[crdoconnor]

There are currently shortages of another basic good: housing.

It's a mistake to think that our economies are any the less planned. Fraud may be policed at the low end, but at the high end (servicer fraud; pension rip offs) it is rife and largely unpoliced.

[spindritf]

Shortage of housing in the US is only local, and it's a feature, not a bug. Voters want a shortage so that they can buy a house in a "good neighbourhood" to move away from poor people. It's almost never explicitly stated that way but that's the way the votes go.

Whole new towns are incorporated around the US to avoid poor school districts. People impose new taxes on themselves, something otherwise unheard of, to do that. Proposition B passed in SF just this month to limit new developments and will probably lead to more limits in the future. Conservative south and urban liberals united at last.

This is the system working as intended, fulfilling the wishes of its constituents.

[crdoconnor]

>Proposition B passed in SF just this month

Preventing the erection of yet more high rise condos will do nothing to solve San Francisco's acute shortage of affordable housing.

Those who care most about affordable housing in SF are, in any case, leaving in droves or have already left.

>This is the system working as intended

Hardly.

[spindritf]

What I meant to say is that voters don't actually want affordable housing because then poor people could move in next door defeating the whole scheme. This is why limiting new developments is system working as intended, as its constituents want it to work.