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The [city] government can build housing according to need just as any other infrastructure. This would however go against a lot of interests, both institutiona
by cloudfifty 5y ago
The [city] government can build housing according to need just as any other infrastructure.
This would however go against a lot of interests, both institutional and citizens with a large mortgage, that depends on high housing prices. So it's rare. But one can see Vienna, Austria, as a good example of where the government takes an active role in building housing and can show a great result in low rents and high availability.
- CryptoPunk 5y agoYes, the state can embark on massive construction of housing. The advantage is it gets around zoning restrictions on building height. State-funded housing tends to be unimaginative/repetitive in design and lower quality though. The same outcome, of higher density housing, can be achieved by simply repealing zoning restrictions, and if that doesn't do enough, by replacing sales taxes with land taxes, which discourage sprawling land-inefficient housing. There may be advantages, in political economy, that makes overcoming special interests opposed to densification easier, with the state-led approach though. As for special interests in general, there are plenty in and close to the state itself that would massively profit from large public projects, so I don't see this as a question of whether or not we support special interests. It's simply a question of which special interests.