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Comment by throwaway4aday | Hacker News Reader

Oddly enough, the only way you can really make housing a commodity item would be to build capsules or other types of mobile homes that can be purchased separately from the land they are parked on. The Nakagin Capsule Tower comes to mind[0] but it's far from a solved problem since you'd need similar infrastructure to a container port to move the capsules around but since you don't move them often the infra itself has to be movable so it can go where the demand is, which is a pretty big ask if you're only moving one capsule. The only existing format is the traditional mobile home which is limited to single story and low density which means it can't be located near urban centers that need it the most. So, you're kind of stuck with the problem of it being easy to build small homes but really hard to find a place to put them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakagin_Capsule_Tower

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Well, it's really hard to find a place to put them because of planning regulations, and because of land costs.

If you, for example, nationalized all inner-city land, you could easily find plots to build high density housing. At which point, you're stuck there wondering why you should bother with the capsules: it's cheaper to just prefab the building in concrete then assemble at site. That's what the kruschevkas are: you leverage economies of scale to produce millions of units of housing for peanuts.

Obviously, nationalizing inner-city land is hard in the current political makeup of most nations today: real estate is a favoured investment for very rich people, and they have a lot of political power. So the question of housing becomes less one about houses, and more about what kind of finessed regulation you need to avoid offending the small number of very wealthy people that own inner city land, while actually allowing the state to build on it.

Nationalizing inner city land would likely have many unintended consequences. I could see it resulting in migration of people and businesses away from the nationalized area only to regroup at a new center that wasn't restricted by direct governmental control. Reasons for that that spring to mind are that planning permissions would certainly be a nightmare, difficult to obtain and extremely slow. If there was a hard quota of apartments vs commercial space it could create a bad situation for businesses and drive them away. The types of residential units may not meet the demand which could drive segments of the population to seek housing elsewhere even if the costs were higher. Poor design decisions for the units constructed could produce areas conducive to crime or just make it unattractive or inconvenient.

There's a long history of national building projects in many countries that have created problems like these.

In Europe there are very many successful examples of national housing projects, indeed many countries have large portions of the housing stock in public hands to this day.

This was generally instituted after WW2, which left the EU housing stock in a far worse condition than the US's today, and left the EU totally impoverished.

So, you can come up with hypothetical problems, but practical experience shows it can absolutely work.

The US has a long history of public housing as well and it suffered and suffers from very real problems.

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