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Comment by Detrytus | Hacker News Reader

It's silly how some people believe in infinite power of "The State". Government can't just will new housing into existence just by passing a bill. Housing costs money. And when I say "money" I really mean "raw materials" and "human labor" and "time". If a city is desirable place to live, with a lot of people coming in then the housing will be expensive. You cannot really work around supply/demand here. Protesting against high rents is like protesting against bad weather - what do you expect your government to do?

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The social democrats built 1 million units of housing in Sweden in the 60s or something like that, because of a housing crisis. They solved the housing crisis just like that.

If a lack of capital investment (or skilled companies) is the problem, that’s a great solution.

But that’s not the reason for expensive rents in big cities.

It’s because many (rich) people want to live there … and due to physical and regulatory limits you can’t build more housing, even for piles of money it would be worth.

>And when I say "money" I really mean "raw materials" and "human labor" and "time".

Biggest pain point in housing is the limited amounts of land and living space, not the building cost.

> what do you expect your government to do?

There are tonnes of things governments can do:

1. build more dense public housing

2. ban Airbnbs

3. ban private equity from turning the housing market in their private casino table

4. tax the hell out of empty apartments and poorly utilized land that's not for living or relevant economic productivity

5. incentivize remote work for white collar jobs so they don't all have to live in X city just to do things that could be done from anywhere else

It’s silly what some people describe as the “infinite power of the ‘State’” when they’re actually just talking about something that has already happened in many wealthy countries (e.g. Austria and Japan).

What do I expect from the government?

Build public housing and only charge a reasonable fee for it.

I don’t know if at the time people protested against the foul smell of the Chicago river. But the government reversed its course to improve the life of its citizens.

Why shouldn’t governments similarly deal with the housing issue using the means they have at their disposal?

(in both cases: the construction of public infrastructure)

The government literally controls the creation of money.

By ingreasing taxes it can make the private sector less competitive and redirect virtually all resources on public projects.

In capitalists states you could even argue that this is the only role of the state. Detecting failures in the market, first trying to fix them by light interventions, like law changes or incentives and if still not successful fixing them directly.

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