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Comment by happytoexplain | Hacker News Reader

Yes - the housing crisis is a chicken and egg problem. How do we get people to create opportunities in places where there are few workers? How do we get workers to move into places where there are few opportunities? I am not educated on this, and it's not a problem intrinsic to modernity, so how has this problem been solved historically? Does it really just boil down to "it happened slowly"?

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As far as I know, historically it wasn't fixed. People didn't live just anywhere they wanted, they lived where there were exploitable resources, be it farmland, mines, or what have you. If the resources dried up the city simply ceased to be. The idea of creating opportunities where people live can only exist within tertiary and quaternary economies, possibly in secondary. Until about two or three hundred years ago nearly all economy was primary, with a small secondary sector right next to where the resources were extracted (because logistics also wasn't as advanced as what we have today; it didn't make sense to move raw materials very far).

Freight was so important that pre-railroad cities were mostly built around harbors or navigable rivers, not just anywhere they wanted.

Definitely. And if I had to take a guess, yes, it happens slowly. I guess we could use Detroit perhaps as an example. Booming, industry sorta crumbled there, made it no longer desirable. Because of that, Detroit for a city has become cheap and to my understanding it is now experiencing a boom? So it maybe it just takes awhile because a correction needs to take place to make it cheap enough for people to move back in? Then I would guess there is also a, enough time needs to pass for a particular perception to fade.

There are towns in rural Italy where you can buy a house for €1 if you promise the fix it up and live there. Still there are few takers. It’s a tough problem to solve.

Italy has a reputation for its slowly moving bureaucratic machine though, so the issue may be more complex than just looking at the price. This offer would be more attractive for me if it didn't potentially come with hidden strings attached (do you need to work with an institution tasked with preserving old buildings? what are the permitting requirements? will it take ages to get approval to do anything?). People in Italy probably know answers to those questions, but as a foreigner slowly thinking about a place in Europe to settle in, those would be things that'd made me think twice about taking up that offer.

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