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> Soaring costs across the EU are pricing out renters, deterring prospective buyers and preventing new homes from being built. As Europe’s housing crisis grows,

> Soaring costs across the EU are pricing out renters, deterring prospective buyers and preventing new homes from being built. As Europe’s housing crisis grows, so do homelessness rates across the bloc. What are the solutions to Europe’s housing crisis? I literally do not understand why after all these years humanity has not yet worked out a system where every person would own a small house each, and instead we have this system that makes it super difficult for so many people to ever become homeowners.

pydry 3y ago
That's communism. We've been programmed to be allergic to the word communism.
- Plasmoid 3y ago
  Are you sure it isn't the long history of failures of communist countries that has caused people to be soured on this idea?
  - pydry 3y ago
    That's certainly what people who charge rent and own media outlets say. Who am I to disagree with their megaphones?
    - Plasmoid 3y ago
      Dude. Are you actually stating that the multiple genocides that have been committed in communist countries were fabricated? Downplaying the killing fields or the Holodomor as invented by the media or landlords is incredibly offensive.
      - pydry 3y ago
        Do you call the holocaust a capitalist genocide? What about when my ancestors were exterminated in the Irish potato famine and the free market was used to justify it? Are you downplaying every genocide that took place in a capitalist country? You denied a historic genocide that killed my ancestors. You think you're offended? Well, I'm not. How can I be offended? You're a basic product of your environment. Youre told that genocides that happen under communist systems are de facto communist genocides. Obvioualy. And genocides that happen under capitalist systems happen for, well, entirely different reasons. Obviously. Realistically though, when pol pot, Stalin and Hitler went on extermination binges to kill enemies (real or imagined) their reasons were much the same... the maintenance of their power. Sorry I mean giving people houses and not charging rent - the two most evil things you could ever do.
        Plasmoid 3y ago
        > Sorry I mean giving people houses and not charging rent - the two most evil things you could ever do. No. You explicitly advocated for Communism, not "free houses". A social structure that actively grinds human rights into dust. You don't get the play the "communists just want to give people free houses" card without admitting to being hopelessly naive or actively malicious. Stop carrying water for history's greatest monsters.
        Gunnerhead 3y ago
        As an onlooker to this comment chain I feel like you completely ignored his entire comment, which I thought was a decent argument, and latched on only to the last sentence.
  - danaris 3y ago
    Are you sure a) any of those countries were actually meaningfully "communist", and not merely authoritarian countries calling themselves so, and b) if they were "communist", that this was actually in any significant way causal in the failures?
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    There have been lots of countries following Leninism and its vanguardist derivatives, and zero other Communist countries. Whatever one's position on whether or not vanguardism is a valid form of Communism, it is a mistake to generalize from vanguardism to all of Communism.
- baal80spam 3y ago
  > programmed Learning by experience <> programming.
arbuge 3y ago
There are places where this actually happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore
CuriouslyC 3y ago
It's intentional. If housing was cheap, land owners wouldn't reap the windfall of value appreciation, and there'd be no way to maintain a serf class.
- nayuki 3y ago
  That's why we need a land value tax as Henry George proposed. People should not be able to make money by squatting on land and waiting for its value to appreciate - whether as a owner-occupier or as a landlord.
Plasmoid 3y ago
It's because housing is very expensive to build, lasts decades, and people absolutely freak-out if you plan to build any amount of housing at all.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  Most people would probably prefer to live in a cheap shack, if it was available and not in a crime-ridden area, if it meant getting back 50% of their income. Housing does not need to be expensive to build, it's just modern "standards". Ford Model T cost $260 in 1925 ($4561 in current USD). But today's cars are closer to $40k. Things don't need to be so expensive, it's not all inflation - it's scope creep and bloat.
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    We can build to modern standards fine. The problem is usually you're not allowed to build at all. Nearly every jurisdiction in the west has tight supply caused by nothing except laws and zoning; there's nothing about the air or the dirt preventing a bigger building. I don't think people necessarily want to go back to the 1900s and share a ten square meter apartment with a 3-generation family, and then die in a fire because that's too many people to evacuate out of one door.
    - throw9away6 3y ago
      Where we live you now need sprinklers installed in most units. It’s overkill for fire safety
      - Gigachad 3y ago
        Sprinklers are not overkill and I really doubt they add that much to the overall cost. What is overkill is parking. When I was looking at buying apartments, each car park cost $80,000 AUD.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    This: > Most people would probably prefer to live in a cheap shack, Correlates with: > if it was available and not in a crime-ridden area In a system where economic advantages agglomerate in a few areas, it would be difficult to create a place that is neither losing to the agglomerating areas, nor is declining itself. If it is an area where the economy is booming, then it will not be cheap. And if it is not an area that is moving upward, then it is moving downward, and with that comes a host of issues that can cause crime to proliferate. > Ford Model T cost $260 in 1925 ($4561 in current USD). But today's cars are closer to $40k. Far more capable and safer vehicles than a ford model T are available for far less than $40k. $20k cars are available, and while not quantifiably true, I think it is easy to say the $20k car of today is easily more than 4x capable and able to provide utility than a $4.5k model T.
pharmakom 3y ago
If you divide land up evenly then each person doesn’t get very much. For the rich and powerful this would be a big step down.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  Bill gates owns about 270,000 acres and the area of the US divided by its population is eight acres per person. Something to think about, although I don't know what an actual conclusion would look like (some of those acres are a lot more productive than others). ;)
  - HFguy 3y ago
    They are mostly not where people want to live
  - pharmakom 3y ago
    Do that same calculation in Benelux, South East UK, Paris metro…
pakitan 3y ago
Humanity has worked out a system where every person would own a small house each - the system is called "live in a remote place in a hut made out of clay and straw, with no access to running water, sewage system, electricity, roads and jobs". Turns out most people don't like the system and prefer living in the city where all those things are available but what is not available is houses for everyone.
- Shekelphile 3y ago
  Western liberals don't mind forcing people to live in those conditions as long as they're not white and left out of sight. They throw a tantrum every time Israel builds temporary housing for bedouins, for example.
Analemma_ 3y ago
Because we chose to set things up such that if you own a house, it probably represents the overwhelming majority of your total wealth, so it cannot ever be allowed to decrease in value, even if that means fucking over future generations and ultimately society itself.
- 7e 3y ago
  People eventually die and their houses become available. It’s only population growth that creates housing demand, and for the good of the planet, that needs to stop.
  - PlunderBunny 3y ago
    Exactly - houses are very affordable in Japan, which has a decreasing population.
slg 3y ago
It is really simple. It is because humanity has decided that housing is an investment and investments need to grow faster than inflation or else they stop being good investments. Society now has a bias to ensure that the price perpetually grows and therefore we enact policy at every level from national governments to HOAs to ensure those investments keep growing.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  Speculating on price signals of housing is how you get housing in places to respond to demand. People are incentivized to figure out where people are going to move in a few years and build houses there to meet the demand when it arrives - rather than responding late.
- rickydroll 3y ago
  humanity didn't decide. A small portion of financial power structure decided it could monetize housing as an investment. The rest of us haven't figured out yet how to strip power from the financial elite.
j-a-a-p 3y ago
In China they solved halve of this problem: there are more houses than inhabitants. Yet, house prices are unreachable for most people.
- rdhayes 3y ago
  Except the houses in China were never built to be lived in.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  Wait until population growth peaks and property has to be valued entirely on its current utility with no expected capital gains.
Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
It's much much easier to extract rent from people than do actual work.
whimsicalism 3y ago
Would require massive inter-continental wealth transfers that are not politically feasible. Like it would require countries like the US redirecting a substantial portion of their industrial output towards building homes in sub-saharan Africa.
gmerc 3y ago
AKA Singapore. 80+% home ownership due to public housing (HDB)
ahtihn 3y ago
> a system where every person would own a small house each If you really want to just own a small house it can be very affordable. It's just that it won't be a desirable place to live and there won't be many good jobs close to it. The problem is "everyone" wants to live in big cities, preferably in the nice neighbourhoods and within a reasonable commuting distance of their job. Part of what makes a neighbourhood "nice" is that it's not affordable for the lower classes.

pydry 3y ago

That's communism. We've been programmed to be allergic to the word communism.

Plasmoid 3y ago
Are you sure it isn't the long history of failures of communist countries that has caused people to be soured on this idea?
- pydry 3y ago
  That's certainly what people who charge rent and own media outlets say. Who am I to disagree with their megaphones?
  - Plasmoid 3y ago
    Dude. Are you actually stating that the multiple genocides that have been committed in communist countries were fabricated? Downplaying the killing fields or the Holodomor as invented by the media or landlords is incredibly offensive.
    - pydry 3y ago
      Do you call the holocaust a capitalist genocide? What about when my ancestors were exterminated in the Irish potato famine and the free market was used to justify it? Are you downplaying every genocide that took place in a capitalist country? You denied a historic genocide that killed my ancestors. You think you're offended? Well, I'm not. How can I be offended? You're a basic product of your environment. Youre told that genocides that happen under communist systems are de facto communist genocides. Obvioualy. And genocides that happen under capitalist systems happen for, well, entirely different reasons. Obviously. Realistically though, when pol pot, Stalin and Hitler went on extermination binges to kill enemies (real or imagined) their reasons were much the same... the maintenance of their power. Sorry I mean giving people houses and not charging rent - the two most evil things you could ever do.
      - Plasmoid 3y ago
        > Sorry I mean giving people houses and not charging rent - the two most evil things you could ever do. No. You explicitly advocated for Communism, not "free houses". A social structure that actively grinds human rights into dust. You don't get the play the "communists just want to give people free houses" card without admitting to being hopelessly naive or actively malicious. Stop carrying water for history's greatest monsters.
        Gunnerhead 3y ago
        As an onlooker to this comment chain I feel like you completely ignored his entire comment, which I thought was a decent argument, and latched on only to the last sentence.
- danaris 3y ago
  Are you sure a) any of those countries were actually meaningfully "communist", and not merely authoritarian countries calling themselves so, and b) if they were "communist", that this was actually in any significant way causal in the failures?
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  There have been lots of countries following Leninism and its vanguardist derivatives, and zero other Communist countries. Whatever one's position on whether or not vanguardism is a valid form of Communism, it is a mistake to generalize from vanguardism to all of Communism.
baal80spam 3y ago
> programmed Learning by experience <> programming.

arbuge 3y ago

There are places where this actually happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore

CuriouslyC 3y ago

It's intentional. If housing was cheap, land owners wouldn't reap the windfall of value appreciation, and there'd be no way to maintain a serf class.

nayuki 3y ago
That's why we need a land value tax as Henry George proposed. People should not be able to make money by squatting on land and waiting for its value to appreciate - whether as a owner-occupier or as a landlord.

Plasmoid 3y ago

It's because housing is very expensive to build, lasts decades, and people absolutely freak-out if you plan to build any amount of housing at all.

HPsquared 3y ago
Most people would probably prefer to live in a cheap shack, if it was available and not in a crime-ridden area, if it meant getting back 50% of their income. Housing does not need to be expensive to build, it's just modern "standards". Ford Model T cost $260 in 1925 ($4561 in current USD). But today's cars are closer to $40k. Things don't need to be so expensive, it's not all inflation - it's scope creep and bloat.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  We can build to modern standards fine. The problem is usually you're not allowed to build at all. Nearly every jurisdiction in the west has tight supply caused by nothing except laws and zoning; there's nothing about the air or the dirt preventing a bigger building. I don't think people necessarily want to go back to the 1900s and share a ten square meter apartment with a 3-generation family, and then die in a fire because that's too many people to evacuate out of one door.
  - throw9away6 3y ago
    Where we live you now need sprinklers installed in most units. It’s overkill for fire safety
    - Gigachad 3y ago
      Sprinklers are not overkill and I really doubt they add that much to the overall cost. What is overkill is parking. When I was looking at buying apartments, each car park cost $80,000 AUD.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  This: > Most people would probably prefer to live in a cheap shack, Correlates with: > if it was available and not in a crime-ridden area In a system where economic advantages agglomerate in a few areas, it would be difficult to create a place that is neither losing to the agglomerating areas, nor is declining itself. If it is an area where the economy is booming, then it will not be cheap. And if it is not an area that is moving upward, then it is moving downward, and with that comes a host of issues that can cause crime to proliferate. > Ford Model T cost $260 in 1925 ($4561 in current USD). But today's cars are closer to $40k. Far more capable and safer vehicles than a ford model T are available for far less than $40k. $20k cars are available, and while not quantifiably true, I think it is easy to say the $20k car of today is easily more than 4x capable and able to provide utility than a $4.5k model T.

pharmakom 3y ago

If you divide land up evenly then each person doesn’t get very much. For the rich and powerful this would be a big step down.

whatshisface 3y ago
Bill gates owns about 270,000 acres and the area of the US divided by its population is eight acres per person. Something to think about, although I don't know what an actual conclusion would look like (some of those acres are a lot more productive than others). ;)
- HFguy 3y ago
  They are mostly not where people want to live
- pharmakom 3y ago
  Do that same calculation in Benelux, South East UK, Paris metro…

pakitan 3y ago

Humanity has worked out a system where every person would own a small house each - the system is called "live in a remote place in a hut made out of clay and straw, with no access to running water, sewage system, electricity, roads and jobs". Turns out most people don't like the system and prefer living in the city where all those things are available but what is not available is houses for everyone.

Shekelphile 3y ago
Western liberals don't mind forcing people to live in those conditions as long as they're not white and left out of sight. They throw a tantrum every time Israel builds temporary housing for bedouins, for example.

Analemma_ 3y ago

Because we chose to set things up such that if you own a house, it probably represents the overwhelming majority of your total wealth, so it cannot ever be allowed to decrease in value, even if that means fucking over future generations and ultimately society itself.

7e 3y ago
People eventually die and their houses become available. It’s only population growth that creates housing demand, and for the good of the planet, that needs to stop.
- PlunderBunny 3y ago
  Exactly - houses are very affordable in Japan, which has a decreasing population.

slg 3y ago

It is really simple. It is because humanity has decided that housing is an investment and investments need to grow faster than inflation or else they stop being good investments. Society now has a bias to ensure that the price perpetually grows and therefore we enact policy at every level from national governments to HOAs to ensure those investments keep growing.

whimsicalism 3y ago
Speculating on price signals of housing is how you get housing in places to respond to demand. People are incentivized to figure out where people are going to move in a few years and build houses there to meet the demand when it arrives - rather than responding late.
rickydroll 3y ago
humanity didn't decide. A small portion of financial power structure decided it could monetize housing as an investment. The rest of us haven't figured out yet how to strip power from the financial elite.

j-a-a-p 3y ago

In China they solved halve of this problem: there are more houses than inhabitants. Yet, house prices are unreachable for most people.

rdhayes 3y ago
Except the houses in China were never built to be lived in.
Gigachad 3y ago
Wait until population growth peaks and property has to be valued entirely on its current utility with no expected capital gains.

Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago

It's much much easier to extract rent from people than do actual work.

whimsicalism 3y ago

Would require massive inter-continental wealth transfers that are not politically feasible. Like it would require countries like the US redirecting a substantial portion of their industrial output towards building homes in sub-saharan Africa.

gmerc 3y ago

AKA Singapore. 80+% home ownership due to public housing (HDB)

ahtihn 3y ago

> a system where every person would own a small house each If you really want to just own a small house it can be very affordable. It's just that it won't be a desirable place to live and there won't be many good jobs close to it. The problem is "everyone" wants to live in big cities, preferably in the nice neighbourhoods and within a reasonable commuting distance of their job. Part of what makes a neighbourhood "nice" is that it's not affordable for the lower classes.