[oceanofsolaris]

I don’t totally get this point. The main problem in big cities is the quantity of housing as well as the distribution of it.

For a train system, a non-state actor will have a hard time getting one of the ground (huge upfront costs, will often make a loss, cooperation of politics super important) and if they do … they will have a monopoly (which also sucks). So having transit publicly owned in some way makes a lot of sense.

But for housing, none of that is true. It’s being built (the amount built mostly depends on government approval, there is no shortage of capital investment), there is no monopoly… what is the problem that more public housing would solve?

The (admittedly outrageous) rent prices in Zürich come from a mismatch of demand and supply. And since Zürich has a lot of rich inhabitants, enough of them are willing to bid up the market rent prices to the current level.

Having a non-market solution for this might lead to cheaper rents, but introduces a lot of other losses and crucially also strangles the supply even more (look at what happened in Berlin when they introduced their moronic rent control law).