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There was a time when the US government built homes for working-class Americans
- selfmodruntime 1y agoMy pet theory is that we could solve 80% of society's problems by providing affordable housing. Most other things that plague us are just symptoms of this one issue.
- blitzar 1y agoIf you did society would collapse as the housing Ponzi scheme collapses.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- itsanaccount 1y agoI never know the attribution of the quote but it springs to mind, "If it can be destroyed by the truth then it should be destroyed."
- JoshTriplett 1y agohttps://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/03/13/destroy/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/03/13/destroy/
- lurk2 1y ago… because?
- azemetre 1y agoIf you dig down deep enough it’s always about valuing money over humans.
- tmountain 1y agoAll of society is built on the housing “Ponzi scheme”?
- gruez 1y agoIreland had a property bubble that popped and society didn't exactly collapse there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_property_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_property_bubble
- Eavolution 1y agoI mean there is currently a housing crisis in Ireland, particularly in Dublin.
- blitzar 1y agoGovernment borrowing 100% of GDP over a few years helped ease the collapse (and re-inflate the prices again).
- disgruntledphd2 1y ago> (and re-inflate the prices again) That's not what re-inflated prices. Basically, no houses were built from about 2007 to 2017, and then far too few houses were built. Meanwhile, loads of people immigrated to Ireland for jobs (mostly in tech and finance). Then, because lots of people spotted that Irish property was a good investment, people started piling in using rents as their baseline for investment, driving rents up, which pushed prices up etc. But fundamentally property prices are increasing in Ireland because of population growth and a lack of supply (driven by poor planning for water and services, along with a culture of property owners objecting to the opening of an envelope).
- rsynnott 1y agoQuite the opposite; the state should instead have borrowed 105% GDP and kept the construction industry on life support (during the financial crisis many countries did this, generally with public works stuff, but Ireland essentially let its construction industry die). As is, almost no housing was built between about 2010 and 2016, resulting in a massive shortage. The extremely high cost of the Irish bank bailout was largely down to bad bank practices and not merely the fact that there was a property bubble. The noughties Irish property crisis was largely driven by a speculative bubble, and there was not really a huge supply shortfall. Unfortunately, he _current_ one is supply-side. In 2023 Ireland built more housing per capita than any other OECD nation and it was close to the top last year, but, even optimistically, that is only stopping the shortfall from getting _worse_. (A lot of this is down to catastrophically bad estimates made early last decade, which had Ireland returning to its traditional economic pattern of perma-recession, and draining the working age population off via emigration.)
- roenxi 1y agoIn corporate environments people often get into a frame of mind where they acknowledge they are behaving irrationally but are convinced - convinced! - that behaving rationally would bring terrible results and everyone is going to move in mad lockstep. I think it is some sort of groupthink-related phenomenon. They're pretty much always wrong about the bad results if someone can force change. It can be true that sudden change can lead to bad results and I wouldn't necessarily advise shock therapy, but making the basis of a system more rational usually leads to good outcomes. Being honest about how valuable something is won't cause society to sink beneath the ocean and neither does letting people just build houses on land they own. Someone is already eating economic losses here, we just don't quite know who or how much. Letting them do better will surely outweigh the negatives.
- blitzar 1y agoI don't advocate for the current system - but the western capitalist system is (rightly or wrongly) based heavily around property. > Someone is already eating economic losses here, we just don't quite know who or how much. It's an intergenerational transfer of wealth from the young to the old. Rough and dirty you could probably reverse back the amount by taking the change in Average house price-to-earnings ratios. Very basic estimate is from 4x earnings to 7x, which on the stock of US housing is about $20 trillion.
- selfmodruntime 1y agoI just want a home for my kids and a garden to grill. I don‘t care about it’s value, or the increase of it.
- Robotbeat 1y agoThe Housing Theory of Everything. Anyway, instead of the government building housing, we have the government stopping the building of housing as much as possible.
- more_corn 1y agoThere’s government and there’s government. Cities block housing through zoning and permitting. They literally refuse to permit. It’s madness.
- hguyer6 1y ago[flagged]
- Robotbeat 1y agoAll that’d require is making it legal to build, in most cases.
- lurk2 1y agoThe plain reading of “There ought to be more affordable housing,” is not “Society needs 100% taxation administered by a genocidal ministry of housing.” > The West isn't ready for the conversation about what would be necessary to "provide" affordable housing. The majority of the developed world (including the United States) has already built affordable housing developments. Austria and Japan both have extensive public housing projects.
- izend 1y agoCanada use to build social housing but stopped around 1995[1] and the housing affordability situation deteriorated over the next 30 years[2]. [1] https://x.com/g_meslin/status/1373689001866067969 https://x.com/g_meslin/status/1373689001866067969 [2] https://external-preview.redd.it/UGgkJlBT0dV7DwLgbEnJpgQzj4i0dRVgL4Zbr4M_1T0.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=023eed3a8fd511f720d634f9a02c082ca71730b5 https://external-preview.redd.it/UGgkJlBT0dV7DwLgbEnJpgQzj4i...
- api 1y agoAround the turn of the millennium many countries seem to have decided to underproduce housing, both by ending government programs like you describe and by erecting government barriers to private home construction. My conspiracy theory is that homeowners vote at higher numbers and more reliably and like free money.
- blargthorwars 1y agoIn a local election we had to stop talking about "Housing Afforbabiliy" as homeowners perceived that as "Shitty Apartments Brining Down My Property Value." Sadly... they're kind of right.
- api 1y ago“I’ve got mine, fuck you.” The thing that drives me insane is that this is endemic in extremely liberal cities. Ask them if they support Trump’s wall and his mass deportations, and when they freak out point out that the housing policies they favor are the same thing on a smaller scale with pretty much the same motives.
- neom 1y agoI was reading this yesterday and it's wild to me how much changed in Canada in 1995: https://progressingcanada.com/ https://progressingcanada.com/ - Seems like 95 through 97 set in motion some bad things for Canada?
- selfmodruntime 1y ago
- riffraff 1y agoYou'd need to build a lot more around the houses. Many "bad neighborhoods" in various countries started as affordable housing projects, but that's not enough to have a healthy social situation. We need the housing, but it doesn't solve most issues.
- baggy_trough 1y agoA sufficiently high housing price is a feature, not a bug.
- blitzar 1y agoThe price isn't the feature - the growth in price is the feature. Inflating away debt is less consistent but more miraculous than compound interest.
- baggy_trough 1y agoBoth are features.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- agent281 1y agoI agree with GP. I would amend their claim with "most problems* could be solved by building high density housing and services in areas with jobs." I.e., build real cities. Building homes on federal land in the middle of no where will not do anything for people. We just need to allow people to build housing where there is a demand for labor. Some things I think would be solved include: - the housing crisis - mobility => it would be easier for people to move to other parts of the country because they would be less tied to their homes - labor mismatches - climate change => less reliance on cars - funding infrastructure => more dense infrastructure means you don't have as much infrastructure to repair and you have more people paying for it - city government budgets => high density areas are more tax efficient - home insurance => the homes on the outskirts of cities are most likely to burn down; if housing is cheap the cost to insure it will be cheaper as well IMO, if housing is 30-60% of peoples budgets and transportation is another 10-20%, if you can bring those costs down you can de-stress a lot of people. That might make politics less intense too. * "Most problems" is not strictly accurate. But "more problems than you might think are directly related to housing" doesn't really roll off the tongue.
- sleepyguy 1y agoThere is a lot of affordable housing; it's just that no one wants to live there for reasons such as work, location, crime, etc. Sure, there is no affordable housing in places like NYC, because too many people want or need to live there. A quick search on realtor.com for a place like Cleveland. Plenty of houses for 150k.
- dingnuts 1y agoit stops being affordable when you take the Cleveland salary
- Nasrudith 1y agoYeah, the problem is that if housing is cheap, chances are you can't afford it unless you have an independent income stream (say retirement). And those who benefit from it usually prefer more expensive areas and/or have a need for more premium services like specialist hospitals in the area because they are old.
- selfmodruntime 1y agoJust make it more affordable to build.
- api 1y agoI’m a gigantic believer in this and will hop on the nearest soapbox at any chance to evangelize it. High housing prices are literally destroying civilization, pricing the next generation out of existence and fueling every form of resentment. Home equity or the future. Choose one. If we keep pricing the next generation out of existence eventually the pyramid will collapse due to population decline. But I suppose the older homeowners living on it now will be dead so they don’t care.
- blitzar 1y ago> Home equity or the future. Choose one. The masses (sadly) will choose home equity every time. I have witnessed bitterly resentful people turn into local activists protesting against any new build the day after they purchase a property.
- CooCooCaCha 1y agoWhen it comes to collective action, people will exhaust every option except the one where they work together for the common good.
- blitzar 1y agoI see a lot of working together to stop any new properties being built, for them it is the "common good" - by common they exclude all "outsiders".
- CooCooCaCha 1y agoClearly that’s not what I meant, and you seem to have figured that out yourself. I meant the common good of society. The greater good, if that makes more sense.
- api 1y agoIt’s mostly about home equity, and this is a very common collective behavior called a cartel. It’s illegal for corporations to do this in most cases, but individuals certainly can. Housing is probably the main area where they do, with neighborhoods forming organic cartels to restrict supply to raise price. As with all cartels the solution is to break it up or take away its ability to restrict production using lawfare and other means.
- thrance 1y agoI think it's too simple. Housing is but one symptom of our dysfunctional societies. That said, I'm all for decommodified housing. As long as capital allocation is decided undemocratically, there won't be enough housing, food or medicine for everyone.
- CooCooCaCha 1y agoIt would make a huge difference though. Cheaper housing would mean more people could walk away from shitty jobs with low risk of ending up homeless. This increases the power of the labor class and would hopefully lead to better working conditions. My pet theory is many of societies problems would significantly improve if we gave more people the ability to walk away.
- Nasrudith 1y agoDecommodification of housing is the exact last thing that you want if your goal is to make housing more affordable. How did that particular buzzword get off the ground?
- thrance 1y agoHow so? If housing was a right instead of a commodity, it wouldn't be a burden on anyone.
- RhysU 1y ago> there won't be enough housing, food or medicine for everyone. This scarcity of resources is true and it has nothing to do with capital allocation methodology. It's just economics. Human beings collectively have unlimited wants. You can't solve it by changing the allocation method.
- thrance 1y agoThe want for food, medicine and housing is not unlimited.
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- jaoane 1y agoThere are places in the West where this has been done and all you get is ghettos full of scum and crime. You have to pair this with jobs and a way of promptly removing undesirable elements from the neighbourhood. Cf. section 8.
- mayneack 1y agohttps://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/ https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
- loeg 1y agoThis has been expressed as "the housing theory of everything," and there's some truth to it.
- 7e 1y agoIf you build all those houses, people will have a ton of babies, and you'll be back to square one within a generation: only with more pollution, more ugly, more traffic, more crowded parks, trails, and parking lots, and a less water and beauty. And lots more carbon in the air. This is how the planet is choked off: one house at a time. Habitat control is the only solution.
- Ferret7446 1y ago> we could solve 80% of society's problems by ... magically generating billions of dollars worth of resources out of thin air Yes, resource scarcity is a key factor underlying society's problems.
- const_cast 1y agoMost of the scarcity around houses are artificial. Home owners want housing to be scarce because they have an expectation of property value going up, forever. If housing becomes more abundant, a lot of middle class people become decidedly poor. Well... that's bad. And they're the voters, so is that going to happen? No. We can build denser, cheaper per-unit housing. We decide not to, because the only people that want that are the ones who don't have a house. As soon as they get a house their opinion will change.
- barchar 1y agoYeah, I unironically think buying a house as a primary residence should require being an accredited investor. Probably among the least popular political ideas I can think up, though.
- blitzar 1y ago> To meet demand, there needed to be sufficient worker housing near shipyards, munitions plants and steel factories. There was an era where the landed gentry were aware of this. There was an era where company owners were aware of this. There was an era where governments were aware of this. Now it's bad for return on capital and/or socialism.
- hguyer6 1y ago[flagged]
- Robotbeat 1y agoIn fact, it’s the middle and upper class, whose largest asset is their home, who keep it illegal to build more housing.
- jebarker 1y agoIs it really the case that primary residence is the largest asset of most of the upper class? My impression is that many upper class people have far more money invested in stocks and businesses than in their house.
- Robotbeat 1y agoFor the vast majority of the upper middle class, it probably is. Think of all the millionaires in California who are millionaires because they bought their houses 40 years ago and managed to control the supply of housing since then.
- disgruntledphd2 1y agoBasically, everyone bar the top 1-2% of wealthy people have most of their "wealth" in their home. It's not liquid though, and assuming you don't want to move (which most people don't) it doesn't actually benefit you as you'd need to spend the gains to get another place to live.
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- create-username 1y agoLet me guess before clicking on the link: it was before the fall of the URSS. Houses are suffering from being at the front of the interest of BlackRock and other almighty lobbies
- Robotbeat 1y agoEveryone wants to think it’s BlackRock instead of the reality that the reason housing shortages exist is to protect the retirement nest egg of Boomers, ie their house equity, by making it effectively illegal to build housing. Sorry to say it’s not a cartoon capitalist villain, but instead your neighbors trying to protect their (inflated) “home value”.
- gruez 1y ago>Houses are suffering from being at the front of the interest of BlackRock and other almighty lobbies Blackrock and "other almighty lobbies" (Chamber of Commerce?) are showing up to city council meetings to block housing from getting built?
- catigula 1y agoI'm just confused as to why the US population needed to grow by almost 100 million since I was born without any sort of infrastructure undertaking to sustain that massive immigration. My local community is terrifically swollen with people and everything built for 1/3rd the population is now crumbling under that weight.
- hguyer6 1y ago[flagged]
- seneca 1y ago[flagged]
- ajross 1y agoMost of suburban America wasn't built yet when you were born. I don't understand this point at all. You don't think sprawl counts as infrastructure? It may not be the housing you (or I) personally think should have been built, but it's absolutely housing. And it was built in great quantity at great cost, and even turned out to be great investments. And it came with schools and strip malls and freeway interchanges and substations to connect it all. Living in the modern US is paradise in almost all quantifiable ways. It's also, it needs be said, wasn't built to support (sigh[1]) "massive immigration". You can find a few H1B holders peppered around, but the sprawl is for the middle class, 100%. [1] Seriously, why must everything become a callout to right wing grievance politics these days?
- catigula 1y agoI think you trying to transmute this to polemic weakens the points you've attempted to make. Obviously we disagree but the point I feel most compelled to push back against is your assertion that "living in the modern US is paradise in almost all quantifiable ways". This is such a problematic statement that clearly labors heavily under the burden of its own premise. A crude metric is quite telling: suicide has trended upwards in the past 20 years. I presume if the data went back further the picture would be more stark. Living in a time with gizmos and gadgets and economic plenty that is weakly distributed and calling that "paradise" is very insulting to people's lived experiences and part of the reason I think the economic message of the politics you represent alienates average folks. Based on your posts it seems like you've been a wealthy developer for decades and likely have employed, or employ, cheap labor. Kind of feels like a rugpull, Ross. Personally, I've managed many teams with cheap foreign developers, I'm just straight about it. Also, when do you think I was born? You think the US hadn't been built in 1982? Absurd claims all around.
- xqcgrek2 1y agoand it was a huge failure and continues to be an issue in other countries. Just look at the UK with its council housing situation.
- Ylpertnodi 1y ago>and it was a huge failure and continues to be an issue in other countries. Just look at the UK with its council housing situation. What is/are the continuing issue/s? What uk council housing situation should we be looking for/at?
- churchill 1y agoThe reason most Western countries won't see affordable housing, at least, not for a few decades, is simple: housing has been commoditized, and the average Western boomer is parking a huge chunk of their net worth in their home. House prices need to stay high to prop up their wealth, and given the electoral participation rate of the Western boomer, any politician whose policies reduces housing values will likely be rewarded (read: punished) by being voted out of office. No amount of banging on and on about immigrants will change that. So, like Cronus eating his kids, many countries around the world have chosen to sacrifice affordability for their kids in order to squeeze out a few more decades of good living. It's just like the problem the US & its peers have with unfunded liabilities: a huge chunk of retirement savings in tied up the stock market, specifically, the SP500 that has a PE ratio of 30. Are you willing to bet that these companies will stay profitable at their current rate for 30y, without slipping? It's a question without easy answers, because as the workforce reduces (low birth rates), there are fewer workers paying into Social Security and bidding stock markets to new heights. As a result, everyone withdrawing ends up with less cash and fewer goods.
- kacesensitive 1y agoThis is one of those things that sounds radical now but was completely normal policy 70 years ago. The federal government used to directly build housing—lots of it—for working-class families. Projects like the New Deal and post-WWII housing initiatives weren't perfect, but they did provide millions of people with stable places to live. What changed? Mostly a shift toward neoliberal policies in the '70s and '80s that framed government intervention as inefficient and market solutions as inherently superior. We offloaded housing policy to private developers and then acted shocked when affordability cratered. We don’t need to reinvent anything—we just need the political will to do what we already did once, and quite successfully. Instead of addressing systemic issues like housing, wages, climate change and healthcare, we started screaming about the culture wars (thanks Reagan). It was easier (and more profitable) to stir outrage over symbolic issues than to solve material problems. We could’ve been building homes, but we got tricked into yelling about bathrooms and book bans instead.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- zajio1am 1y agoYou ignore the administrative/legal barriers to any new project that greatly increased since that time, due to legislation pushed mostly by left. Today it is substantially harder to build anything, both for public and private sector (although private sector can push through by throwing more money at the problem). > We don’t need to reinvent anything—we just need the political will to do what we already did once, and quite successfully. We are in vetocracy, because cheapest way way to placate your political supporters is to give them power to veto what they do not want (instead of accomplish anything positive). See https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/abundance-democrats-political-power/682929/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/abundance-...
- redserk 1y agoYour initial take is bizarrely politically charged for something that transcends the left-right divide. Many non-“left” barriers have been raised too and ignoring that only contributes to the mess we’re in. For example: zoning and planning. Plenty of folks would like to claim they want more homeless housing, just not near them. I find the divide between what people want nationally versus locally very amusing: https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/44611-opinions-national-vs-local-development-poll https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/44611-opinions-na...
- firesteelrain 1y agoThis article seems to romanticize a time of long ago Most of these developments were meant to be temporary wartime measures and were heavily discriminatory. Housing hasn’t been seen as a public good so that’s partially the reason why we don’t do more of these types of projects. Habitat for Humanity is one organization that builds similar public housing projects notably not on the best real estate. Our housing situation is deliberately chosen over the last 100 years. We could have continued down that path beyond WW1 but realize it was done for a specific purpose at a specific point in time because the government realized it needed to bootstrap a nation for war.
- xivzgrev 1y agoWeeeell let’s see what that translates to today. Assuming 30k houses for 100,000 people this effort would have budgeted… $77k per house in today’s dollars. record stops The median home today is $350k-ish. Whoops, Congress better be prepared to allocate more or lower housing costs before this article’s advice can be implemented waiting for Godot
- snypher 1y ago>The median home today is $350k-ish Sale price at market yes. Let's see cost of goods on that please.
- esseph 1y agoSupply and demand. There's huge demand and not enough supply. You act like that number should be the target. If the government were to start pumping out houses, supply goes up, reduced demand drops prices.
- ponector 1y agoAre you sure you're talking about same type/size of housing with the same amount of amenities?
- happyopossum 1y agoLots of breathless waxing about the ambition and scope of the project, so I was surprised that when I followed through to source material I found this: > 9,543 single and 3,996 semi-detached homes while 5,000 apartments So 18.5k homes of one kind or another over ~2 years. That’s, umm, nothing? Like seriously - the current rate of housing completions is over 2 orders of magnitude above that (it’s hovering just over 1.4M/yr right now). [0] https://www.census.gov/construction/nrc/current/index.html https://www.census.gov/construction/nrc/current/index.html
- Ferret7446 1y agoClassic government inefficiency, I believe state housing projects have similarly low figures.
- sitzkrieg 1y agoaffordable housing will never happen again in the USA, thats pretty clear
- lapcat 1y agoWhen I was a baby, my Baby Boomer parents and I lived for a year or so in a Quonset hut, which was military housing repurposed for civilians after World War II: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quonset_hut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quonset_hut
- Ccecil 1y agoMy Grandparents, mother and a couple of the older aunts lived in Rodger Young Village [1] when they first moved from Pennsylvania to Southern California just after the war. My grandparents picked strawberries until they could find "proper" jobs. Grandmother and Mother worked eventually doing keypunch for Kaynar (sp?), which was a contractor for the aerospace industry. Stories of pallets of punchcards... Grandfather ended up becoming and efficiency engineer. They raised 8 kids. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodger_Young_Village https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodger_Young_Village
- brudgers 1y agoIf you want market rate housing, you can rely on the market. By definition. If you want below-market rate housing, you can't. By definition. No change to zoning or interest rates changes that. The market simply has more potential upside when those things happen. In the wake of the S&L crises, the Federal Government crafted a scheme to provide below market rate housing using the sale of Tax credits. The reduction of corporate tax rates and wider use of trans-national financial engineering has devalued the tax credits underpinning that scheme. Meanwhile Hope VI, removed the majority of subsidized housing inventory at all levels over the last thirty years. But if you really want to understand what you are up against, the 1/3 of income for housing criterion is the same rate that landlords required of share-croppers on 1/3 shares (those that provided their own family's food and mule, those that couldn't were on 1/2 shares). People not being able to buy a house is reversion to the mean...or just people you know falling into the fat part of the graph alongside all the people who couldn't afford a house before.
- more_corn 1y agoThe market rate goes up at an artificially inflated rate due to constraints on housing construction. If you want affordable housing you build more housing. It’s basic economics.
- brudgers 1y agoThe market rate goes up because higher prices are more profitable. Most real estate is not owned by willing sellers. And most real estate is not leveraged. Most real estate is a place to park wealth. And selling to wealth is a better business model than selling to poverty.