturnal creatures can thrive.

it is dead space if it's just a lawn.

There are places where this actually happens:

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

It is really simple. It is because humanity has decided that housing is an investment and investments need to grow faster than inflation or else they stop being good investments. Society now has a bias to ensure that the price perpetually grows and therefore we enact policy at every level from national governments to HOAs to ensure those investments keep growing.

Speculating on price signals of housing is how you get housing in places to respond to demand. People are incentivized to figure out where people are going to move in a few years and build houses there to meet the demand when it arrives - rather than responding late.

humanity didn't decide. A small portion of financial power structure decided it could monetize housing as an investment. The rest of us haven't figured out yet how to strip power from the financial elite.

Because we chose to set things up such that if you own a house, it probably represents the overwhelming majority of your total wealth, so it cannot ever be allowed to decrease in value, even if that means fucking over future generations and ultimately society itself.

People eventually die and their houses become available. It’s only population growth that creates housing demand, and for the good of the planet, that needs to stop.

Exactly - houses are very affordable in Japan, which has a decreasing population.

It's much much easier to extract rent from people than do actual work.

It's intentional. If housing was cheap, land owners wouldn't reap the windfall of value appreciation, and there'd be no way to maintain a serf class.

That's why we need a land value tax as Henry George proposed. People should not be able to make money by squatting on land and waiting for its value to appreciate - whether as a owner-occupier or as a landlord.

Humanity has worked out a system where every person would own a small house each - the system is called "live in a remote place in a hut made out of clay and straw, with no access to running water, sewage system, electricity, roads and jobs".

Turns out most people don't like the system and prefer living in the city where all those things are available but what is not available is houses for everyone.

Western liberals don't mind forcing people to live in those conditions as long as they're not white and left out of sight. They throw a tantrum every time Israel builds temporary housing for bedouins, for example.

If you divide land up evenly then each person doesn’t get very much. For the rich and powerful this would be a big step down.

Bill gates owns about 270,000 acres and the area of the US divided by its population is eight acres per person. Something to think about, although I don't know what an actual conclusion would look like (some of those acres are a lot more productive than others). ;)

They are mostly not where people want to live

Do that same calculation in Benelux, South East UK, Paris metro…

AKA Singapore. 80+% home ownership due to public housing (HDB)

Would require massive inter-continental wealth transfers that are not politically feasible.

Like it would require countries like the US redirecting a substantial portion of their industrial output towards building homes in sub-saharan Africa.

In China they solved halve of this problem: there are more houses than inhabitants. Yet, house prices are unreachable for most people.

Except the houses in China were never built to be lived in.

Wait until population growth peaks and property has to be valued entirely on its current utility with no expected capital gains.

That's communism. We've been programmed to be allergic to the word communism.

Are you sure it isn't the long history of failures of communist countries that has caused people to be soured on this idea?

That's certainly what people who charge rent and own media outlets say. Who am I to disagree with their megaphones?

Dude. Are you actually stating that the multiple genocides that have been committed in communist countries were fabricated?

Downplaying the killing fields or the Holodomor as invented by the media or landlords is incredibly offensive.

Do you call the holocaust a capitalist genocide? What about when my ancestors were exterminated in the Irish potato famine and the free market was used to justify it?

Are you downplaying every genocide that took place in a capitalist country? You denied a historic genocide that killed my ancestors. You think you're offended?

Well, I'm not. How can I be offended? You're a basic product of your environment. Youre told that genocides that happen under communist systems are de facto communist genocides. Obvioualy. And genocides that happen under capitalist systems happen for, well, entirely different reasons. Obviously.

Realistically though, when pol pot, Stalin and Hitler went on extermination binges to kill enemies (real or imagined) their reasons were much the same... the maintenance of their power.

Sorry I mean giving people houses and not charging rent - the two most evil things you could ever do.

> Sorry I mean giving people houses and not charging rent - the two most evil things you could ever do.

No. You explicitly advocated for Communism, not "free houses". A social structure that actively grinds human rights into dust. You don't get the play the "communists just want to give people free houses" card without admitting to being hopelessly naive or actively malicious.

Stop carrying water for history's greatest monsters.

As an onlooker to this comment chain I feel like you completely ignored his entire comment, which I thought was a decent argument, and latched on only to the last sentence.

Are you sure

a) any of those countries were actually meaningfully "communist", and not merely authoritarian countries calling themselves so, and

b) if they were "communist", that this was actually in any significant way causal in the failures?

There have been lots of countries following Leninism and its vanguardist derivatives, and zero other Communist countries. Whatever one's position on whether or not vanguardism is a valid form of Communism, it is a mistake to generalize from vanguardism to all of Communism.

> programmed

Learning by experience <> programming.

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