Comment by _petronius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _petronius | Hacker News Reader

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Luckily, your personal thoughts from first principles with zero review of the available data is not all we have to go on!

There is research[0] about causes of homelessness and about the effect[1] of house building on homelessness.

This is a well-studied issue, that, as the linked article likes to point out, people are just opposed to the solution for reasons of personal interest and (to me, bizzare) bias. Building houses reduces homelessness, increases supply for everyone, and lowers housing costs for everyone. It has no economic downsides, and significant personal upsides for everyone (cheaper housing and more options for you, dear reader).

[0]: https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/ (taken from elsewhere in this thread) [1]: https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1314...

Eh, I'm not against building more homes though. I just think biasing towards social housing is better than building homes in general.

The point of that second link above is that any amount of housing, at any price point, lowers cost of housing for everyone, especially lower-income participants in the market.

Housing is in such brutally short supply (goes for major cities in North America as well as Europe) that not only can we not afford to be picky, but in terms of actual effect it doesn't matter: social housing is as effective as luxury housing. Sometimes it is _less_ effective at achieving social goals, if rich people are also trying to get their hands on the same housing stock, because there is not enough to meet demand at the top end of the market.

I think people misunderstand the state of the housing market: it is brutally expensive because of chronic, decades long undersupply, not building enough to meet _new_ demand each year, thus the "debt" in supply has compounded massively. This has strong and weird market effects, such that building lots of cheap housing at huge scale is only a partial solution (and the scale actually needed to alleviate the problem is much larger than anyone is actually willing to contemplate right now).

> The point of that second link above is that any amount of housing, at any price point, lowers cost of housing for everyone, especially lower-income participants in the market.

Not unless you force developers to build even when it's unprofitable (or not profitable enough)

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