Hacker News Reader

Comment by kiba | Hacker News Reader

The problem with a UBI is not the UBI itself, but the fact that landlords could just raise their price.

You need to solve the contradiction within the economy in order to make UBI works.

The current way our taxation policy work is to tax labor and capital, which is the basis of our economy, while flinching away from taxing land, which derives much of its value from the surrounding economic activity rather than an owner's effort.

By the way, the UBI is an old idea. In the 19th century, it was known as the Citizen's Dividend.

View on HN

If cities allowed more supply to be constructed, landlords couldn't just raise the price.

Just like in the US, there are a ton of homes in Ireland just sitting vacant. Supply isn't nearly as large a problem as affordability. Ireland introduced a vacant homes tax to try to help, but it seems they haven't gone far enough.

I know of cities where real estate development is rampant, sometimes to the detriment of quality, and yet apartment prices are soaring.

That's because, in the places where housing is expensive, it's expensive because a _LOT_ of people want to live there. It's a pipe dream that you can out build demand in these places. Reducing prices of housing in nice places to live (by any means, including building) will only result in more demand up until that insatiable demand is satisfied.

Nice places to live can't support all the people that want to live there.

Because demand is, for all intents and purposes, insatiable, the dollar value of housing/property isn't based on supply and demand because supply can't practically be increased to affect demand. Instead, the price is related to what a prospective buyer can afford to pay _every month_ and, thus, is related to interest rates. Interest rates go down, prices go up to the point where a prospective buyer's mortgage payment would be the same.

People who bring up the (un)affordability of housing are never talking about Oklahoma, they're talking about the Bay Area, Southern California, New York City, Seattle, Portland, etc. All places that are so desirable, they can't practically support everyone that wants to live there.

> it's expensive because a _LOT_ of people want to live there.

I can't figure out how to make the math make sense even if I were to build a house in the middle of nowhere. Time and materials is the real killer.

Some day, when AI eliminates software development as a career, maybe you will be able to hire those people to build you houses for next to nothing, but right now I don't think it matters where or how many you build. The only way the average Joe is going to be able to afford one — at least until population decline fixes the problem naturally — is for someone else to take a huge loss on construction. And, well, who is going to line up to do that?

You can't afford a 175k house on a software engineer salary?

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/3024-N-Vermont-Ave-Oklaho...

"Built in 1954" doesn't sound like new construction. Of course you can buy used houses at a fraction of the cost. That's nothing new. Maybe you missed it, but the discussion here about building new to make homes more affordable.

It's not like the newly built homes are typically the most affordable. It causes a ripple effect as those that can afford it upgrade their housing.

https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1314...

It is not like I'm homeless. I would be the one upgrading. Except I don't see how the numbers make sense.

You're right: The cost of new construction anchors the used market. Used housing is so expensive because new housing is even more expensive. If new houses were cheaper I, like many others, would have already have built one and my current home would be up for grabs at a lower price than I'd expect in the current reality. However, that's repeating what was already said.

> building new to make homes more affordable

No need to build new, a plethora of affordable homes are available.

If one was freely able to move about the entire world you may have a point. Especially given current events, I am not sure the country in which that house is located would take kindly to many of us moving there. In a more practical reality you're not going to find anything for anywhere close to that price even in the middle of nowhere, never mind somewhere where everyone wants to live. That is where earlier comments suggest building more housing would help.

Except it is not clear who can afford new construction either. It is even more expensive.

> That is where earlier comments suggest building more housing would help.

I explained earlier why I don't think it would. The places with a housing "shortages" are the places where everyone wants to live. Those places would have to build an impossible number of houses to affect demand.

You have people saying they can't afford housing and then, when you show them they can, they say, "not there..."

> Those places would have to build an impossible number of houses to affect demand.

If houses were able to be built freely then everyone would be able to build a house... Except, if you can't afford a used house, you most definitely cannot afford a new one. As before, time and materials are the real killer. The used housing market is merely a reflection of the cost to build new. Same reason used cars have risen so high in price in recent years: Because new cars have even higher prices.

> You have people saying they can't afford housing and then, when you show them they can, they say, "not there..."

The trouble is that you confuse affordability with sticker price. I technically could live in that house for six months before I have to return back to my home country, but I could not legally work during that time. It is far more affordable to pay significantly higher prices in my country for a house and work all year long. The price of that house is low, but the cost is very high.

The places everyone wants to live are the places everyone wants to live because they are the most affordable places to live. If it were cheaper to move somewhere else, the people would have moved there already. Humans love to chase a good deal and carve out an advantage for themselves. However, a low price doesn't mean cheaper.

> The used housing market is merely a reflection of the cost to build new.

The majority of the cost of a home in places with shortages is the land, not the home.

Land is more or less worth the same whether it has a used house on it or if you build a new house on it. The trouble remains that the high cost of new construction anchors the cost of used houses.

Construction costs should really have been driven down by the march of technology, but that really hadn't been the case. It's mostly stagnant IIRC. But construction costs doesn't really explain the housing crisis well.

It seems London hit record levels of empty properties in 2024, some 30,000 of them worth £2Bn or so.

What part of your idea was supposed to stop that happening and why didn't it work?

Too much capital, too few assets. We can't keep building assets, so perhaps we need to do something about the capital?

We could tax it and pay some of the money to artists?

> What part of your idea was supposed to stop that happening

The part where people see their money burning away paying maintenance and tax on deteriorating assets.

Why are people holding assets unused?

Because they don't believe that the city will allow sufficient development to allow them to purchase like-assets in the future if they chose to reinvest and the carrying cost is minimal because council taxes are trivial relative to the value of the asset. If my research is correct, Kensington council taxes are under 10k USD per year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com