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For over 20+ years I've been hearing people and politicians talking about "affordable housing" and in that time, the gap between housing price increases and wa

For over 20+ years I've been hearing people and politicians talking about "affordable housing" and in that time, the gap between housing price increases and wage increases has only gone up, along with wealth inequality, that I'm tired of hearing even more talks, as I already know where this is going: nowhere. Housing will get more expensive and the rich will keep getting richer, as per usual, while the politicians will keep making vague empty political promises about housing affordability when the election time comes. I'm not holding my breath this will be solved ever in my lifetime, unless war or a violent revolution resets the monopoly board.

barfbagginus 2y ago
Work to bring about Revolution, don't just hope for it.
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  The problem with revolution is that when it comes, you won’t be in charge. The person who is willing to be the most violent and ruthless will be.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    Exactly this. It's why the former communist countries had nothing to do with Karl Marx's communism and why people say "real communism has never been tried". Those "communists" who came to power there didn't distribute the wealth to the people, but came to power to pocket it themselves by replacing the monarchies who had all the wealth and power previously to them, but still kept the folk enslaved at gunpoint. You basically switched one undemocratic oppressive regime with another and the average folk kept getting the short stick both times. So be careful when you wish for major revolutions. Doesn't necessarily mean that with new management, things will always turn out better for you this time. Doesn't mean you should stick to the status quo and never try to change things either.
    - barfbagginus 2y ago
      I endorse queer automated Revolution. The beauty of this is that we can do terror and violence to the enemy by just existing peacefully, as queer people. The enemy is literally just that cowardly, we could say "boo, I exist" at them, and we don't have to kill anyone. Automating things, making those automations queer inclusive, and maintaining control of the things that we automated, by making them open source, is how we ram that victory home. Tada! Queer automated open source communism for the win. Now you either want to work for the revolution, are terrified of it like bonkers because I said queer as if I'm proud of it, or you have critical ideas about how to improve it! And that's exactly how a revolution should be! Viva! We can be gay! We can do crimes! We can automate the things! And we can win!
zeroCalories 2y ago
You should migrate to somewhere that does value affordable housing.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  Where would that be that's nice to live, safe, good infrastructure, good jobs AND by some miracle still allows you to buy affordable housing? Plus, if you move to a low-CoL area with a high-CoL job then you're not really solving housing, you're just moving your problem elsewhere onto other people making housing unaffordable for them. How many former cheap places to live have been gentrified into oblivion in a short amount of time? The goal is to make housing affordable AND help preserve local communities and culture(even though that might be contradictory to a degree), not to keep gentrifying and uprooting them in a musical chairs style game and then wonder why communities are dying, family units are dying, birth rates plummet, family support networks are dying, mental illnesses are up, loneliness is up, etc.
  - baq 2y ago
    You seem to assume a free market for housing, that would be at least partially incorrect. The free market is a cause of long term (timeframe of decades) housing unaffordabilty because the haves treat housing as investment while the have-nots live under bridges or in cars which puts them in an unemployment/debt spiral. The free market could work if housing was a depreciating asset like cars. Too many people in the west would be pissed off if that happened, though. It will come to some countries with collapsing demographics and that won’t be a pretty sight.
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      >It will come to some countries with collapsing demographics and that won’t be a pretty sight. Except that's not how it happens. Demographics have been collapsing in many EU countries for a while now and prices have been going nowhere but up at rates beyond wage growth. Internal migration from rural to urban, and external migration from war torn and impoverished nations also to urban centers, keep pushing demand up regardless of local reproduction numbers. Sure, you can now buy cheap properties in some empty towns in the south of Italy for example, but to what end if there's no jobs there?
bboygravity 2y ago
It was already solved though (in Singapore and many other places). Affordable housing is not rocket science nor a novel or hard problem to solve. IMO the root cause is that there's a serious issue with the sustainability of the US political system (and its fiat currency) in general.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >It was already solved though If people can only name Singapore, Tokyo and Vienna as examples where "housing was fixed", then it's proof that it hasn't been fixed when there's the other millions of cities worldwide left.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    it proves it's a solvable problem, so the other 10,000 or so cities (there aren't millions of them) just aren't properly motivated to solve the problem. The first atomic bomb was hard, because it wasn't known if it was even possible. The second one was still really hard, but once the Americans proved it was possible, everyone else knew it was possible.
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      >so the other 10,000 or so cities (there aren't millions of them) just aren't properly motivated to solve the problem Civilizations, human settlements, people's homes and communities aren't fungible commodity widgets solvable and movable through copy-paste solutions like technical challenges, no matter how much HN insists every world challenge from housing to world peace, is as easily solvable as those at their tech jobs. Just because you can 1:1 reverse engineer a bomb design and have it work the same, doesn't mean you can just take a housing policy that worked in the demographic, geographical, historical and cultural context of one country and just drop it in another country with a completely different context and background, and expect it to just work the same. This is the tech equivalent of: "well, it was working on my machine".
      - 2y ago
klyrs 2y ago
Right, you can't increase wages, because that would cause inflation! Nevermind the grocers, oil cartels and landlords hiking prices year after year. That's just good business sense, hampering that would destroy prosperity!

barfbagginus 2y ago

Work to bring about Revolution, don't just hope for it.

amanaplanacanal 2y ago
The problem with revolution is that when it comes, you won’t be in charge. The person who is willing to be the most violent and ruthless will be.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  Exactly this. It's why the former communist countries had nothing to do with Karl Marx's communism and why people say "real communism has never been tried". Those "communists" who came to power there didn't distribute the wealth to the people, but came to power to pocket it themselves by replacing the monarchies who had all the wealth and power previously to them, but still kept the folk enslaved at gunpoint. You basically switched one undemocratic oppressive regime with another and the average folk kept getting the short stick both times. So be careful when you wish for major revolutions. Doesn't necessarily mean that with new management, things will always turn out better for you this time. Doesn't mean you should stick to the status quo and never try to change things either.
  - barfbagginus 2y ago
    I endorse queer automated Revolution. The beauty of this is that we can do terror and violence to the enemy by just existing peacefully, as queer people. The enemy is literally just that cowardly, we could say "boo, I exist" at them, and we don't have to kill anyone. Automating things, making those automations queer inclusive, and maintaining control of the things that we automated, by making them open source, is how we ram that victory home. Tada! Queer automated open source communism for the win. Now you either want to work for the revolution, are terrified of it like bonkers because I said queer as if I'm proud of it, or you have critical ideas about how to improve it! And that's exactly how a revolution should be! Viva! We can be gay! We can do crimes! We can automate the things! And we can win!

zeroCalories 2y ago

You should migrate to somewhere that does value affordable housing.

Rinzler89 2y ago
Where would that be that's nice to live, safe, good infrastructure, good jobs AND by some miracle still allows you to buy affordable housing? Plus, if you move to a low-CoL area with a high-CoL job then you're not really solving housing, you're just moving your problem elsewhere onto other people making housing unaffordable for them. How many former cheap places to live have been gentrified into oblivion in a short amount of time? The goal is to make housing affordable AND help preserve local communities and culture(even though that might be contradictory to a degree), not to keep gentrifying and uprooting them in a musical chairs style game and then wonder why communities are dying, family units are dying, birth rates plummet, family support networks are dying, mental illnesses are up, loneliness is up, etc.
- baq 2y ago
  You seem to assume a free market for housing, that would be at least partially incorrect. The free market is a cause of long term (timeframe of decades) housing unaffordabilty because the haves treat housing as investment while the have-nots live under bridges or in cars which puts them in an unemployment/debt spiral. The free market could work if housing was a depreciating asset like cars. Too many people in the west would be pissed off if that happened, though. It will come to some countries with collapsing demographics and that won’t be a pretty sight.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    >It will come to some countries with collapsing demographics and that won’t be a pretty sight. Except that's not how it happens. Demographics have been collapsing in many EU countries for a while now and prices have been going nowhere but up at rates beyond wage growth. Internal migration from rural to urban, and external migration from war torn and impoverished nations also to urban centers, keep pushing demand up regardless of local reproduction numbers. Sure, you can now buy cheap properties in some empty towns in the south of Italy for example, but to what end if there's no jobs there?

bboygravity 2y ago

It was already solved though (in Singapore and many other places). Affordable housing is not rocket science nor a novel or hard problem to solve. IMO the root cause is that there's a serious issue with the sustainability of the US political system (and its fiat currency) in general.

Rinzler89 2y ago
>It was already solved though If people can only name Singapore, Tokyo and Vienna as examples where "housing was fixed", then it's proof that it hasn't been fixed when there's the other millions of cities worldwide left.
- fragmede 2y ago
  it proves it's a solvable problem, so the other 10,000 or so cities (there aren't millions of them) just aren't properly motivated to solve the problem. The first atomic bomb was hard, because it wasn't known if it was even possible. The second one was still really hard, but once the Americans proved it was possible, everyone else knew it was possible.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    >so the other 10,000 or so cities (there aren't millions of them) just aren't properly motivated to solve the problem Civilizations, human settlements, people's homes and communities aren't fungible commodity widgets solvable and movable through copy-paste solutions like technical challenges, no matter how much HN insists every world challenge from housing to world peace, is as easily solvable as those at their tech jobs. Just because you can 1:1 reverse engineer a bomb design and have it work the same, doesn't mean you can just take a housing policy that worked in the demographic, geographical, historical and cultural context of one country and just drop it in another country with a completely different context and background, and expect it to just work the same. This is the tech equivalent of: "well, it was working on my machine".
    - 2y ago

klyrs 2y ago

Right, you can't increase wages, because that would cause inflation! Nevermind the grocers, oil cartels and landlords hiking prices year after year. That's just good business sense, hampering that would destroy prosperity!