There was a time when the US government built homes for working-class Americans
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What changed? Mostly a shift toward neoliberal policies in the '70s and '80s that framed government intervention as inefficient and market solutions as inherently superior. We offloaded housing policy to private developers and then acted shocked when affordability cratered.
We don’t need to reinvent anything—we just need the political will to do what we already did once, and quite successfully.
Instead of addressing systemic issues like housing, wages, climate change and healthcare, we started screaming about the culture wars (thanks Reagan). It was easier (and more profitable) to stir outrage over symbolic issues than to solve material problems. We could’ve been building homes, but we got tricked into yelling about bathrooms and book bans instead.
> We don’t need to reinvent anything—we just need the political will to do what we already did once, and quite successfully.
We are in vetocracy, because cheapest way way to placate your political supporters is to give them power to veto what they do not want (instead of accomplish anything positive).
See https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/abundance-...
Many non-“left” barriers have been raised too and ignoring that only contributes to the mess we’re in. For example: zoning and planning. Plenty of folks would like to claim they want more homeless housing, just not near them.
I find the divide between what people want nationally versus locally very amusing: https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/44611-opinions-na...
There was an era where the landed gentry were aware of this. There was an era where company owners were aware of this. There was an era where governments were aware of this.
Now it's bad for return on capital and/or socialism.
As fun as it might be to dunk on strawman republicans, those developments weren't exactly showered with praise from the left either. The same housing was being decried as being "company towns" or whatever.
Company scrip is what a lot of people take issue with, I assume, as they should.
No? People also complain how it limits your career prospects (because there aren't any competitors to jump ship to), or how the company ends up with outsized political influence.
record stops
The median home today is $350k-ish. Whoops, Congress better be prepared to allocate more or lower housing costs before this article’s advice can be implemented
waiting for Godot
Sale price at market yes. Let's see cost of goods on that please.
There's huge demand and not enough supply.
You act like that number should be the target. If the government were to start pumping out houses, supply goes up, reduced demand drops prices.
They raised 8 kids.
That's not what re-inflated prices. Basically, no houses were built from about 2007 to 2017, and then far too few houses were built. Meanwhile, loads of people immigrated to Ireland for jobs (mostly in tech and finance).
Then, because lots of people spotted that Irish property was a good investment, people started piling in using rents as their baseline for investment, driving rents up, which pushed prices up etc.
But fundamentally property prices are increasing in Ireland because of population growth and a lack of supply (driven by poor planning for water and services, along with a culture of property owners objecting to the opening of an envelope).
The extremely high cost of the Irish bank bailout was largely down to bad bank practices and not merely the fact that there was a property bubble.
The noughties Irish property crisis was largely driven by a speculative bubble, and there was not really a huge supply shortfall. Unfortunately, he _current_ one is supply-side. In 2023 Ireland built more housing per capita than any other OECD nation and it was close to the top last year, but, even optimistically, that is only stopping the shortfall from getting _worse_.
(A lot of this is down to catastrophically bad estimates made early last decade, which had Ireland returning to its traditional economic pattern of perma-recession, and draining the working age population off via emigration.)
It can be true that sudden change can lead to bad results and I wouldn't necessarily advise shock therapy, but making the basis of a system more rational usually leads to good outcomes. Being honest about how valuable something is won't cause society to sink beneath the ocean and neither does letting people just build houses on land they own. Someone is already eating economic losses here, we just don't quite know who or how much. Letting them do better will surely outweigh the negatives.
> Someone is already eating economic losses here, we just don't quite know who or how much.
It's an intergenerational transfer of wealth from the young to the old.
Rough and dirty you could probably reverse back the amount by taking the change in Average house price-to-earnings ratios. Very basic estimate is from 4x earnings to 7x, which on the stock of US housing is about $20 trillion.
[1] https://x.com/g_meslin/status/1373689001866067969 [2] https://external-preview.redd.it/UGgkJlBT0dV7DwLgbEnJpgQzj4i...
My conspiracy theory is that homeowners vote at higher numbers and more reliably and like free money.
Sadly... they're kind of right.
The thing that drives me insane is that this is endemic in extremely liberal cities. Ask them if they support Trump’s wall and his mass deportations, and when they freak out point out that the housing policies they favor are the same thing on a smaller scale with pretty much the same motives.
Anyway, instead of the government building housing, we have the government stopping the building of housing as much as possible.
We need the housing, but it doesn't solve most issues.
Inflating away debt is less consistent but more miraculous than compound interest.
Building homes on federal land in the middle of no where will not do anything for people. We just need to allow people to build housing where there is a demand for labor.
Some things I think would be solved include:
- the housing crisis
- mobility => it would be easier for people to move to other parts of the country because they would be less tied to their homes - labor mismatches
- climate change => less reliance on cars
- funding infrastructure => more dense infrastructure means you don't have as much infrastructure to repair and you have more people paying for it
- city government budgets => high density areas are more tax efficient
- home insurance => the homes on the outskirts of cities are most likely to burn down; if housing is cheap the cost to insure it will be cheaper as well
IMO, if housing is 30-60% of peoples budgets and transportation is another 10-20%, if you can bring those costs down you can de-stress a lot of people. That might make politics less intense too.
* "Most problems" is not strictly accurate. But "more problems than you might think are directly related to housing" doesn't really roll off the tongue.
A quick search on realtor.com for a place like Cleveland. Plenty of houses for 150k.
Home equity or the future. Choose one.
If we keep pricing the next generation out of existence eventually the pyramid will collapse due to population decline. But I suppose the older homeowners living on it now will be dead so they don’t care.
The masses (sadly) will choose home equity every time.
I have witnessed bitterly resentful people turn into local activists protesting against any new build the day after they purchase a property.
It’s illegal for corporations to do this in most cases, but individuals certainly can. Housing is probably the main area where they do, with neighborhoods forming organic cartels to restrict supply to raise price.
As with all cartels the solution is to break it up or take away its ability to restrict production using lawfare and other means.
It was easy to miss that in the due diligence.
And it was really frustrating to experience. The development company cut so many corners that our own neighborhood had to engage several times with the city council and development bodies because their water management was threatening our properties. During construction of the water infrastructure they backflowed a toxic concentration of chemicals into the water supply. Their retention pond design is absolute garbage and while it was inspected and approval has already caused problems. They forgot to account for water going downhill while making assumptions about water volume that a week of heavy rain already invalidated.
We need the housing though, so it’s good we have that. I’m not sure we need more housing in the form of townhomes that cost $700,000+ each but at least it’s higher density than single family residences, which are killing the housing market in their own way.
Would just be nice if home building firms weren’t such a menace.
An optimistic theory is that new high-value housing leads to good outcomes for everyone: developers make a better profit, the area becomes more appealing, wealthier families can upgrade to the new houses, the local government gets more real estate taxes, and the previous houses of the relocators can be bought by less wealthy families (repeat this last step down the wealth scale).
As long as capital allocation is decided undemocratically, there won't be enough housing, food or medicine for everyone.
This increases the power of the labor class and would hopefully lead to better working conditions.
My pet theory is many of societies problems would significantly improve if we gave more people the ability to walk away.
This scarcity of resources is true and it has nothing to do with capital allocation methodology. It's just economics. Human beings collectively have unlimited wants. You can't solve it by changing the allocation method.
Suppose only 5% of the population breeds like rabbits in the presence of food, medicine, and housing. It won't take long for that cultural subpopulation to dominate.
Humans are not unlike microorganisms in a petri dish when one adds nutrients. All life is.
If you really believe this shit, read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
Humans are very much unlike microorganisms. Populations don't explode when their needs are met, quite the contrary.
Demographic transition in one culture does not imply universal demographic transition across the species. Because those who haven't yet transitioned will control population growth rates.
Now why did I say this? Because you opened by presuming that socialism would solve human wants. Which is nonsense. Nothing solves human wants.
I reiterate, the need for food, housing and medicine is not unlimited. The population is not infinite and humans have a limited need of these things. Do the math: finite×finite=finite
"Nothing solves human wants": what about prices? It seems like it does. It's a flawed solution that leaves some with nothing, but it does solve it. Now, what if we distributed the basic utilities on an as-needed basis. That too would solve "human wants" on those things, and would ideally leave none lacking.
Please don't quote "econ 101 and basic biology" at me without actually engaging with what I'm saying. You're ignoring material reality and using abstract nonsense to deter from the subject.
We see this quite clearly. Wealthy nations have much lower fertility rates. Wealthy individuals tend to have fewer kids. Even those pursuing large families have smaller families than they did in the recent past - my grandfather was the youngest of 12, when was the last time you met someone with 12 kids? Even Elon Musk, one of the richest people in human history whose net worth exceeds what a medieval peasant would make in their lifetime a million times over and who has an obsession with maximizing his reproduction has a number of offspring that would not be seen as exceptionally large by a medieval peasant, particularly when spread across multiple women.
Realistically, no one is going on a breeding frenzy because they can suddenly afford a 3 bedroom apartment.
> Humans are a K-selected species - the optimal strategy for passing on our genes is to invest as many resources as possible into the smallest viable number of offspring.
It's certainly fashionable these days in the West. I don't know that I would call it optimal. Optimal now for passing along genes is probably donating at a sperm bank after getting into a regionally swanky university. A joke, of course, but notice it stacks! Certainly the donating to the sperm bank plus what you profess dominates what you profess in isolation. Since I just improved the strategy, it wasn't optimal.
> People reproduced much more when food, medicine, and housing were much more scarce.
Yet the population was smaller. You're talking per capita rates and I am not.
We successfully produce more viable adults now in absolute terms than ever before, the number of live births notwithstanding. Otherwise, global population would drop. Which it hasn't. Definitely slower growth but not shrinking: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#growth rate
That site says "The latest world population projections indicate that world population will reach 10 billion persons in the year 2060 and 10.2 billion in 2100."
> Humans are quite a bit different from micro-organisms
Humans increasingly inhabit inhabitable parts of the Earth with increasing density. This species-wide growth, regardless of the optimal reproductive strategy for any single individual, is like a microorganism spreading across a petri dish. We're starting to run into the edges of the dish so we're slowing down a tad. But, likely growth for at least the next 75 projected years per the above 10.2B people in 2100 projection.
Going back a step: My point is there's no end in sight for needs around housing, food, and medicine. Human beings aren't special. We consume all available resources, in part due to population growth. I did not expect population growth to be such a controversial topic. Population, it grows.
You did not improve on the strategy.
> You're talking per capita rates and I am not.
Because per capita rates are all that matters. specifically your concern was "Suppose only 5% of the population breeds like rabbits in the presence of food, medicine, and housing." This requires individuals to have more children per capita.
Population growth has been dominated by demographic momentum. Because a few generations ago infant mortality fell, those generations that had high birthrates produced much larger subsequent generations than thir immediate predecessors. These later generations had much lower per capita birthrates but they were larger, so as you say, they have more aggregate children. Subsequent generations after this have very similar numbers of children, but these generations are replacing smaller generations from when the infant mortality rate was higher. Once you get far enough from industrialization that no one from before the infant mortality decrease is left to be replaced, the population stops growing, at least from births. In the developed world which is now well over 100 years from this transition, population growth is purely from immigration, and in fact without this immigration the populations would be decreasing (as it is in a few less desirable locales like eastern europe). East Asia which went through this transition about 60 years ago is plateauing now. World population growth is only continuing in parts of the world where infant mortality is still falling, particularly sub-Saharan Africa.
You conveniently failed to mention in your link that it shows the world population dropping to 10.2 billion in 2100 after peaking in the 2080s.
> Humans increasingly inhabit inhabitable parts of the Earth with increasing density.
False. Huge potentially inhabitable parts of the earth remain uninhabited and are unlikely to ever be inhabited, and population densities in most inhabited areas are falling. There are a few distinct areas, namely urban centers, where population density is large and increasing, but this only proves that population density is not resource constrained.
> We're starting to run into the edges of the dish so we're slowing down a tad.
False. Resources are more abundant than ever, and our rate of production is growing faster than ever. Places with the most resources, the most petri dish available, have the lowest birthrates.
> But, likely growth for at least the next 75 projected years per the above 10.2B people in 2100 projection.
57 years based on the above projection
> We consume all available resources, in part due to population growth.
False. See above.
> I did not expect population growth to be such a controversial topic. Population, it grows.
Because you were uninformed on the topic.
> My point is there's no end in sight for needs around housing, food, and medicine.
There very clearly is an end in sight for the need for higher levels of housing, food production, and medicine production. Specifically it's in decades, not centuries, barring some future demographic shift comparable to the reduction in infant mortality during industrialization.
Yes, resource scarcity is a key factor underlying society's problems.
If housing becomes more abundant, a lot of middle class people become decidedly poor. Well... that's bad. And they're the voters, so is that going to happen? No.
We can build denser, cheaper per-unit housing. We decide not to, because the only people that want that are the ones who don't have a house. As soon as they get a house their opinion will change.
Probably among the least popular political ideas I can think up, though.
> 9,543 single and 3,996 semi-detached homes while 5,000 apartments
So 18.5k homes of one kind or another over ~2 years. That’s, umm, nothing? Like seriously - the current rate of housing completions is over 2 orders of magnitude above that (it’s hovering just over 1.4M/yr right now).
[0] https://www.census.gov/construction/nrc/current/index.html
It's also, it needs be said, wasn't built to support (sigh[1]) "massive immigration". You can find a few H1B holders peppered around, but the sprawl is for the middle class, 100%.
[1] Seriously, why must everything become a callout to right wing grievance politics these days?
Obviously we disagree but the point I feel most compelled to push back against is your assertion that "living in the modern US is paradise in almost all quantifiable ways".
This is such a problematic statement that clearly labors heavily under the burden of its own premise. A crude metric is quite telling: suicide has trended upwards in the past 20 years. I presume if the data went back further the picture would be more stark.
Living in a time with gizmos and gadgets and economic plenty that is weakly distributed and calling that "paradise" is very insulting to people's lived experiences and part of the reason I think the economic message of the politics you represent alienates average folks.
Based on your posts it seems like you've been a wealthy developer for decades and likely have employed, or employ, cheap labor. Kind of feels like a rugpull, Ross.
Personally, I've managed many teams with cheap foreign developers, I'm just straight about it.
Also, when do you think I was born? You think the US hadn't been built in 1982? Absurd claims all around.
At the turn of the previous century, suicide rates were markedly higher than today, even though today is worse than 20 years ago.
https://jabberwocking.com/raw-data-us-suicide-rates-since-19...
It's probably not causative, as that would be quite silly, but economic plenty for extremely wealthy people caused by a massive influx of cheap labor is clearly not a net boon on this metric.
The US made its bones well before this insane population explosion we only very recently had.
(Yes, we've had large amounts of immigration before. We also built infrastructure and were vastly less developed).
> A crude metric is quite telling: suicide has trended upwards in the past 20 years. I presume if the data went back further the picture would be more stark.
1. The data going back 70 years, which is 50 years more than 20, show that suicide has sharply risen.
2. The integrity of data much older than that is substantially in question.
> After two decades of slowly rising, the US suicide rate has stabilized over the past few years. It is now at the same level as the 1950s.
And yeah, the rates pre-1950 were much, much higher.
Suicide and basic needs being met is likely not highly correlated. On the other side suicide stats likely don’t include dependency related death, alcoholism can be a coping mechanism, if you didn’t commit suicide but instead murdered your liver and died early is that really a different statistic in your assessment?
The only way you can measure is access to basic needs, housing, shelter, medical care, nutrition. A century ago those things were significantly lower for the average person vs now. Could the world be in a better situation? Very likely yes, but is could also be much worse.
If you want to significantly change things then better, advocate for more social workers and to make sure the social welfare system works through them. They are in my experience very good at sussing out whether someone is a leech to society and is just looking for a handout of someone who is truly in need.
Advocate for adequate housing, more suburbs doesn’t help low-middle class people, you need more dense housing close to infrastructure or workplaces.
I just don't know how to express to you how philosophically naive I think the kind of utilitarian assertion you've made is.
We can easily construct a thought experiment world that you and I would both agree is a living hellscape where all human needs were simultaneously being met. Most horror science fiction is predicated on those premises.
I just think we don’t need to debate this, things are better than a century ago but they are still not great.
Quality of life isn’t solely based on basic needs alone, but for the vast majority of people those basic needs are now met when they weren’t before. That doesn’t mean we get to say, “That’s good enough let’s pack up” there’s still a lot of work to do.
Fundamentally the question to me becomes "what is the meaning of life" and I don't actually think the answer is even "to be extremely comfortable".
This is my core disagreement with tech enthusiasts (specifically AI) people. It's just a naive way of understanding the human organism.
(You know, it occurs to me that most Americans aren't even extremely comfortable because they live in comfort with a massive amount of real or perceived precarity.)
I can tell you my point of view is that we aren’t even sure what we should do. I know reasonably well how to solve the basic needs, in my experience that doesn’t mean you are going to be happy, I was the unhappiest in my life when I had the most I’ve had. Well maybe the second unhappiest, there was a point in my life I will never want to go back to, but I don’t think I will.
When everything was going well, I needed nothing, I was achieving all my life goals, I fought through the worst depression, I had to seek medical help.
That doesn't sound right.
They said that the US population has grown by almost 100 million since they were born. That would put their birth year around 1989.
Some searching suggests that in 1989 about 50% of the population lived in suburban areas. That would have been about 120 million people.
It is still about 50% which is 170 million people today. That suggests that around 70% of the suburbs were already built when they were born.
Which is usually how these arguments go.
Are there more or fewer homeless people in the US than in 1982? There are fewer. Is the number of people per household larger or smaller than in 1982? It is smaller. Is the average home larger or smaller than in 1982? It is larger (very significantly so). Do the math. We're building housing faster than population growth. QED.
And, overwhelmingly, we're building that housing in suburban sprawl, because that's where it's cheap to build housing.
Now, there are many arguments about whether this is good or bad or whether policies could be better or worse. And I think you'd find you agree with me on more than you don't.
But statements like the above that seem to take as a prior that "massive immigration" (sigh, again) is somehow creating an infrastructure crises are simply wrong. Period. Start with correct arguments, then tune. Don't yell about one because your priors tell you it "doesn't sound right".
We’ve had roughly 4 million births and 2 million deaths per year since 1980. That is roughly a difference of 90 million. Additionally, when people cite immigration numbers, they frequently leave out negating numbers; the amount of people who were here temporarily, the amount of people who were deported or left voluntarily, and those who are “repeat offenders” in terms of migration that are frequently counted multiple times. So while yes, the number of immigrants as a percentage of population has increased in that time, the entire population increase is not a direct result of the roughly 10-15% they account for, which also aligns with the roughly 10-15% of the population they account for. Also, if you go back further than just when you were born, the US had roughly 14% immigrant population since 1900. Racism (in the form of nationalism/anti-immigration/etc) and nationalist changes to immigration laws reduced that number to 3% in the 20s, which has been slowly returning to the same 14% level since the 70s.
The US population growth has slowed overall since you were born, averaging a rate of 1% +/- 0.5% over that time and currently lower than when you were born. During that same time, our average infrastructure spending has grown from 300 to 600 billion a year; a 100% increase over that time compared to 1% growth in population per year.
So, given all these facts, how do you reconcile your statements that we have added 100 million due to massive immigration with no increases in infrastructure, when the facts seem to directly refute your assertions?
Most of these developments were meant to be temporary wartime measures and were heavily discriminatory. Housing hasn’t been seen as a public good so that’s partially the reason why we don’t do more of these types of projects. Habitat for Humanity is one organization that builds similar public housing projects notably not on the best real estate. Our housing situation is deliberately chosen over the last 100 years. We could have continued down that path beyond WW1 but realize it was done for a specific purpose at a specific point in time because the government realized it needed to bootstrap a nation for war.
No amount of banging on and on about immigrants will change that.
So, like Cronus eating his kids, many countries around the world have chosen to sacrifice affordability for their kids in order to squeeze out a few more decades of good living.
It's just like the problem the US & its peers have with unfunded liabilities: a huge chunk of retirement savings in tied up the stock market, specifically, the SP500 that has a PE ratio of 30. Are you willing to bet that these companies will stay profitable at their current rate for 30y, without slipping?
It's a question without easy answers, because as the workforce reduces (low birth rates), there are fewer workers paying into Social Security and bidding stock markets to new heights. As a result, everyone withdrawing ends up with less cash and fewer goods.
What is/are the continuing issue/s? What uk council housing situation should we be looking for/at?
Houses are suffering from being at the front of the interest of BlackRock and other almighty lobbies
Blackrock and "other almighty lobbies" (Chamber of Commerce?) are showing up to city council meetings to block housing from getting built?
If you want below-market rate housing, you can't. By definition.
No change to zoning or interest rates changes that. The market simply has more potential upside when those things happen.
In the wake of the S&L crises, the Federal Government crafted a scheme to provide below market rate housing using the sale of Tax credits. The reduction of corporate tax rates and wider use of trans-national financial engineering has devalued the tax credits underpinning that scheme.
Meanwhile Hope VI, removed the majority of subsidized housing inventory at all levels over the last thirty years.
But if you really want to understand what you are up against, the 1/3 of income for housing criterion is the same rate that landlords required of share-croppers on 1/3 shares (those that provided their own family's food and mule, those that couldn't were on 1/2 shares).
People not being able to buy a house is reversion to the mean...or just people you know falling into the fat part of the graph alongside all the people who couldn't afford a house before.
Most real estate is not owned by willing sellers. And most real estate is not leveraged. Most real estate is a place to park wealth.
And selling to wealth is a better business model than selling to poverty.