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There is another option: The government could buy/build/offer public housing as an alternative to the free market. It was done in the past and in other countrie

There is another option: The government could buy/build/offer public housing as an alternative to the free market. It was done in the past and in other countries and I see no reason not to do it now. The way I see it (and the way you put it) the free market has failed to provide housing to people, to an extend that there is no free market solution going forward. If the government (federal/state/county/municipal/etc.) provides and alternative to free market housing, they will directly be competing with private housing speculators. Prices on the free market will likely go down as a result (why pay $1,000,000 for a house from a speculator when you can buy a better house from the county for $400,000). These speculators will get angry, (and some bootlickers/sympathetic middle class) but they will not have the masses behind them to generate blood on the street. This is not an alien solution, it is battle tested as it has been done multiple times in most countries several times in history, as recently as the 1960s. The only reason not to go for it (given your two other scenarios) would be that the government is so sympathetic to the few rich that it is willing to let everything else crash and burn in just to cater to the interests of the rich.

klipt 5y ago
> the free market has failed to provide housing to people Is it really a free market in places like the Bay Area where zoning is so restrictive and NIMBYs can show up to planning meetings to basically block any new construction? It's been pointed out elsewhere in this thread that Japan also had a free market but less restrictive zoning and housing is much more affordable there. The main argument for government efficiency would be if the government could override the NIMBYs more easily than private developers can.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  Eminent domain?
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    Reducing the ability of the neighborhood to prevent you from building housing on your property is probably the opposite of eminent domain; you could argue that enabling excessive NIMBY's is essentially eminent-domain-like taking of your property to do what the (local) government wants instead of what you want.
  - erik_seaberg 5y ago
    We don’t need to steal land. All it would take is legalizing enough construction.
- runarberg 5y ago
  idk about the housing market in Japan, but I was under the impression that housing prices in Tokyo were far from affordable. Also a quick glance at Wikipedia informs me the governments in Japan actually take a pretty active role in the housing market, including by providing public housing. Are you sure zoning is the only thing that sets apart the Bay Area from Japan?
sokoloff 5y ago
That $400K house the county is selling. Is it a direct comp to the $1M house the other seller is offering? If it is, where’d the county get the land so much cheaper than the market? If they had a bunch of county-owned land from original incorporation, great, but is giving it away at that price (presumably via a lottery process) the best thing for residents of the county, or is $750K a more prudent use of the people’s resources?
- runarberg 5y ago
  Note that I’m weighing this up as an alternative to the GP’s doomsday scenarios. Given those scenarios spending on fixing the housing crisis seems like the most prudent action for a government. If public housing was done on a mass scales (like it has been in the past/other countries) you wouldn’t need a lottery process, just a wait period. A lot of people are renting and can afford to wait a year or two. In the status quo we simply can’t buy at all, we forsee renting for the rest of our lives, and are at risk of not even affording that as rent goes up exponentially.
mrjin 5y ago
Oh well, let's see it from a different perspective, then everything would be much simpler and clearer. The government can actually make housing a lot cheaper but why would it do so? Just take a look at the budget sheets, you will find out that the government is one of biggest if it's not the biggest one of the beneficiaries from the property boom. By making housing more expensive, it can collect more land/property taxes. If it cannot hike the tax rates easily, the evaluation hikes anyway. By printing more money, it dilutes its liabilities. Almost all the governments have been printing money for decades now, but they claimed there were not enough inflations, really? There seemed to be no severe inflation simply because of the methods used to calculate the inflation rates were biased. Indeed groceries' prices did not raise much, but how about the assets and/or properties? The economy is a dynamic system and can compensate by reducing non-essential expenditures to maintain essentials. But doesn't matter how flexible a system is, it still has a limit which no one really knows what it would be. We are pretty close to a tipping point if we are not already at it. The reason is pretty simple, any system with only positive feedback, doesn't matter how small the positive feedback is, is eventually going to crash as it requires more and more resource as input so that it can maintain the output. When it hits the hard limit, boom...

klipt 5y ago

> the free market has failed to provide housing to people Is it really a free market in places like the Bay Area where zoning is so restrictive and NIMBYs can show up to planning meetings to basically block any new construction? It's been pointed out elsewhere in this thread that Japan also had a free market but less restrictive zoning and housing is much more affordable there. The main argument for government efficiency would be if the government could override the NIMBYs more easily than private developers can.

Apocryphon 5y ago
Eminent domain?
- PeterisP 5y ago
  Reducing the ability of the neighborhood to prevent you from building housing on your property is probably the opposite of eminent domain; you could argue that enabling excessive NIMBY's is essentially eminent-domain-like taking of your property to do what the (local) government wants instead of what you want.
- erik_seaberg 5y ago
  We don’t need to steal land. All it would take is legalizing enough construction.
runarberg 5y ago
idk about the housing market in Japan, but I was under the impression that housing prices in Tokyo were far from affordable. Also a quick glance at Wikipedia informs me the governments in Japan actually take a pretty active role in the housing market, including by providing public housing. Are you sure zoning is the only thing that sets apart the Bay Area from Japan?

sokoloff 5y ago

That $400K house the county is selling. Is it a direct comp to the $1M house the other seller is offering? If it is, where’d the county get the land so much cheaper than the market? If they had a bunch of county-owned land from original incorporation, great, but is giving it away at that price (presumably via a lottery process) the best thing for residents of the county, or is $750K a more prudent use of the people’s resources?

runarberg 5y ago
Note that I’m weighing this up as an alternative to the GP’s doomsday scenarios. Given those scenarios spending on fixing the housing crisis seems like the most prudent action for a government. If public housing was done on a mass scales (like it has been in the past/other countries) you wouldn’t need a lottery process, just a wait period. A lot of people are renting and can afford to wait a year or two. In the status quo we simply can’t buy at all, we forsee renting for the rest of our lives, and are at risk of not even affording that as rent goes up exponentially.

mrjin 5y ago

Oh well, let's see it from a different perspective, then everything would be much simpler and clearer. The government can actually make housing a lot cheaper but why would it do so? Just take a look at the budget sheets, you will find out that the government is one of biggest if it's not the biggest one of the beneficiaries from the property boom. By making housing more expensive, it can collect more land/property taxes. If it cannot hike the tax rates easily, the evaluation hikes anyway. By printing more money, it dilutes its liabilities. Almost all the governments have been printing money for decades now, but they claimed there were not enough inflations, really? There seemed to be no severe inflation simply because of the methods used to calculate the inflation rates were biased. Indeed groceries' prices did not raise much, but how about the assets and/or properties? The economy is a dynamic system and can compensate by reducing non-essential expenditures to maintain essentials. But doesn't matter how flexible a system is, it still has a limit which no one really knows what it would be. We are pretty close to a tipping point if we are not already at it. The reason is pretty simple, any system with only positive feedback, doesn't matter how small the positive feedback is, is eventually going to crash as it requires more and more resource as input so that it can maintain the output. When it hits the hard limit, boom...