[carom]

I guess, either way, you need a system that addresses supply and allocates housing fairly. I believe the free market can do that. Saying no land ownership doesn't really address who builds more housing, what incentive do they have, what restrictions are there, who gets to live where. Sure, if you could replace it with a system where the government builds as dense as is safely possible to meet demand, then held a lottery for who got to live there, and those tenants were forced to relocate every 3-5 years to give other people an opportunity to live there, I guess I'd be on board with that.

My hesitation is that would be a total rewrite, and we have a system that works pretty well where we could remove some market distortions and have it working really well. Remove residential zoning restrictions and landlords will build, there is incentive for it. So much of LA is zoned for SFH+ADU, and your neighbors will sue you if you get creative. There is no room in the zoning code for low end housing. I read about these men's hotels [1] and I don't think you can build something like that anymore, something that addresses a need at a price point people can afford. It sounds crass but we need tenements, so someone who is barely scraping by has a bed, an address, and a shower.

There is nothing besides legacy rent control units at the $500/mo price point in LA. There should be. We shouldn't rely on rent control, where we privatize the costs of a social problem and give landlords a huge incentive to get people out. We should just build some livable shit.

1. https://newrepublic.com/article/161808/ewing-annex-hotel-hou...

[pasabagi]

My gut feeling is that even if you did remove distortions, the problem would persist. If the price for a commodity ultimately stabilizes at material cost + labour, I think rent ultimately stabilizes at 'everything you can afford to pay and some'.

Ultimately, commodity price is driven down by the fact there's always some industrialist who can flood the market with cheaper crap, until there's basically no profit in it. You can't flood the market with 'living in walking distance from work', and a large part of the cost of any building project is simply buying the plot to build on, because each landowner has no direct competition.