[socialismisok]

Yes, 1000 times yes. The idea that housing is an investment (or that you can invest in housing you'll never use) distorts so many systems in America.

We stop thinking about housing as something everyone needs and start thinking about making sure we get ours before others do.

[TulliusCicero]

Exactly. Imagine if the supply of new cars dropped through the floor and prices shot up, especially for used cars.

Oh wait, this actually happened during the pandemic and nobody was like, "oh this is good, people's car equity is going up!" because with things that aren't houses people have a saner view of finances.

[quonn]

I know a lot of people who started to think of their cars as appreciating assets.

[TulliusCicero]

Now imagine people start trying to ban car companies from making new cars, because they'll probably just be luxury cars for brogrammers anyway, plus more cars means less parking availability!

[saltcured]

Hah, so this becomes the same trap as thinking that way about a primary home. Do they have a plan for selling to realize their gains? Do we get to look forward to car-equity lines of credit or reverse car loans where people try to have their cake and eat it?

[Simon_O_Rourke]

I'd be interested to see more of what the likes of Singapore do, especially for larger metropolitan areas. As I understand it, and I could be way wrong here, but I think there's a government office that buys and sells properties, but with restrictions on price and who can buy through the schema. Anyone else is totally free to conduct private property transactions, but get slapped with an almost-unmanageable property tax, making it more economical to go through official channels. This then lets the government rather than the market set the fair rate for a particular house in a particular area.

https://darrenong.sg/blog/a-complete-guide-to-buy-a-property...

[andreareina]

Public housing in Singapore is affordable if you win the ballot for a new unit. Otherwise the secondary market is allowed to float and basically the only restriction is that they must be sold to Singaporeans (i.e. citizens or permanent residents). I don't think it's really done much to curb the exuberance, there's plenty of talk of flipping these units once the minimum occupancy period (5 years) is up.

[herodoturtle]

You might also be interested in checking out Sweden’s public housing policies. They vary slightly from one municipality to the next, but an interesting concept overall.

[mijamo]

Sweden Public housing is terrible. You get in the queue at 16/18 and maybe maybe when you're 30 you can get a nice 2 rooms apartment on the suburbs. Except if you managed to either buy someone's contract illegally, or use family connections to get in front of the queue. If you are a recent immigrant there is basically no point going in the queue and you will be forced to expensive second hand contract and move every year as they expire.

And then there's no logic to prices. You will get something cheaper in your 50s because you waited so long that you can finally get a nice spacious apartment for no money at all in the city center, while a student will have to pay more than that to get a shitty corridor room in the suburbs. Real life example: a friend paying 6000kr for a room in the suburbs as a student vs a 40yo lady with a good income paying the same for a 2 bedroom appartment in the center (market rent for second hand contracts for such a flat is about 19 000kr). And then you have newly built public housing in the suburbs that has prices 2-3 times more expensive than the old ones in the center for the same size, but those you can get without waiting whereas the old ones need more than 20 years of queue to get.

It is probably the most broken system in Sweden, but it kind of seems to be by design to be honest. I would actually have liked a well functioning and supplied public housing market, compared to the annoying parts of the private market in most countries, but swedish rules have just made it a nightmare instead

[avar]

The Netherlands has essentially the same system. It's not broken, it's by design.

The system is meant to benefit long-term residents at the cost of everyone else. It's not there to provide a general housing subsidy.

[cinntaile]

The reason why the price between the student apartment and the regular apartment differs so much has a lot more to do with when they were built. The 2 room bedroom apartment was likely built during a time when building was much cheaper. Student apartments on the other hand are usually much newer.

[orwin]

In France it's the same in tight markets, but in small, declining towns you can get public housing in less than a year.

[naruvimama]

It is the same system in Denmark. It started out with good intentions but has now been skewed to create more inequality.

The property tax in some new areas even in the suburbs is more than or only slightly less than the total rent in the some social housing in the center of the city. Some of these areas do not even have public heating.

It has become reverse socialism, steal from the poor and subsidise the rich.

[dagw]

I highly recommend as many people as possible study the Swedish public housing policies closely, so that they know what not to do.

[Simon_O_Rourke]

I'm not sure about Denmark or Sweden, but when I was living in England a few years back, the right-wing tabloid press used housing policy as basically a cudgel to drive voters into the arms of right-wing politicans. The basic story they seemed to run every few weeks was some immigrant (preferably Middle-Eastern) family who got a free house that was denied to locals. This kind of story was what drove a lot of voters into the mess of Brexit that they're still in.