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Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

It's going to get worse before it gets better. The pyrrhic NIMBY victory over new housing development that might threaten the value of their investment has led to the country eating its young. It's not just homelessness, it's a crashing birth rate because young couples are making the decisions they're guided into by the market: not starting families.

Build mixed income public housing, Singapore style. Resurrect the Federal Works Agency and restore the powers of the Army Corps of Engineers to file eminent domain paperwork in the morning and roll bulldozers after lunch.

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I don't think people understand how bad it is and far the effects of bad housing policy reach. I live in Western Massachusetts, about 2 hours from Boston. Boston's terrible housing policy has driven up housing prices here because literally 99% of people can't afford a house in Boston so they start moving outside the city. The suburbs were full decades ago so they're crazy expensive. With the rise of remote work people are moving 2-3 hours outside of Boston because they may have to go in once a quarter but otherwise don't have to day to day. So we have a situation where decades of bad housing policy to protect property values are literally raising the prices of houses hundreds of miles away. At this point, I couldn't even afford my own house with the rise in interest rates and prices, and I only bought mine in 2018. The phrase "the country eating its young" is such a perfect way to describe this, and many other problems with America right now.

It's even worse in Cali because of something called proposition 13: essentially rent control for property taxes. So you have not just a powerful NIMBY force, but nobody has any desire to sell. This creates a highly skewed market while the rent:buy ratio serves extremely cheap rent - people are happy to sit on these houses and enjoy dirt cheap taxes. It even used to be a heritable fixed tax / tax control but they stopped that -- people are salty because they inherit a house that their parents easily afforded taxes for with tax control, but suddenly the taxes are a gorillion dollars. Presumably in fact the taxes would be lower were these controls not in place, the newbies are paying the majority of property tax costs

> Build mixed income public housing, Singapore style.

I work for a Singapore company, and the issues my coworkers complain about are that houses are leased for 99 years, have a 6-8 year waiting list, and are very expensive.

This makes it difficult to live near your office because you can't easily move. Many coworkers have 1.5-hour commutes one way via MRT.

None have shared this with me, but a huge amount of your assets are poured into an apartment that is a lease with an expiration date. In the USA, you can rely on home equity in your retirement, but if your lease is ending in 20 years, it's not valuable.

I wonder if relying on home equity as an appreciating asset the cause of a lot of our problems in the US?

A 99 year lease is a kind of estate duty that restarts the opportunity clock each generation. This way the kids will inherit less and really have to work to create their own wealth. The only thing they are able to inherit is early life preparation like education. I’m sure there are other advantages parents pass down to their kids but by imposing limits, social mobility is preserved.

Many people are terrible at saving. This is a problem for society, because a bunch of unhoused older people will cause big problems.

societal tools that force people to save (Social Security, mortgages, opt out 401k) are great for addressing this issue.

Right, and Singapore has the CPF system which entails mandatory contributions from employee and employer. This is supposed to be preventative of poverty in older age. So the 99 year lease isn’t an issue in practice.

We have social security in the US which isn’t quite the same. Not sure if the public will ever accept CPF type systems — might feel too paternalistic to Americans.

Making 401K mandatory? With a minimum percentage? Yeah I wonder how that would go but if it meant you could opt-out of Social Security maybe it could work.

They changed the law for 2025 so that new 401k by default are 3%.

You can opt out tho

My issue with the 99 year lease, is it’s harder to pass down wealth to your kids, as there would be no home to give..

Maybe as a society, less generational wealth is a good thing.

I think inherited wealth is downright cancerous to society.

Ideally, we want to promote the most talented people into the positions where they have the most power and can wield it wisely. With inherited wealth, we instead give huge advantages to, not the talented, but the lucky, and we end up with incompetent leadership who are able to simply buy power with an inconsequential fraction of their wealth. When power is bought and not earned, you end up with people who do idiotic things with power. Eventually the society rots from within and is toppled by more efficient groups.

We don't even have to copy Singapore. Just let people build buildings on land that they own.

Copy Iowa, not Singapore. Kick the knowledge industries (tech, finance, law, media) out of the state. The juice isn't worth the squeeze.

> mixed income public housing

Maybe its just my country and the way we do things but these words dont make sense in this order. What do you mean by public housing?

Public housing is housing owned and managed by the government. It could be the same copy paste apartment blocks but owned by your city or state government. Despite public housing always being connected to affordable housing, it does not have to be affordable housing to be public housing.

I'm talking about publicly subsidized housing construction, along the lines of Singapore model[1].

Public housing in the US is stigmatized because there's a focus on the deliberately ghettoized, designed-to-fail low income housing that was built in the 20th century. This is held up as the definition of public housing, but there are other version of it that were and are successful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore

Singapore also has "draconian" laws, so it may not be as easy to replicate.

Vienna has great public housing and is probably closer to the US culturally in some ways.

100%, Vienna would be my other example of how to do it right.

The US 'attempt' to do public housing is like your child, being told to wash the dishes, simply smashes all the dishes and says that this chore is impossible because look, all the dishes got broken. Meanwhile the kids next door have built an entire dishwashing machine in the time your child spent complaining it wasn't possible.

Which housing related laws are "draconian"?

A high percentage of public housing is not the only solution to limit rent prices: any non-market housing is often enough to keep the prices down, although public housing is the most proeminent across the world, associative housing work very well, and can be taken from existing stock (friends of mine inherited 4 appartments and let them be rented by an association, a sort of 20 years free lease where the only obligation for the association is to take care of the renovations and keeping the appartments appliances up to date).

> It's going to get worse before it gets better.

What would be a reasonable estimate of when it could start to “get better”? I find “country eating its young” to be a perfect metaphor and honestly I don’t see any hope, it’s sad to see.

I have been in the US for close to 15 years now, as a renter, and the insane rent increase driven by housing shortage is truly sour. Every year there’s a high probability that my rent will be dramatically jacked up, to the point where I have moved 11 times since I came here, in several instances directly driven by a 20% rent increase.

And I work in tech so generally can afford things due to high pay, I cannot even imagine how less fortunate professionals in other careers manage. Probably tons of roommates or accepting 2h commutes.

All this has definitely added a sense of instability to my life that certainly contributed to other downstream decisions, some serious like never having kids (not the only reason, but a factor nonetheless), and some trivial like never buying any nice furniture/tools because it’s just going to be an annoyance when I’ll have to move again in N months after the landlord says they can now get $4k on the market instead of my current $3.5k.

Fortunately I am a european citizen and most likely I see myself gravitating more and more there as I age. Europe has a lot of problems, including housing shortage in some pockets, but where I come from, which is a generally desirable urban/suburban metro, it’s easy to find affordable rentals on a 8 year contract, which makes it so much easier to plan your life and not live with the anxiety that in just 9 months a 20% increase will come your way.

Why would you think it's going to ever get better? The whole economy is set up to make the problem worse indefinitely. Wealth disparity and poverty are features not bugs.

You will get lots of resistance to things that significantly lower current values unless they are very widespread.

Consider my house. I paid $280k for it in 2007. Zillow estimates it is now worth $454k and Redfin estimates $498k. So on paper I've gained about $200k.

But since property tax is based on value I've also gained a quite a bit on my property tax bill. Same with house insurance. Until I actually sell the house I gain no benefit from the gain in value, except possibly I could take out a larger home equity loan than I would be able to otherwise.

When I do sell it then I've got a nice windfall right? Not really. Since houses have gone up all over the place if I buy another house the gains go into that.

How about if I instead rent an apartment? Rents are way up since 2007 too, so the money runs out roughly as fast as it would have if house prices and rent had stayed the same as they were in 2007.

So yeah, I'd be happy with the lower taxes and lower insurance that lower prices would bring, and would vote for measures that would bring that about such as more development. But only if whatever is done to lower prices in my region is also being done in the rest of the state and country.

Lowering birth rates is a good thing though

Good for the planet, bad for the economy.

and betting the farm based on models with infinite expansion as their core axiom is dicey within relatively short time frames

Bad for society. Lots of old people and few children and young people makes for a pretty fucked up social situation.

The consequence is a rapidly aging society which is terrible for everyone. It's terrible for the huge undercared-for, neglected bloc of elderly. It's terrible for the smaller amount of overworked, overtaxed young people.

Landing the plane is a good thing.

Landing the plane by going nose-down into the ground is not.

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