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Comment by bwb | Hacker News Reader

IMO... one of the most important benchmarks for judging the effectiveness of a government is the cost of housing. Cheap and basic housing is so key for economic well-being. I would love to see very basic, small, apartments created by governments on a mass level to try to overcome the current situation. Like persistently have a department of government just building to meet needed demands in economic centers.

What other benchmarks would you throw out there if you were going to grade gov effectiveness?

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Singapore's HDB system is world class in this regard.

Key items being first time owners are highly prioritized (effectively no one else). Must be owner occupied for first 5 years before allowing rental or resale. Government sets initial sale pricing to be quite affordable with special loans being cheap for the BTO. Average 2 year wait from lottery to build. Was 5 during covid.

Austria too - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-11-08/the-desig...

A lot of the cheap blocks of government made apartments in the UK are now being torn down. Without regular maintenance and updating, cheap housing can quickly become ugly ghettos. It isn't enough to just build houses. They need to be initially desirable and continually maintained to remain desirable.

Ya I don't want it to be cheap, rather super solid and built for 100 years, but run on that type of time frame. I have some friends who build for universities and that is how they think when they build a project versus a cheap throw up that is barely expected to last 20 years.

Even if they are built, the entire insurance system post-Grenfell is causing absolutely insane service charges for residents.

Mine are up >50% since 2018, that’s despite gaining no new services and work on the building being put on hold due to it not being essential. The fact that it’s a relatively new build (about 12 years old) is almost irrelevant as construction is shoddy.

Putting new buildings up is only part of the problem, the entire system is fucked.

> Even if they are built, the entire insurance system post-Grenfell is causing absolutely insane service charges for residents.

If it's building insurance hikes, for fucks sake it should not be allowed to roll these over to the renters - they have had zero say in shoddy construction, the developers should be the ones held liable.

They should, but they’re not and the government appears unwilling to do anything about it.

Hell, my building recently lost it’s fire safety certificate because one guy decided to scam the system which has caused a ton of knock-on impact for owners looking to move out.

Not allowed to roll over to renters? What does that mean? How would it work? Money is fungible.

Why should the owner of a unit be expected to absorb the cost? It isn't like they chose the cladding.

People obviously do go after the developers but it isn't like they are picking and choosing from materials lists during construction either.

Renters in this case probably means leaseholders. Under leasehold, the owner of the unit is effectively a renter.

Double whammy: spray foam attic insulation (aided by goverment grants!) causing sale & mortgage problems.

https://hoa.org.uk/advice/guides-for-homeowners/i-am-improvi...

We had our cladding replaced but now our fire safety certificate is invalid.

The replacement was done so poorly that panels come loose and we have to request the building management company sort it out.

>I would love to see very basic, small, apartments created by governments on a mass level

As someone living in a country where it can take five or more years to get approval to build a new house and 10+ for commercial buildings due to the government bureaucracy, I'm scared by the idea of getting the government more involved. The key issue is that the government makes it very hard to build -> less housing -> expensive housing.

what country is that?

Czechia. Also, it's very inconsistent depending on local governance. Even Microsoft bailed out their data center project near Prague for this (and other) reasons...

if that is SF then that sounds like the discretionary review process for entitlements, are you familiar with any of those words?

I’d add fertility rate as another powerful metric: when people feel safe, supported, and optimistic, they have kids. So if housing, income stability, healthcare, and trust in the future are in place, you’ll usually see that reflected in birth rates.

All this only makes sense in the context of large groups; at the individual level, many factors determine whether someone has children.

What the puppet masters will tell you though that a country’s fertility rate are declining, because women want careers, the men are incels, and fertility drops due to climate change and microplastics.

Most people I know around my age, either limit the number of children or delay having them because they don’t feel safe bringing a child into this world.

> when people feel safe, supported, and optimistic, they have kids.

I actually thought that wasn't the case. Across the entire world, people in more precarious circumstances have more kids. I don't know why.

> people in more precarious circumstances have more kids. I don't know why.

Did you consider that the judgement of precariousness of the people's situation is in your value system, and does not necessarily transfer to their value system? Especially this could be due to you having access to more information than them

isn’t your comment doing literally the same thing?

Actually I do not see the similarity. However it appears that you see disrespect where only respect was intended - could you propose how should I have conveyed the message in a way that would appear more respectful in your eyes?

Huh?

less educated -> less money -> less to lose + welfare benefits don't look too bad

Across the world, yes, but in the context of reasonably well of people, no. There are other differences too.

The consequences of having more kids is very different for a subsistence farmer vs an affluent urban person.

Women who are educated about birth control and able to make those decisions have less kids. That is why - when women specifically have options they choose to have less kids and pursue own happiness.

Nordic countries have the lowest birth rates outside east asia and they rank among the top on surveys of happiness, optimism and the like. I think you need to revisit your thesis. Some cultures just dont prioritize having kids.

My understanding of human geography and population pyramids is that it's the opposite - when a nation is developing but not developed, birth rates are the highest. Developed nations have lower birth rate.

I’ve been told in China they have dirt cheap small units available for people who would otherwise be homeless. They aren’t flashy, but they are absolutely better than letting people be homeless.

Not sure why this kind of housing just doesn’t really exist elsewhere.

I often think that for a government to convince me that they are serious about addressing a housing crisis, the first thing they need to do is determine what proportion of residential properties are not being used as a primary residence. It seems to me (looking at changes in the number of households to number of dwellings in my property obsessed country) that that proportion has been declining and policies should be introduced to encourage people not to remove residences from the permanent housing stock (e.g. higher taxes on short term rentals, second homes, empty homes, etc).

Life expectancy, starvation rates, literacy rates

Ugh, that made me look at literacy rates in the USA at the 6th grade or below.

Its kinda funny you mention this because a lot of communist countries did pretty much this with high rise apartments. They're still there too.

Ya good point, I see those all the time in Serbia. We need some kinda of base building for supply, and the rest of the bit where they can override local zoning, speed up permits, override reviews, etc.

And that's kind of the dream TBH. Every private dollar that goes into housing is a dollar taken away from people who could be building businesses themselves or investing. Having cheap, plentiful housing provides a base that people can build from. There's other benefits too, say your relationships explodes and you need a new place, the last thing you want to do is be living with your ex, or couch surfing with friends.

Par of Khrushchev's legacy was switching away from the earlier focus on higher quality housing that largely favoured the elite in favour of throwing up cheap housing fast to alleviate the severe housing crisis.

But as a result, a more enduring part of his legacy became that due to economic stagnation, a large proportion of this really poor quality housing that was indeded as a stopgap to meet desperate short-term housing need, survived not just Khrushchev, but the Soviet Union...

> But as a result, a more enduring part of his legacy became that due to economic stagnation, a large proportion of this really poor quality housing that was indeded as a stopgap to meet desperate short-term housing need, survived not just Khrushchev, but the Soviet Union...

The alternative was people living in sheds and 19th-century timber huts that were falling apart.

The Khrushchev apartment blocks, despite their many disadvantages, were a godsend to the ballooning (at the time) population and necessary to support the rapid urbanization without homelessness.

The HN bubble will never understand that you can't solve the housing problem with only high-quality desirable housing while still making it cheap enough for the bottom quartile to afford it.

That's not even getting into the regulation side of it and local council/town NIMBYs

Sure. I think for all of Khruschev's faults, his housing policy was a significant positive.

It is just also a cautionary tale of how easily a temporary fix becomes semi-permanent, but that was on his successors and the failure of the longer term Soviet economy.

Careful about cheap. Housebuilders were happy to just use plasterboard to separate dwellings in a flat complex for example (or it at least sounds like it. There is zero soundproofing - every sniff, tap, movement etc can be heard)

And the best way to do this imo is to have the right incentives for investors to build affordable homes.

Maternal mortality rate.

Also infant mortality rate.

Governments caused this problem by fighting tooth and nail to keep immigration levels high. Without that, house prices in most developed countries would be falling now, like they are in Japan, because a decreasing population means less demand for housing.

Cure worse than the disease. A aging population is economically ruinous.

Compare the growth in GDP per capita in Japan Vs the UK, the UK isn't doing particularly better in spite of all that immigration.

It's not obvious to me that comparing GDP per capita is a fair comparison when talking about one country with immigration vs one without. A lot of the immigration I believe to be not so skilled. But we needed lower-skill jobs filled too.

its quite complicated and changes over time.

Post Brexit changes make it easier for high skilled workers and harder for low skilled. I have not idea how big the actual change has been.

There have been other events and rule changes that have had an impact - covid and Ukrainian visas.

Some interesting data here: https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/mi...

It looks to me that the Uk has done a lot better:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...

good lord the unsubstantiated zenophobia. please share some data to support this claim.

here is counterpoint: i live in a place where housing prices rose higher than the national average during a time period when the state experienced out migration.

Immigration is not to blame. Gulf states have massive immigration and expat populations - multiple times that of the locals and yet they manage to manage and house them just fine.

This is a bit like saying that high nobility can afford to house its extended family : what about everyone else that did not inherit vast sums of money (hydrocarbons) ?

It is not about having money or not. It is about how the question of immigration is treated. If poor people without UK citizenship were not allowed to live or own property in the big cities, the rents there would have been substantially lower.

Housing prices are falling in Japan because they have the most YIMBY zoning laws in the developed world so they actually expand their housing stock. Also because their economy is shit since they dont allow any immigration.

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