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My 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 i
by selfmodruntime 1y ago
My 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.
- 1y ago
- 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.