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My argument was solely that of the capitalists fallacy, i.e. that monetary value and desirability are not always identical. Each case needs its own consideratio

• AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  > However, there are streets in London of very highly priced completed uninhabited houses, which serve as speculation objects and money parking vehicles. Inhibiting this is another benefit of building even more housing. Speculation only occurs when people expect housing costs to increase or at least stay the same. If you build enough to actually start to lower prices then the speculators will try to get out before they lose their money and thereby put even more housing on the market. > There are many examples in Germany were newly constructed housing lead to a increase in rents of already existing housing. This can happen when the shortage is so bad that it's actually harming quality of life in the city, e.g. by making local traffic worse because people who want to be living in the city have to commute in instead. As you start to relieve the shortage you start to address those problems, which improves quality of life in the city (good), but that makes housing there more valuable and makes people willing to pay more of a premium for it, which increases demand. That isn't actually a problem -- the demand isn't infinite and improving quality of life is a gain -- it just means you still aren't building enough housing to satisfy the pent up demand. > Where is the value for the very real people who must leave the city because they can't afford the rising rents, even though they have their work there and their children go to school there? This is one of the situations where you're almost out of water but the middle ground is a desert. If you don't build more housing, the status quo is untenable. If you only build a little bit it can even get worse. To actually fix it you need to build a lot. Not an infinite amount, not an impossible amount, but quite a large amount. And the status quo if you do nothing is that you die a slow death. > I just don't think that housing should just be unregulated so the market can have its go at it as if that were the god-given solution to every problem. Government: <causes problem by imposing unnecessary rules> Government: We should address this problem by imposing some additional rules. ... There are things markets are bad at. Matching supply with demand is not one of those things.
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  • madez 7y ago
    > There are things markets are bad at. Matching supply with demand is not one of those things. The market matches supply with demand by definition, one can say. But at what price? Of course, some people go the fundamentalist capitalists path, and say 'fuck those that can't afford to live where they are now, they don't deserve to live there and should leave'. I disagree with that radicalism. Housing is different from other products. Housing is essential, so everybody has to satisfy their demand. This may justify regulation. Housing is not arbitrarily replaceable, so people may be forced to compromise important parts of their lifes when moving. This may justify regulation. These issues are not created by government regulation. They are there. If regulation is used to internalize these aspects into the market, then it would be myopic to view that as the pesky authorities meddling with the market. It is possible to build more housing under regulation taking into account these aspects and other aspects.
    • AnthonyMouse 7y ago
      > The market matches supply with demand by definition, one can say. But at what price? At the market clearing price. That is why rules that constrain supply are so problematic -- they raise that price. > Of course, some people go the fundamentalist capitalists path, and say 'fuck those that can't afford to live where they are now, they don't deserve to live there and should leave'. I disagree with that radicalism. If you own property somewhere, the amount it costs you was set in the past. Whether the price goes up or down doesn't matter to you until you do leave. Price increases can push out renters, but the whole point is to ultimately get costs to go down. That doesn't push out anybody, except maybe speculators. > Housing is essential, so everybody has to satisfy their demand. This may justify regulation. The "regulation" that allows more people to satisfy their demand would by definition be regulations that induce more housing to be constructed. So this would be things like not imposing tax on buildings (LVT instead of property tax), tax incentives for new construction etc. But notice how easily this is reframed as really just removing existing legislative disincentives from new construction. By contrast, the rules we have now do things like expressly prohibit taller buildings or impose minimum parking requirements and other costs that do nothing but make housing more expensive for the people who could otherwise do without those things and would not willingly choose to pay their cost if not doing so was available as an option. You can't just say "we need rules" without specifying what they are. Bad rules are explicitly worse than no rules -- and bad rules are what we have. So we can start by getting rid of those. Only if the problem then continues to exist do we need to worry about replacing them with something else. But notice also how hard it is to find and enact good rules. When rents are high you get numerous loud people who don't understand math or economics proposing counterproductive nonsense like rent control and designated affordable housing, and then those get enacted precisely because they don't reduce overall rents, allowing the politicians to lie to the proles about helping them while increasing the rents collected by the landlords. Doing wrong is worse than doing nothing.