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Comment by twelvechairs | Hacker News Reader

Good to see this happening.

That said I strongly dislike when there's a conflation of "affordable housing" (lower-case, the general concept of providing for people on lower incomes) with specific schemes you have to qualify for (often "Afffordable Housing" upper-case) - in this case it seems to be deed restrictions on income that are required in exchange for floorspace bonuses and building code relaxations?

There's a big problem for me in the latter building inefficient bureaucratic systems and being able to be gamed (e.g. If I'm rich maybe I can still buy a lower income unit for my children or perhaps my wife or mother and then rent it out. I could lower my income for one year just to qualify etc.)

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One major restriction has to be a covenant that you can only ever buy one of these if you meet the means-test they were initially sold under. That limits the market and the mortgages available therefore caps the price.

That or generational (eg 35y) leaseholds. In the UK apartments are almost always leasehold anyway, but a long-but-not-too-long lease would mean it always returns to the state without being resold or sublet indefinitely.

I agree, defining "means" in a means-tested transaction can be tricky but also, it's just data. If you can't or won't show enough history (even homelessness leaves a trail), it's not hard to find someone else who meets the criteria with a better history.

Ya, I don’t see any of these schemes being sustainable until they are somehow universal (eg an option even for the rich, but not one they can somehow monopolize). Like Singapore’s public housing, which isn’t gated by income, but rationed in other ways (marriage, have a family, must be a resident).

I think the only answer is that housing as an investment needs to be banned, it’s just too damaging. Not only is it making people poorer by the decade, eventually leading to a dead economy, it’s completely unproductive. Imagine if all that money were to be invested in business instead.

Or have the government build houses at cost. That is how post war Europe fixed the housing crisis.

I don't blame investors not wanting to build for the poor- they would quite literally lose money.

Ehh, they tried that in the US with major housing projects like Pruitt Igoe, and we all saw how that turned out.

A single failure doesn’t somehow cancel out the more successful versions, it says you should learn from them how not to repeat the mistakes. The toxic stew of racism of the south in the 1950s, for example, seems significant as does the realization that you can’t just toss up a building with no shopping, jobs, poor transportation access, etc. and expect it to go well.

Sure, but it wasn’t just one. Essentially every public housing project in America failed. I’d argue the main problem is American culture as a whole, which emphasizes an attitude of “if I don’t personally own something I should ruin it immediately”

It’s not true that every project failed, and you really have to keep things in context. The problem was not the concept of public housing but rather the racial segregation underlying much of that era’s policies and design, and those same policies had many other negative impacts. Saying that we shouldn’t build public housing is responding to the symptom, not the problem.

Pruitt Igoe suffered from a number of structural issues (including literal issues with the structures) that had little to do with it being government funded. Indeed one of the biggest issues was the government's unwillingness to fund it - several parts of the project were cancelled, then when the city's population started to plummet and vacancies started to mount there was no assistance to make up for the shortfall in maintenance revenue.

I am not sure if you can "rule investments by fiat" like this. People invest in housing because they distrust investment in businesses, or at least expect smaller returns. That has some underlying cause.

If you ban investment into housing, it does not follow that people will start trusting businesses more and give them their money. I would rather expect the money to find some hitherto unexpected side channel elsewhere.

If, on the other hand, housing ceases to be a good investment because of a glut of housing, people will start investing into something else even without legal pressure to do so.

What almost the entire West has is artificial scarcity of housing, because of overregulation weaponized by NIMBYs. Artificial scarcity can be remedied, though, just like they did in LA.

> I would rather expect the money to find some hitherto unexpected side channel elsewhere.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? It seems obvious that people would just put their money in the stock market or bonds like they do already.

"It seems obvious that people would just put their money in the stock market or bonds like they do already."

Not obvious to me, but a lot would depend on the details.

The GP wishes for a law(?) that would ban investing into homes, but how do you even do that? As long as new construction is capital-extensive (and it won't stop) and at the same time subject to artificial scarcity by incessant vetoing of higher density developments, every sqm of living space in desirable places will generate huge returns to someone. So the loose capital will look for ways how to soak into mortar and bricks again, only perhaps more convoluted ways instead of directly.

The only way to break this combination is to remove the artificial scarcity, at which moment the entire field becomes a lot more competitive, and in competitive fields, prices generally sink.

I agree, this is a bit like shareholder's ownership in the UK and the antiquated leaseholder setting.

Just no. The solution isn't to make home ownership an even more complicated topic but to increase the stock, within the parameters of building regulations.

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