[turtledove]

I buy electricity from a monopoly provider in my area, run the government. Is that a market? I buy sewer and garbage service likewise.

There are some commodities we choose to operate as natural monopolies because competition and profit seeking leads to bad outcomes for society. My argument is fundamentally that housing is the same.

[qeternity]

> we choose to operate as natural monopolies

No, not at all. We don’t choose natural monopolies. We recognize them. The whole point is they are naturally occurring whether we want them or not. Housing shares nothing in common with the other services you mention which are anything but commodities!

The natural monopoly of the electrical company isn’t electricity, it’s distribution. Power is a commodity, and delivery is anything but.

Your argument that housing is the same is not well informed.

[southerntofu]

There is no reason we have to pay for anything. Money is not a natural construct and is a leaky abstraction. Our ancestors built housing long before currency was even invented.

Public services are not a "natural monopoly". They are a deliberate political choice (that was paid in blood by the lower classes, see also Haymarket Affair for example). We could very easily make housing free for all, or just affordable (see also HLM program in France).

[qeternity]

> There is no reason we have to pay for anything. Money is not a natural construct and is a leaky abstraction. Our ancestors built housing long before currency was even invented.

As you note, there are other ways to pay for things than money. Whether it's "paid in blood" or other barter system, there is always a cost to pay.

> We could very easily make housing free for all, or just affordable (see also HLM program in France).

Would love to hear your very easy solutions. Affordability is relative. If you have more demand than supply (as we do with housing) the only way to increase affordability in real terms is to shift the supply curve. This shift is not free, and somebody has to pay for it. This is where the "omg it's so easy" arguments typically fall apart.

[southerntofu]

> Whether it's "paid in blood" or other barter system, there is always a cost to pay.

I meant the social rights/protections had to be paid in blood. But nothing in itself requires payment. We just happen to live in a society which commoditizes everything. If everyone worked some field they're passionate about (and people are passionate about many things) and we evenly shared the work for undesirable jobs (eg. cleaning) we could have everything for free.

> If you have more demand than supply (as we do with housing)

This is highly uninformed. In many countries around the planet, empty dwellings easily outnumber homeless people so we don't need to build anything at all to house everyone. Moreover, if we just stopped tearing down housing and started renovating them, that's also much less work/resources. Finally, if you really want/need more housing, a government run program (such as the HLM i mentioned before) shows you can build affordable housing for 10-30k€/appartment and rent them for a final user cost (after government help for housing) of under 100€/month.

It's a shame like all public services across France the HLM system is being corrupted and coopted into money-making machine. The buildings in popular neighborhoods go unmaintained while administrators pocket all the money, and the little that's left goes into developing higher-classes "HLM" housing which we popular classes can't afford.

[qeternity]

> If everyone worked ... we could have everything for free.

Nothing is free. As you say yourself, everything requires work. This is just physics.

> This is highly uninformed.

Ok sure, I'll bite. Your understanding of supply and demand is extremely naive. An empty dwelling does not mean excess supply. If I own two houses, it's because I want two houses. It's not because we have too many houses. In fact, hoarding is a classic sign that we don't have enough of something.

I think you ought to step back and understand why the things you mention exist. You will find out more by doing that than you will shouting into the void on HN. If it were as easy as you proclaim, we would be doing it. The world is not stupid.

[paisawalla]

How will you be deciding who gets to have a view of the ocean, and who gets to sleep next to the overpass? First come first serve? Birthright?

[nivenkos]

Pricing? You can have the government / housing co-ops sell properties and just forbid private renting out in absentia.

[paisawalla]

The point is that 1 KWh is 1KWh, but your home on the top floor of Millennium Tower is not equivalent to my home across from the 680 overpass. Housing is not a commodity like electricity, it's not fungible.

[aqme28]

Is anyone in this thread proposing this kind of system? This is kind of an insane strawman.

You can have a regulated market that still has prices. OP only proposed incentives to build and disincentives to hoard. Homes would still have prices, there would just be less scarcity.

[dahfizz]

OP is claiming that housing is a commodity. If treated as a commodity, all houses would be priced the same. Then the reality sets in and you have to deal with the fact that some houses are more desirable than others, so you need to distribute them somehow without changing the price.

[turtledove]

You could have a lottery, adjust prices within a regulated range, offer incentives for less desirable lots.

You could reward developers for lots that have long wait lists and lots of interest, incentivizing developers who build places people want to live.

[marvin]

Offer incentives for less desirable properties, eh? That sounds suspiciously like having different prices, just with extra steps.

[turtledove]

I suppose, in the same way negative interest rates are just interest rates with extra steps.

Start from a position of "everyone gets a home" and then ask "in that case, how do we make sure folks who end up in less desirable homes are compensated?"

I suppose you could frame it in the language of prices, but in this case the price is paid to the tenant.

[sokoloff]

Indeed, it would be a tragedy if someone’s taxpayer-provided housing was insufficiently desirable that we must create a bureau to determine how much additional largess they should receive. That system seems likely to end well.

[paisawalla]

Ah hmm, that's interesting. How have lotteries for highly desired goods worked out in other centrally planned regimes? Did we find a pretty broad socioeconomic distribution among dacha owners in the USSR?

[p1esk]

Did we find a pretty broad socioeconomic distribution among dacha owners in the USSR?

Yes.

[headsoup]

What if someone less fortunate 'wins' the mansion on the beach. How do they afford the future upkeep?

[refurb]

That’s exactly what Singapore does with new public housing - it’s a lottery.

And now they are “clawing back” future price appreciation because it’s literally like winning the lottery if you get a place in a prime location as public housing is heavily subsidized.

If you get selected for a prime area apartment it’s a huge financial win 5 years down the road when you sell at market prices.

And oh yes, Singaporeans game the hell out of the system. From carefully falling under household income limits, to bidding on a new public housing unit despite owning one now.

The government is constantly trying to keep up with all the new incentives each new rule creates.

[turtledove]

This is a fair question, and one I'm not entirely satisfied that I have the answer for. Ideally, in my mind, I wouldn't own my home but I'd also be on the hook for maintenance and upkeep. But I recognize this does not meet everyone's needs and needs more thought.

I would also hope that we would tend to build fewer mansions in favor of more multi family complexes, cohousing, coops, and small community oriented housing on the beach.

[agentgumshoe]

You know this kind of leads towards communism... Which I think is the key problem with any kind of shared equality by force system, it will work nicely so long as no one running things decides they don't want it to, then it works really poorly.

[turtledove]

Looking at any single step on a path and rejecting it because the extreme end of the path isn't desirable is a quick way to never make any progress.

We can improve things, we can do social good, and never slide to authoritarianism. (I assume you are talking about authoritarian communism vs, eg, council communism.)

[carom]

How often would people have to move?

[turtledove]

When they wanted to. Forcing people to move is, imo, needlessly cruel.

[carom]

Isn't that unfair to someone else who wants to live there? It just seems like the first to arrive is the lucky one.

[piotrkaminski]

Housing is very, very far from being a commodity.

[geoduck14]

I agree. We already tried to commodity housing - and we ended up with Brutilist Archutecture. It sucked then amd it will suck again.

[turtledove]

In what sense? I mean, I'd love it if that were the case, but at least here in the US housing is extremely commodified.

[kriops]

Wikipedia: "A commodity is an economic good (...) that has full or substantial fungibility. (...)"

On the basis of geography alone, housing can not be a commodity.

[vertis]

You're confusing want and need though. You might not like to live in any house, and you might need to be roughly geographically located to do work, but for the most part any house that fits your family is interchangable.

When you take the other things, like job and where you want to send your kids to school it becomes a hell of a lot more fungible.

Given that commoditization is a scale, I would say it could be toward that end of the spectrum if we wanted it to be.

[gameman144]

> Given that commoditization is a scale, I would say it could be toward that end of the spectrum if we wanted it to be.

Commoditization is only a scale inasmuch as the underlying goods are fungible. Corn is a commodity because nobody cares about differences between individual kernels, but if some process came around that only worked with super-specific kernels, then you'd be reducing the commoditization of corn.

I can, however, think of nothing that would make housing even close to fungible. Views, neighborhoods, neighbors, noise, history, location -- the list of things which are entirely unique per property is higher than basically any other market I can think of.

[vertis]

Those are things you're attaching because of privilege though. One visit to China will give you a view of just how much housing can be commodtized. Endless rows of apartment buildings, each identical, supplying everything you could need.

If you're without a home, one house is very much like another. It's only once you have money and ambition that you might want a better view, better schools.

[aqme28]

Eh I see your point but I disagree. Look for housing in a highly competitive city, and soon enough you stop caring about geographical specifics and instead look for some combination of useful attributes. In practice, that's fungibility.

[zaroth]

This whole thread is filled with similarly absurd statements like this one. That is not “fungibility” at all, not in practice, not in the slightest.

Fungibility is the absolute incontrovertible likeness of two separate units to the point where they are entirely interchangeable across all parties in the economy.

US dollar bills are fungible. Even BTC are not entirely fungible anymore. Houses are not even remotely fungible.

[dahfizz]

Just because you're willing to accept a wide range of houses does not make them fungible. Each house is unique and each home buyer has different priorities.

That's why houses a priced individually. When you go to the grocery store, they don't individually price each cob of corn. There might be two different buckets with a differentiator (organic vs non organic), but within the bucket each cob is fungible. It doesn't matter which one you grab.

Each house gets its own bucket.

[pooper]

I think gasoline or diesel is a commodity because for the most part a gallon of gasoline is a gallon of gasoline whether you buy it at Shell or at Costco. I mean Shell will probably try to say they have better detergents or whatever but for the most part they are the same.

Similarly, one unit of electricity from solar is the same as a unit of electricity because a kilowatt hour is a kilowatt hour. You could say well my unit of electricity is better because Elon Musk sold it but for the most part they do the same thing.

Housing is not that very interchangeable. For example, in the Denver area in Colorado apparently the Cherry Creek area commands a higher sticker price because of the school district.

Some homes are just more desirable than others. For me, I desire:

* Excellent public transit

* Excellent symmetric high speed fiber optic Internet connection to the home

* Costco or Sam's Club within half an hour or inexpensive grocery stores within walkable distance

And there are unspoken assumptions like somewhere an ambulance can get to me in time if I am dying and take me to a hospital so good roads and proximity to a good hospital.

[simonh]

I'll try and argue the point without the useless pejoratives in a companion comment.

Those payments are the equivalent of rent in the housing market. The thing that isn't a market and isn't being bought and sold is the right to provide those services, it's the power grid and generation plants, or the garbage infrastructure. The monopoly on those is what is anti-market and is the equivalent of not being able to buy and sell property.

I'm not making a political point there, I happen to thing some thing are natural monopolies and that markets have their limit. Housing is a complex issue in this respect. Flats in big city blocks are much like a commodity and limited urban building space naturally reduces competition, while nice houses in the suburbs or country are very much a market with lots of options suiting different needs.

[Bayart]

> I buy electricity from a monopoly provider in my area, run the government. Is that a market?

It's not a market for you, but it is to your provider. And it naturally impacts the cost that's layed upon you, whether directly through electricity bills or through taxes if it's subsidised.