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by Nextgrid
959 days ago
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I disagree that the limiting factor is construction. The limiting factor is that there are significant entrenched interests based on the scarcity of property which influence any eventual laws/regulations or incentives to build more property. > You can build an arbitrarily large amount of shelter You can, but it isn't done, because of see above. For a lot of people/businesses in power to actually change things, it's often more profitable to defend the status-quo than make the change. It's a "tragedy of the commons" problem - it would end up better for everyone if the change were to be made, but only if it's done collectively - otherwise any individual player would be at a disadvantage. But my original argument wasn't even about third-party constructed shelter. Even if let's say you wanted land just to put a tent somewhere and call that your home, well you can't without buying said land first, which is often priced disproportionately compared to wages (and there's pressure to keep it that way, where either wages/earning potential are pushed down, or land will just raise in price to match). |
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Now you're making a completely different argument: Not that the problem is that you have to work in order to buy housing, but that the cost of housing is too high because of artificial restrictions on housing construction.
Which is totally true but is something else entirely -- if housing cost 10% of what it does now, it still wouldn't be free.
> It's a "tragedy of the commons" problem - it would end up better for everyone if the change were to be made, but only if it's done collectively - otherwise any individual player would be at a disadvantage.
It's quite the opposite really. It would be better for anyone individually to build more housing on their land because they would make more money than the construction costs, so in order to prevent that they pass laws prohibiting nearly anybody from doing that.
These laws persist because of regulatory dysfunction. People benefit if the property they own is worth more and the property they might want to buy is worth less -- and any given person doesn't own most property, so the general advantage is to make housing cost less everywhere. But the laws that prevent it are instituted at the local level, in places zoned for single family homes that are predominantly owner-occupied, so the local voters are local homeowners who want local housing prices to go up rather than down. Meanwhile they don't get a vote in what the zoning is somewhere they might want to move to, so the rules make prices go up.
This is a real problem that could be solved by empowering individual property owners to build what they want on their own property, but what does that have anything to do with employers who are largely ambivalent to this? If anything employers should prefer housing costs to be lower so they can attract talent to their locality through a lower cost of living, and pay less in rent themselves.
> Even if let's say you wanted land just to put a tent somewhere and call that your home, well you can't without buying said land first
What are you proposing to do instead? You can't feasibly create more land, and what people actually want the land for is to have shelter. You can create more shelter, but that requires labor. It's never going to be free -- one way or another somebody has to build it. Somebody would even have to make the tent.
We could certainly make it cost less by removing zoning restrictions but less is not free.