[haizhung]

No. Mass building (while not touching inequality) will NOT solve the issue.

It’s easy to see why: there already IS enough housing around for everybody. If there wasn’t, you would see a massive amount of homeless people. And even in the US where that might be the case - the amount of empty real estate is larger than the amount of homeless people. You could easily house them if you wanted. It’s a question of distribution.

The other reason to see why this doesn’t work is: there is no country that managed to do it. Miraculously, the housing crisis has hit all (western) countries on the planet. All of them try to build their way out of it, no one succeeds. Why?

If you just mass build, the new units will be bought immediately by the rich, and the working people will have no housing still.

[zozbot234]

> It’s easy to see why: there already IS enough housing around for everybody.

Maybe in Detroit this statement is true, or a ghost town in the middle of nowhere. The fact that housing costs money mostly anywhere else is trivially evidence that there isn't enough of it to go around.

> Miraculously, the housing crisis has hit all (western) countries on the planet. All of them try to build their way out of it, no one succeeds. Why?

Very few western countries are trying to "build their way out" in a meaningful sense. Folks aren't buying that housing en masse for no reason; they just expect it to become even scarcer and more expensive in the future. If you fail to build any more, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[margalabargala]

Most western countries have not tried. They prefer a capitalist let-the-market-decide approach, and also have tended not to cut down the mountains of red tape they've associated with building.

The handful of countries that have really tried, have succeeded. Jordan and Finland are the two I'm aware of.