Occasionally as a thought exercise, I ask myself what I would do with the untold billions of Bezos, Musk, etc. There's only so much you can spend on yourself. I could go for a bigger house, but I like my car as is, and I don't want a yacht or a private jet[0]. So then the question is, what relatively expensive thing could I do that would solve a lot of problems? That would make a lot of lives better?
The thing I keep coming back to again and again is public housing. I would just start buying up land and building public housing. Getting the homeless off the streets would improve not just their lives, but also the lives of the people who already have homes who happen to live in areas with a lot of homeless.
I've also considered public pay-what-you-want restaurants.
If anyone wants to give me untold billions, I will get right on it.
[0] I would totally go for a private train car, though.
I did some back-of-the-enveloping once, and I agree. Land acquisition and building are already pretty expensive, and then there's staff + maintenance + utilities over time.
I think the strategy is do it in a couple of prominent areas, and, assuming it actually works out, point to them as success stories and acquire philanthropic funding to keep doing it in more and more cities.
The problem is public housing is maintained poorly. People generally beat rentals to shit and public housing is beat up even worse. The maintenance workers are union and can’t get fired, so they work at a leisurely pace. The admin are union and can’t get fired so their office is a mess and they respond slowly.
Bad tenants in privately owned rentals get kicked out. In public housing they just make things terrible for their neighbors.
Without the profit motive, rental property becomes dilapidated quickly. I think the real solution for public housing is to make it rent-to-own for the tenants so they actually care. Otherwise it just goes to shit.
Public housing starts out nice when the masonry is new, its operations are freshly funded, and every initial tenant passes a basic credit check.
Will it stand as a shining example after 10-20 years, when poorer tenants are in arrears or move in unauthorized people, United States union mentality workers or overpriced contractors do the bare minimum for upkeep, and people who can afford to move out do?
This is just a step away from UBI. I appreciate the universal approach but prefer universal solution instead of only to “housing” offering public housing to people who can afford and choose to live in higher quality is a fake universal solution. UBI sends money, even Jeff Bezos will benefit although negligibly from 1k per month. “Oh but Jeff Bezos doesn’t need it” you miss the point. Universal removes a TON of beauracrocy and issues that come with qualifications. And by giving direct money this solution helps literally all fiscally related problems (not mental health or education). Food deserts will still be a problem. Places without affordable housing will still exist. But people will have some real and immediate help in affording the solutions and also help in moving out of those locations to ones without those problems.
There is no “solution” to “solve” any of these things 100% the idea of universal housing is not realistic considering current government housing and HUD is known for its unsafe, low quality, overpriced and corruptible attributes. UBI is a real implementable “solution” that will “improve” the problem.
I can't speak for the US but in the UK you have the issue of deciding where to put the public housing.
If you try to stuff it all into somewhere like London then you end up either with huge overcrowding (it's really hard to double the capacity of 150 year old infrastructure) or with people living so far out of the centre that commute costs really start to bite.
If you build new towns then you have to be really careful to somehow distribute the wealth properly otherwise you just end up with slums.
I actually think that for the most part what people aren't willing to accept is that the capitalist model actually does allocate housing fairly well according to need, it's just that if you're on the wrong side of that equation then it feels terribly unfair to be asked indirectly via the market to move to a cheaper area.
The current model seems to give existing capital owners a strong veto on the creation of new supply while providing little representation for the beneficiaries of new housing
In the U.S. I don’t think this is a concern, thankfully. Most of our cities have infill opportunities. In Columbus, Ohio where I live there’s hundreds of acres of surface parking lots. Buy them up and build housing blocks like in NYC. This solves lots of problems. [1]
> I actually think that for the most part what people aren't willing to accept is that the capitalist model actually does allocate housing fairly well according to need
I generally agree as well, but it seems like we are no longer satisfying lower ends of the market and developers would prefer to not build rather than build homes that don’t hit their IRR numbers. The federal government in the US could build housing and auction it off to individuals or families or run a sort of lottery system. Could add a few rules to prevent bad actors from renting the places out or something along those lines.
[1] As an aside everyone working for the housing agency or federal transportation admin should have to read The Death and Life of Great American Cities and be treated in that knowledge before taking a job there.
In the UK we have a lot of stuff like that too, not necessarily codified, just that the default position is that you can't build somewhere unless you have permission and the local council will probably block it (as a result undeveloped land is <10% of the cost of developed/developable land).
Feels like that's a far easier target to attack first.
This is the problem that a lot of people are overlooking; it's not just a lack of property developers, NIMBYism, etc but a major part is policy and zoning laws, which aren't being challenged / changed enough.
Housing and jobs zoning needs to be better distributed. Why does all the work activity have to be concentrated in small city centers and housing spread out so much?
City centers need a higher proportion of residential and other places need a higher concentration of commercial/industry. That isn’t a market issue because these things are controlled by local governments.
There wouldn’t be a housing crisis if your zoning required 1:1 jobs to homes ratios, or even anything close.
What I want to see is “there’s no more office space available here, we’ll have to move somewhere else”
That and square footage limitations for worker density in office spaces.
A whole lot of the housing crisis boils down to local governments allowing a whole lot of office space growth and not much residential growth.
It's people wanting to live in the city without paying the price, essentially wanting their cake and eating it too.
Affordable homes can be had out in more rural areas (and I don't mean Bumfuckistan, I mean smaller cities and towns), the problem is everyone wants a flat in Manhattan or Tokyo without paying up. Metropolitan real estate has always been expensive, this in itself is nothing new.
Houses in cities ought to be cheaper than in the countryside. The use of space is denser, utilities have much shorter lines and roads are just that small thing between all the houses not long stretches trough the landscape.
What we have to discuss is the distribution of living space, just like here in Austria I guess in the UK there's a lot of older people still living in the same house as a couple (or even alone) as when they had their children still living with them. We need incentives for people to downsize when they are still able to do it on their own.
And people who (rightly or wrongly) believe they have a right to find a new house in the same place they grew up, regardless of their current earning power.
They tried this in the communist countries when they were still around. Sure, people had affordable housing and didn't have to worry about homelessness, but at what cost? That's not a rhetorical question.
> Initially, public housing was intended to be built widespread, and as such be mixed-income, but lobbyists who did not want to see public housing decrease their housing values blocked such housing from going up
>With the introduction of suburbs and expansion of choices for the white working class, the demographics of public housing changed from more class and racially integrated to predominantly impoverished, single-parent, welfare, and people of color[30]. This led to stigmatization of public housing, through pushing the narrative that people living in public housing were "Welfare Queens", or otherwise living in a state of abject poverty and terrible conditions[30]. These demographic changes also decreased support for housing, leading to the government cutting funding for the program
Uhm, at the cost of some tax dollars. It's still like this in Cuba. people still beg, BUT they have a home to go to at the end of the day. I don't think this is a particularly bad thing. Would you rather our tax dollars are spent on missiles and tanks for other places.
I work with and am friends with many Cuban immigrants and former Soviet bloc country immigrants. I think I’ll ask them if they would trade the freedom and security they have now for the guarantee against homelessness they had then (and all that other stuff).
Pretty sure none will be willing to trade back and would view any attempts at establishing public housing for all as a scary step in the wrong direction.
That's what rhetorical questions are for. This one isn't one of those. I'm genuinely asking about a real life situation where this was tried, and asking about the costs. I genuinely don't know, I never lived in those countries, and my education was in a very anticommunist country, so that doesn't help me much.
Occasionally as a thought exercise, I ask myself what I would do with the untold billions of Bezos, Musk, etc. There's only so much you can spend on yourself. I could go for a bigger house, but I like my car as is, and I don't want a yacht or a private jet[0]. So then the question is, what relatively expensive thing could I do that would solve a lot of problems? That would make a lot of lives better?
The thing I keep coming back to again and again is public housing. I would just start buying up land and building public housing. Getting the homeless off the streets would improve not just their lives, but also the lives of the people who already have homes who happen to live in areas with a lot of homeless.
I've also considered public pay-what-you-want restaurants.
If anyone wants to give me untold billions, I will get right on it.
[0] I would totally go for a private train car, though.
More / affordable housing alone does not fix the homeless problem alone though. I mean it'll help, but it's only one part of that problem.
My controversial take is that I don't actually think Musk has enough to solve the problem.
I did some back-of-the-enveloping once, and I agree. Land acquisition and building are already pretty expensive, and then there's staff + maintenance + utilities over time.
I think the strategy is do it in a couple of prominent areas, and, assuming it actually works out, point to them as success stories and acquire philanthropic funding to keep doing it in more and more cities.
The problem is public housing is maintained poorly. People generally beat rentals to shit and public housing is beat up even worse. The maintenance workers are union and can’t get fired, so they work at a leisurely pace. The admin are union and can’t get fired so their office is a mess and they respond slowly.
https://nypost.com/2024/02/10/metro/residents-in-corruption-...
Bad tenants in privately owned rentals get kicked out. In public housing they just make things terrible for their neighbors.
Without the profit motive, rental property becomes dilapidated quickly. I think the real solution for public housing is to make it rent-to-own for the tenants so they actually care. Otherwise it just goes to shit.
Public housing starts out nice when the masonry is new, its operations are freshly funded, and every initial tenant passes a basic credit check.
Will it stand as a shining example after 10-20 years, when poorer tenants are in arrears or move in unauthorized people, United States union mentality workers or overpriced contractors do the bare minimum for upkeep, and people who can afford to move out do?
This is just a step away from UBI. I appreciate the universal approach but prefer universal solution instead of only to “housing” offering public housing to people who can afford and choose to live in higher quality is a fake universal solution. UBI sends money, even Jeff Bezos will benefit although negligibly from 1k per month. “Oh but Jeff Bezos doesn’t need it” you miss the point. Universal removes a TON of beauracrocy and issues that come with qualifications. And by giving direct money this solution helps literally all fiscally related problems (not mental health or education). Food deserts will still be a problem. Places without affordable housing will still exist. But people will have some real and immediate help in affording the solutions and also help in moving out of those locations to ones without those problems.
There is no “solution” to “solve” any of these things 100% the idea of universal housing is not realistic considering current government housing and HUD is known for its unsafe, low quality, overpriced and corruptible attributes. UBI is a real implementable “solution” that will “improve” the problem.
How do we prevent UBI from driving inflation and just becoming another way to funnel money to the rich?
I can't speak for the US but in the UK you have the issue of deciding where to put the public housing.
If you try to stuff it all into somewhere like London then you end up either with huge overcrowding (it's really hard to double the capacity of 150 year old infrastructure) or with people living so far out of the centre that commute costs really start to bite.
If you build new towns then you have to be really careful to somehow distribute the wealth properly otherwise you just end up with slums.
I actually think that for the most part what people aren't willing to accept is that the capitalist model actually does allocate housing fairly well according to need, it's just that if you're on the wrong side of that equation then it feels terribly unfair to be asked indirectly via the market to move to a cheaper area.
The current model seems to give existing capital owners a strong veto on the creation of new supply while providing little representation for the beneficiaries of new housing
In the U.S. I don’t think this is a concern, thankfully. Most of our cities have infill opportunities. In Columbus, Ohio where I live there’s hundreds of acres of surface parking lots. Buy them up and build housing blocks like in NYC. This solves lots of problems. [1]
> I actually think that for the most part what people aren't willing to accept is that the capitalist model actually does allocate housing fairly well according to need
I generally agree as well, but it seems like we are no longer satisfying lower ends of the market and developers would prefer to not build rather than build homes that don’t hit their IRR numbers. The federal government in the US could build housing and auction it off to individuals or families or run a sort of lottery system. Could add a few rules to prevent bad actors from renting the places out or something along those lines.
[1] As an aside everyone working for the housing agency or federal transportation admin should have to read The Death and Life of Great American Cities and be treated in that knowledge before taking a job there.
Is there a reason that private developers aren't doing this already? Zoning?
Zoning and parking minimums. When it’s illegal to build a bowling alley without 128 parking spaces you end up bulldozing your city for parking.
In the UK we have a lot of stuff like that too, not necessarily codified, just that the default position is that you can't build somewhere unless you have permission and the local council will probably block it (as a result undeveloped land is <10% of the cost of developed/developable land).
Feels like that's a far easier target to attack first.
The Uk has a hideously restrictive planning process designed to ensure no building is too interesting
This is the problem that a lot of people are overlooking; it's not just a lack of property developers, NIMBYism, etc but a major part is policy and zoning laws, which aren't being challenged / changed enough.
Housing and jobs zoning needs to be better distributed. Why does all the work activity have to be concentrated in small city centers and housing spread out so much?
City centers need a higher proportion of residential and other places need a higher concentration of commercial/industry. That isn’t a market issue because these things are controlled by local governments.
There wouldn’t be a housing crisis if your zoning required 1:1 jobs to homes ratios, or even anything close.
What I want to see is “there’s no more office space available here, we’ll have to move somewhere else”
That and square footage limitations for worker density in office spaces.
A whole lot of the housing crisis boils down to local governments allowing a whole lot of office space growth and not much residential growth.
It's people wanting to live in the city without paying the price, essentially wanting their cake and eating it too.
Affordable homes can be had out in more rural areas (and I don't mean Bumfuckistan, I mean smaller cities and towns), the problem is everyone wants a flat in Manhattan or Tokyo without paying up. Metropolitan real estate has always been expensive, this in itself is nothing new.
Houses in cities ought to be cheaper than in the countryside. The use of space is denser, utilities have much shorter lines and roads are just that small thing between all the houses not long stretches trough the landscape.
What we have to discuss is the distribution of living space, just like here in Austria I guess in the UK there's a lot of older people still living in the same house as a couple (or even alone) as when they had their children still living with them. We need incentives for people to downsize when they are still able to do it on their own.
And people who (rightly or wrongly) believe they have a right to find a new house in the same place they grew up, regardless of their current earning power.
They tried this in the communist countries when they were still around. Sure, people had affordable housing and didn't have to worry about homelessness, but at what cost? That's not a rhetorical question.
I don't think free markets in land constrained areas is possible for real estate.
They also tried this in the US before it went full neoliberal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing#United_States
But
> Initially, public housing was intended to be built widespread, and as such be mixed-income, but lobbyists who did not want to see public housing decrease their housing values blocked such housing from going up
>With the introduction of suburbs and expansion of choices for the white working class, the demographics of public housing changed from more class and racially integrated to predominantly impoverished, single-parent, welfare, and people of color[30]. This led to stigmatization of public housing, through pushing the narrative that people living in public housing were "Welfare Queens", or otherwise living in a state of abject poverty and terrible conditions[30]. These demographic changes also decreased support for housing, leading to the government cutting funding for the program
And also massively implemented in the UK, with "council homes".
It's also the way things work in Singapore; a decidedly not communist country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore
Same in Vienna:
https://www.marketplace.org/2021/05/03/in-vienna-public-hous...
Uhm, at the cost of some tax dollars. It's still like this in Cuba. people still beg, BUT they have a home to go to at the end of the day. I don't think this is a particularly bad thing. Would you rather our tax dollars are spent on missiles and tanks for other places.
I work with and am friends with many Cuban immigrants and former Soviet bloc country immigrants. I think I’ll ask them if they would trade the freedom and security they have now for the guarantee against homelessness they had then (and all that other stuff).
Pretty sure none will be willing to trade back and would view any attempts at establishing public housing for all as a scary step in the wrong direction.
Affordable housing and quality housing are not mutually exclusive though, even though from a capitalist point of view they have to be.
Are you attempting to imply that you can only build public housing in communist countries?
That's what rhetorical questions are for. This one isn't one of those. I'm genuinely asking about a real life situation where this was tried, and asking about the costs. I genuinely don't know, I never lived in those countries, and my education was in a very anticommunist country, so that doesn't help me much.
https://www.vox.com/2014/5/30/5764096/homeless-shelter-housi... Generally the research I have seen says that its cheaper to build houses/house folks than deal with the negative side effects of not doing that.
That seems like a net win when you don't just consider the cost of doing it, but the cost of not doing it.