[macspoofing]

>Housing is in many places (mostly successful cities) the economic disaster. Fully exposed to financialization, business cycles, inflation prone. Rather than signalling to supply, prices adjust to whatever the median person can afford to pay

Why should housing not be to governed by market forces? Housing shortages are due to regulations, from limiting new development outright, to limiting high density buildings, to heavy rent control (disincentivizing investment and maintenance), to regulations that just make housing investment expensive. Reasonable regulations should be the guideline, but they aren't. The most aggregious local example is San Francisco.

Soviet housing never worked. More to the point the wait lists for apartments was measured in years (ripe for corruption). The buildings were shoddy and depressing (hope you like grey). Urban planning was haphazard and may or not may have corresponded to where people actually wanted to live.

[dominotw]

> More to the point the wait lists for apartments was measured in years (ripe for corruption). The buildings were shoddy and depressing (hope you like grey). Urban planning was haphazard and may or not may have corresponded to where people actually wanted to live.

This tv show on amazon prime was really good insight to soviet life during stalin times, based on the life of Regina Zbarskaya. I really enjoying looking at the houses across social classes, streets in different cities, law enforcement, morality, relationships(eg: giving up your apartment is the biggest favor you could do, staying in relationship with someone because they have govt allocated apartment ect)

https://www.amazon.com/Part-9/dp/B01GU8D4IK/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UT...

[renw0rp]

while definitely pre-fabricated building were grey and ugly, they still look better than British council houses in London; especially after many of them, for example in Warsaw, got renovated, insulated, covered with plaster and colourfully painted.

[kingofhdds]

Worth mentioning these pretty renovations happened well after the system which brought them stopped its existence.

[renw0rp]

that's for sure, mostly 10-15 years after. Doesn't change the fact that this never happened in the UK; old council houses are still ugly, energy inefficient and often mouldy inside... not to mention some awful&impractical design choices

[kingofhdds]

Well, after I stayed in a typical British house for some time, with its coldness even in a relatively warm weather, and two separate taps system in bathroom, I started to believe that impractical designs in building could be an inseparable part of British culture :-)

[snidane]

This is a reault of huge EU subsidies coming from Brussels/western Europe. Causing set of new problems in the region like making rich people and firms who can orient in the subsidy bureaucracy labyrinth. Which makes it quite similar to Soviet era economics where you had to be well connected to get around.

[snidane]

> Why should housing not be to governed by market forces?

Housing can and should of course be managed by market forces. Land usage rights distribution is where the problem lies.

For physical reasons there is no supply of new land. We'd have to wait until Mars or Moon colonization, which would pop the ongoing land price inflation.

Until then it's just a market in which the sooner you get in the better off you'll be. Which is why older generations and aristocracy benefit from such arrangement.

Later generations are just told to shut up and accept that you have to slave more and more each decade to be afford living. Until a revolution of some sort.

The funny thing is the misnomer 'to own land'. The only thing you own is a right to use the parcel, which is guaranteed by no one else but the population. And the population is not paid to provide such a service.

Payment for actual usage on ongoing basis is a solution. Such as land tax or government lease.

Worked wonders in countries founded on this principle.

https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/successfull-examples-of-land-...

[seanmcdirmid]

Many supply restrictions are geographic rather than based on regulation.

Also, Singapore has a semi-socialized system that seems to work.

[macspoofing]

>Many supply restrictions are geographic rather than based on regulation.

That's true. At the end of the day there are only so many desirable beachfront properties, or direct views on Central Park. Those are going to be expensive.

>Singapore has a semi-socialized system that seems to work.

I know very little about Singapore, but I'll make two comments:

1) I'm skeptical about the feasibility of models that work in tiny regions with very specific constraints and applying them to big nations. But maybe there's something there to learn from.

2) At the end of the of the day, it's not magic. You have a lot of people, in a relatively small geographic area - you need to focus on density. You don't need a heavily socialized system to build dense housing - you just need to align regulations.

[seanmcdirmid]

Singapore is dense like NYC is, and, outside of its public housing program, is equally, if not more, expensive than NYC. Singapore is otherwise a very capitalistic country, and its housing program is basically ownership with restrictions that fade overtime.

But more to the point: every super dense city I’ve lived in has had more expensive housing than the lesser dense cities I’ve lived in. Obviously something else is going on, density itself isn’t magic.

[saosebastiao]

> Obviously something else is going on, density itself isn’t magic.

Of course it's not. You can have dense cheap cities (Tokyo, Chicago), dense expensive cities (Hong Kong, NYC), sprawled cheap cities (Houston, Indianapolis), and sprawled expensive cities (Palo Alto, Los Angeles). Density doesn't make a city cheap any more than it makes it expensive. Supply relative to demand does.

If you want a nearly perfect predictor of housing prices, don't look at density, look at the vacancy rate. The vacancy rate is probably the most direct way of measuring supply vs demand. If you have a high vacancy rate, you have a cheap city, and if you have a low vacancy rate, you have an expensive city.

The reason density is often touted as the solution is because increasing density is an increase in supply. It only moves the needle in one direction. Sprawl also moves the needle in that same direction. Cities with lots of space to move out have both options, and typically sprawl is cheaper. A city like Seattle or San Francisco doesn't have both options, so density is the only way to increase supply.

[Retric]

> Why should housing not be to governed by market forces?

The limit is transportation/infrastructure. not buildings. You need NYC's roads, schools, and subway etc before block after block of 40+ floor building are viable. It'a very much a tragedy of the commons situation as a single high rise is fine but 100 of them are not.

Unfortunately, most areas are regulated at the local level which while better than a free for all creates massive problems.

I would posit that the best solution is state level control + an infrastructure tax on new development. Charging ~30k per SFH might seem to make things more expensive but by allowing new entry to pay their own way let market forces work while adjusting for externalities.

[conanbatt]

> I would posit that the best solution is state level control + an infrastructure tax on new development. Charging ~30k per SFH might seem to make things more expensive but by allowing new entry to pay their own way let market forces work while adjusting for externalities.

Why should the new pay the burden of the new and the old together?

[Retric]

The old has already paid for a lot of infrastructure or their would be no roads etc. New people need both new and old infrastructure their property taxes offset the use of old infrastructure, but the added cost of new should be paid for by the people who need it.

[conanbatt]

The idea that the current residents have a right to extract a tax on the future ones is the basic motivation of nimbysm. Then come zoning controls, come construction controls, all those that make the new buildings more expensive to make, and the old ones more and more increasing in value, even at the decay of services or population.

[Retric]

This tax is not going to increase the cost of a new home 1:1 as markets still exist. It's going to reduce the profit of a new home construction and thus the value of existing land. As the tax is very much levied on the person building the house not the person buying the house the person selling land is also going to take a hair cut.

Really I am saying local governments lose the ability to limit growth.

The ideal amount of growth is where the total cost of new construction balances the demand for new construction. I am simply including externalities as part of that cost. Any other system makes some group richer at the cost of everyone else.

[conanbatt]

> This tax is not going to increase the cost of a new home 1:1 as markets still exist. It's going to reduce the profit of a new home construction and thus the value of existing land.

Reducing the profit of new construction increases the value of land, as it reduces the supply of housing. Study case, san francisco. It has a 0.1 supply elasticity: if rental prices went up 100%, construction units move by 10%.

Any tax that is put on construction reduces construction.

> The ideal amount of growth is where the total cost of new construction balances the demand for new construction. I am simply including externalities as part of that cost. Any other system makes some group richer at the cost of everyone else.

Your system makes local homeowners with very old large houses very rich: not for the house, but the land they have that appreciates because it is harder to build around it.

[darksaints]

Nobody needs, or can even afford for that matter, infrastructure for people that don't exist yet. That's why that process never works. It is nothing more than a giant concern troll: you get to look like the smart one who insists on planning ahead for more development, knowing full well that nobody will seriously propose adding more infrastructure for people that don't exist yet.

Luckily, you can build infrastructure as it's needed. If traffic gets bad because 100k people moved in and it's straining the transit system, you've got an additional 100k people who will help pay for it. We've been doing it this way for thousands of years, so it's pretty hard to argue that it doesn't work.

[Retric]

It's a question of collecting money not building infrastructure.

When 100k people move in and you need a new water treatment plant. Those 100k people should pay for the water treatment plant not everyone that lives in the area who also paid for the last water treatment plant.

Further, you need to start building infrastructure now, not in 20 years when the new people have paid enough in taxes to pay for it. It's not like you need a new police station and a new school from a single new home but you do need them after X new homes.

Debt seems like the obvious solution to time shifting infrastructure, but that increases costs, adds risks, and still forces everyone to pay for new infrastructure. When a tiny home is worth 3x what would be somewhere else that value is from the existing infrastructure not the cost of building the house so adding a tax to capture that surplus is completely reasonable.

[darksaints]

That's exactly the point, nobody is gonna pay to build infrastructure for people that don't exist yet. Especially if they don't want those people to exist. That's what's so ridiculously obvious about the concern troll. When a developer wants to build housing, it's always "no, we don't have the infrastructure to support it", yet a few days later when new infrastructure gets proposed, it's "we can't afford that!". Well shit, wouldn't it be nice if there were more people in the city that could help share that cost? But you blocked them out.

Requiring infrastructure to be built beforehand is nothing more than a way for incumbents to win in their quest to never let anything new get built.

[Retric]

In my new system local government can't say no. Making that objection meaningless.

They simply collect money from new people to pay for it, because it's very much needed.

[saosebastiao]

Maybe theoretically that works. But it's still not fair in the way that you think it is.

100k people move in and several things happen: you need a new sewage treatment plant, new some more transit capacity, new schools, etc. You are proposing that the new people pay for this expansion. But you are neglecting the ways in which you benefit.

By building more schools, each school serves a geographically smaller area, meaning school buses drive a lot less. You can also have higher student-to-administrative ratios (even if student to teacher ratios stay the same). By having more transit riders, your transit system might need additional capacity, but it will be using that transit capacity much more efficiently, because transit system is a step-fixed cost business, and more riders means more profitability (or less subsidy). You aren't getting any benefits to scale on the sewage treatment plant, but you will get benefits on the water provision: smaller and higher density housing uses far less water per person than single family homes with yards, etc.

So yeah, if new people move in, you're gonna need a new sewage treatment plant. If you charge the new residents for the new sewage treatment plant, are you gonna credit them for the improved efficiency of the transit system, school system, and water system? Or are you gonna try to keep those benefits to yourself?

Somehow I think its all just a bit easier to treat every person as the same whether they're new to the area or not.

[zeth___]

>Soviet housing never worked. More to the point the wait lists for apartments was measured in years (ripe for corruption). The buildings were shoddy and depressing (hope you like grey). Urban planning was haphazard and may or not may have corresponded to where people actually wanted to live.

And yet there was no homelessness in the USSR.

If that's a system that doesn't work, sign me up for two.

[zo1]

You'd be surprised at how humans "make a plan" when it comes to those things, as long as family/community is not broken. Either way, there probably was some homelessness, but we'd have to look at actual records/stats on it.

But the USSR was just one system of social housing. Have a look at what's happening right now in South Africa with what they call RDP housing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_and_Development...

Sounds good on paper. However it has so many problems:

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2017-03-16-gover...

http://www.corruptionwatch.org.za/cracks-exposed-in-rdp-hous...

http://www.cplo.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/BP-432-RDP...

[dragonwriter]

> Either way, there probably was some homelessness, but we'd have to look at actual records/stats on it.

Since it was a subject of official denial, records and stats would likely be hard to find.

[kofejnik]

> And yet there was no homelessness in the USSR.

Just stop, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

Source: grew up in USSR, 4 people in a 10 sqm room.

[simonbarker87]

Wasn’t the lack of homelessness and unemployment because both of those were designated as a crime and so you got sent of to a work camp?

[kofejnik]

More or less so. Plus, you also could not just decide to go to Moscow (or other city), you needed "propiska" (residence permit). And those born in countryside didn't have passports until _1974_ so had no freedom of movement at all.

Seriously, I cannot find polite words for people praising USSR

[dang]

Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[cc81]

>And yet there was no homelessness in the USSR.

Was there no homelessness or did the state just say that? Just like there are no homosexuals in Saudi Arabia or Chechnya?

[macspoofing]

Honestly, there probably wasn't. It's not hard to 'solve' homelessness if you can forcibly send the homeless to work-camps or institutionalize them. Done and done.

[macspoofing]

There was also no unemployment. Clearly that is a system worth emulating.

[Consultant32452]

>And yet there was no homelessness in the USSR.

>If that's a system that doesn't work, sign me up for two.

Okay, step one is to starve millions of Americans to death in order to reduce demand. What's step 2 again?

[dang]

Please don't take HN threads even further into ideological flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html