My pet theory is that we could solve 80% of society's problems by providing affordable housing. Most other things that plague us are just symptoms of this one issue.
riffraff · 33m ago
You'd need to build a lot more around the houses. Many "bad neighborhoods" in various countries started as affordable housing projects, but that's not enough to have a healthy social situation.
We need the housing, but it doesn't solve most issues.
agent281 · 6m ago
I agree with GP. I would amend their claim with "most problems* could be solved by building high density housing and services in areas with jobs." I.e., build real cities.
Building homes on federal land in the middle of no where will not do anything for people. We just need to allow people to build housing where there is a demand for labor.
Some things I think would be solved include:
- the housing crisis
- mobility => it would be easier for people to move to other parts of the country because they would be less tied to their homes
- labor mismatches
- climate change => less reliance on cars
- funding infrastructure => more dense infrastructure means you don't have as much infrastructure to repair and you have more people paying for it
- city government budgets => high density areas are more tax efficient
- home insurance => the homes on the outskirts of cities are most likely to burn down; if housing is cheap the cost to insure it will be cheaper as well
IMO, if housing is 30-60% of peoples budgets and transportation is another 10-20%, if you can bring those costs down you can de-stress a lot of people. That might make politics less intense too.
* "Most problems" is not strictly accurate. But "more problems than you might think are directly related to housing" doesn't really roll off the tongue.
baggy_trough · 28m ago
A sufficiently high housing price is a feature, not a bug.
blitzar · 21m ago
The price isn't the feature - the growth in price is the feature.
Inflating away debt is less consistent but more miraculous than compound interest.
Robotbeat · 35m ago
The Housing Theory of Everything.
Anyway, instead of the government building housing, we have the government stopping the building of housing as much as possible.
izend · 35m ago
Canada use to build social housing but stopped around 1995[1] and the housing affordability situation deteriorated over the next 30 years[2].
Around the turn of the millennium many countries seem to have decided to underproduce housing, both by ending government programs like you describe and by erecting government barriers to private home construction.
My conspiracy theory is that homeowners vote at higher numbers and more reliably and like free money.
blitzar · 43m ago
If you did society would collapse as the housing Ponzi scheme collapses.
gruez · 21m ago
Ireland had a property bubble that popped and society didn't exactly collapse there.
If you dig down deep enough it’s always about valuing money over humans.
lurk2 · 12m ago
I’d like to dig down deep enough that we reach causal explanations.
thrance · 15m ago
I think it's too simple. Housing is but one symptom of our dysfunctional societies. That said, I'm all for decommodified housing.
As long as capital allocation is decided undemocratically, there won't be enough housing, food or medicine for everyone.
sleepyguy · 31m ago
There is a lot of affordable housing; it's just that no one wants to live there for reasons such as work, location, crime, etc. Sure, there is no affordable housing in places like NYC, because too many people want or need to live there.
A quick search on realtor.com for a place like Cleveland. Plenty of houses for 150k.
dingnuts · 24m ago
it stops being affordable when you take the Cleveland salary
api · 30m ago
I’m a gigantic believer in this and will hop on the nearest soapbox at any chance to evangelize it. High housing prices are literally destroying civilization, pricing the next generation out of existence and fueling every form of resentment.
Home equity or the future. Choose one.
If we keep pricing the next generation out of existence eventually the pyramid will collapse due to population decline. But I suppose the older homeowners living on it now will be dead so they don’t care.
blitzar · 26m ago
> Home equity or the future. Choose one.
The masses (sadly) will choose home equity every time.
I have witnessed bitterly resentful people turn into local activists protesting against any new build the day after they purchase a property.
CooCooCaCha · 6m ago
When it comes to collective action, people will exhaust every option except the one where they work together for the common good.
jaoane · 4m ago
There are places in the West where this has been done and all you get is ghettos full of scum and crime. You have to pair this with jobs and a way of promptly removing undesirable elements from the neighbourhood. Cf. section 8.
catigula · 36m ago
I'm just confused as to why the US population needed to grow by almost 100 million since I was born without any sort of infrastructure undertaking to sustain that massive immigration. My local community is terrifically swollen with people and everything built for 1/3rd the population is now crumbling under that weight.
ajross · 25m ago
Most of suburban America wasn't built yet when you were born. I don't understand this point at all. You don't think sprawl counts as infrastructure? It may not be the housing you (or I) personally think should have been built, but it's absolutely housing. And it was built in great quantity at great cost, and even turned out to be great investments. And it came with schools and strip malls and freeway interchanges and substations to connect it all. Living in the modern US is paradise in almost all quantifiable ways.
It's also, it needs be said, wasn't built to support (sigh[1]) "massive immigration". You can find a few H1B holders peppered around, but the sprawl is for the middle class, 100%.
[1] Seriously, why must everything become a callout to right wing grievance politics these days?
catigula · 19m ago
I think you trying to transmute this to polemic weakens the points you've attempted to make.
Obviously we disagree but the point I feel most compelled to push back against is your assertion that "living in the modern US is paradise in almost all quantifiable ways".
This is such a problematic statement that clearly labors heavily under the burden of its own premise. A crude metric is quite telling: suicide has trended upwards in the past 20 years. I presume if the data went back further the picture would be more stark.
Living in a time with gizmos and gadgets and economic plenty that is weakly distributed and calling that "paradise" is very insulting to people's lived experiences and part of the reason I think the economic message of the politics you represent alienates average folks.
Based on your posts it seems like you've been a wealthy developer for decades and likely have employed, or employ, cheap labor. Kind of feels like a rugpull, Ross.
Personally, I've managed many teams with cheap foreign developers, I'm just straight about it.
Also, when do you think I was born? You think the US hadn't been built in 1982? Absurd claims all around.
jpc0 · 4m ago
I think the situation is likely significantly more nuanced than either of your points of view allows.
Suicide and basic needs being met is likely not highly correlated. On the other side suicide stats likely don’t include dependency related death, alcoholism can be a coping mechanism, if you didn’t commit suicide but instead murdered your liver and died early is that really a different statistic in your assessment?
The only way you can measure is access to basic needs, housing, shelter, medical care, nutrition. A century ago those things were significantly lower for the average person vs now. Could the world be in a better situation? Very likely yes, but is could also be much worse.
If you want to significantly change things then better, advocate for more social workers and to make sure the social welfare system works through them. They are in my experience very good at sussing out whether someone is a leech to society and is just looking for a handout of someone who is truly in need.
Advocate for adequate housing, more suburbs doesn’t help low-middle class people, you need more dense housing close to infrastructure or workplaces.
catigula · 1m ago
I respect your thoughts here because I think they come from a good place that wants to help people.
I just don't know how to express to you how philosophically naive I think the kind of utilitarian assertion you've made is.
We can easily construct a world that you and I would both agree is a living hellscape where all human needs were simultaneously being met. Most horror science fiction is predicated on those premises.
sokoloff · 12m ago
I looked for older suicide rate data and it doesn’t support what I think is your view above.
At the turn of the previous century, suicide rates were markedly higher than today, even though today is worse than 20 years ago.
I'm not sure what point you think is being made but your own chart shows suicide exploding during the exact timeline we're discussing.
It's probably not causative, as that would be quite silly, but economic plenty for extremely wealthy people caused by a massive influx of cheap labor is clearly not a net boon on this metric.
The US made its bones well before this insane population explosion we only very recently had.
(Yes, we've had large amounts of immigration before. We also built infrastructure and were vastly less developed).
firesteelrain · 8m ago
This article seems to romanticize a time of long ago
Most of these developments were meant to be temporary wartime measures and were heavily discriminatory. Housing hasn’t been seen as a public good so that’s partially the reason why we don’t do more of these types of projects. Habitat for Humanity is one organization that builds similar public housing projects notably not on the best real estate. Our housing situation is deliberately chosen over the last 100 years. We could have continued down that path beyond WW1 but realize it was done for a specific purpose at a specific point in time because the government realized it needed to bootstrap a nation for war.
kacesensitive · 27m ago
This is one of those things that sounds radical now but was completely normal policy 70 years ago. The federal government used to directly build housing—lots of it—for working-class families. Projects like the New Deal and post-WWII housing initiatives weren't perfect, but they did provide millions of people with stable places to live.
What changed? Mostly a shift toward neoliberal policies in the '70s and '80s that framed government intervention as inefficient and market solutions as inherently superior. We offloaded housing policy to private developers and then acted shocked when affordability cratered.
We don’t need to reinvent anything—we just need the political will to do what we already did once, and quite successfully.
Instead of addressing systemic issues like housing, wages, climate change and healthcare, we started screaming about the culture wars (thanks Reagan). It was easier (and more profitable) to stir outrage over symbolic issues than to solve material problems. We could’ve been building homes, but we got tricked into yelling about bathrooms and book bans instead.
blitzar · 40m ago
> To meet demand, there needed to be sufficient worker housing near shipyards, munitions plants and steel factories.
There was an era where the landed gentry were aware of this.
There was an era where company owners were aware of this.
There was an era where governments were aware of this.
Now it's bad for return on capital and/or socialism.
Robotbeat · 30m ago
In fact, it’s the middle and upper class, whose largest asset is their home, who keep it illegal to build more housing.
jebarker · 11m ago
Is it really the case that primary residence is the largest asset of most of the upper class? My impression is that many upper class people have far more money invested in stocks and businesses than in their house.
gruez · 28m ago
>Now it's bad for return on capital and/or socialism.
As fun as it might be to dunk on strawman republicans, those developments weren't exactly showered with praise from the left either. The same housing was being decried as being "company towns" or whatever.
galleywest200 · 14m ago
Company towns absolutely do still exist and are absolutely still built up.
Company scrip is what a lot of people take issue with, I assume, as they should.
gruez · 7m ago
>Company scrip is what a lot of people take issue with, I assume, as they should.
No? People also complain how it limits your career prospects (because there aren't any competitors to jump ship to), or how the company ends up with outsized political influence.
xqcgrek2 · 31m ago
and it was a huge failure and continues to be an issue in other countries. Just look at the UK with its council housing situation.
churchill · 29m ago
The reason most Western countries won't see affordable housing, at least, not for a few decades, is simple: housing has been commoditized, and the average Western boomer is parking a huge chunk of their net worth in their home. House prices need to stay high to prop up their wealth, and given the electoral participation rate of the Western boomer, any politician whose policies reduces housing values will likely be rewarded (read: punished) by being voted out of office.
No amount of banging on and on about immigrants will change that.
So, like Cronus eating his kids, many countries around the world have chosen to sacrifice affordability for their kids in order to squeeze out a few more decades of good living.
It's just like the problem the US & its peers have with unfunded liabilities: a huge chunk of retirement savings in tied up the stock market, specifically, the SP500 that has a PE ratio of 30. Are you willing to bet that these companies will stay profitable at their current rate for 30y, without slipping?
It's a question without easy answers, because as the workforce reduces (low birth rates), there are fewer workers paying into Social Security and bidding stock markets to new heights. As a result, everyone withdrawing ends up with less cash and fewer goods.
create-username · 40m ago
Let me guess before clicking on the link: it was before the fall of the URSS.
Houses are suffering from being at the front of the interest of BlackRock and other almighty lobbies
gruez · 31m ago
>Houses are suffering from being at the front of the interest of BlackRock and other almighty lobbies
Blackrock and "other almighty lobbies" (Chamber of Commerce?) are showing up to city council meetings to block housing from getting built?
Robotbeat · 32m ago
Everyone wants to think it’s BlackRock instead of the reality that the reason housing shortages exist is to protect the retirement nest egg of Boomers, ie their house equity, by making it effectively illegal to build housing. Sorry to say it’s not a cartoon capitalist villain, but instead your neighbors trying to protect their (inflated) “home value”.
We need the housing, but it doesn't solve most issues.
Building homes on federal land in the middle of no where will not do anything for people. We just need to allow people to build housing where there is a demand for labor.
Some things I think would be solved include:
- the housing crisis
- mobility => it would be easier for people to move to other parts of the country because they would be less tied to their homes - labor mismatches
- climate change => less reliance on cars
- funding infrastructure => more dense infrastructure means you don't have as much infrastructure to repair and you have more people paying for it
- city government budgets => high density areas are more tax efficient
- home insurance => the homes on the outskirts of cities are most likely to burn down; if housing is cheap the cost to insure it will be cheaper as well
IMO, if housing is 30-60% of peoples budgets and transportation is another 10-20%, if you can bring those costs down you can de-stress a lot of people. That might make politics less intense too.
* "Most problems" is not strictly accurate. But "more problems than you might think are directly related to housing" doesn't really roll off the tongue.
Inflating away debt is less consistent but more miraculous than compound interest.
Anyway, instead of the government building housing, we have the government stopping the building of housing as much as possible.
[1] https://x.com/g_meslin/status/1373689001866067969 [2] https://external-preview.redd.it/UGgkJlBT0dV7DwLgbEnJpgQzj4i...
My conspiracy theory is that homeowners vote at higher numbers and more reliably and like free money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_property_bubble
As long as capital allocation is decided undemocratically, there won't be enough housing, food or medicine for everyone.
A quick search on realtor.com for a place like Cleveland. Plenty of houses for 150k.
Home equity or the future. Choose one.
If we keep pricing the next generation out of existence eventually the pyramid will collapse due to population decline. But I suppose the older homeowners living on it now will be dead so they don’t care.
The masses (sadly) will choose home equity every time.
I have witnessed bitterly resentful people turn into local activists protesting against any new build the day after they purchase a property.
It's also, it needs be said, wasn't built to support (sigh[1]) "massive immigration". You can find a few H1B holders peppered around, but the sprawl is for the middle class, 100%.
[1] Seriously, why must everything become a callout to right wing grievance politics these days?
Obviously we disagree but the point I feel most compelled to push back against is your assertion that "living in the modern US is paradise in almost all quantifiable ways".
This is such a problematic statement that clearly labors heavily under the burden of its own premise. A crude metric is quite telling: suicide has trended upwards in the past 20 years. I presume if the data went back further the picture would be more stark.
Living in a time with gizmos and gadgets and economic plenty that is weakly distributed and calling that "paradise" is very insulting to people's lived experiences and part of the reason I think the economic message of the politics you represent alienates average folks.
Based on your posts it seems like you've been a wealthy developer for decades and likely have employed, or employ, cheap labor. Kind of feels like a rugpull, Ross.
Personally, I've managed many teams with cheap foreign developers, I'm just straight about it.
Also, when do you think I was born? You think the US hadn't been built in 1982? Absurd claims all around.
Suicide and basic needs being met is likely not highly correlated. On the other side suicide stats likely don’t include dependency related death, alcoholism can be a coping mechanism, if you didn’t commit suicide but instead murdered your liver and died early is that really a different statistic in your assessment?
The only way you can measure is access to basic needs, housing, shelter, medical care, nutrition. A century ago those things were significantly lower for the average person vs now. Could the world be in a better situation? Very likely yes, but is could also be much worse.
If you want to significantly change things then better, advocate for more social workers and to make sure the social welfare system works through them. They are in my experience very good at sussing out whether someone is a leech to society and is just looking for a handout of someone who is truly in need.
Advocate for adequate housing, more suburbs doesn’t help low-middle class people, you need more dense housing close to infrastructure or workplaces.
I just don't know how to express to you how philosophically naive I think the kind of utilitarian assertion you've made is.
We can easily construct a world that you and I would both agree is a living hellscape where all human needs were simultaneously being met. Most horror science fiction is predicated on those premises.
At the turn of the previous century, suicide rates were markedly higher than today, even though today is worse than 20 years ago.
https://jabberwocking.com/raw-data-us-suicide-rates-since-19...
It's probably not causative, as that would be quite silly, but economic plenty for extremely wealthy people caused by a massive influx of cheap labor is clearly not a net boon on this metric.
The US made its bones well before this insane population explosion we only very recently had.
(Yes, we've had large amounts of immigration before. We also built infrastructure and were vastly less developed).
Most of these developments were meant to be temporary wartime measures and were heavily discriminatory. Housing hasn’t been seen as a public good so that’s partially the reason why we don’t do more of these types of projects. Habitat for Humanity is one organization that builds similar public housing projects notably not on the best real estate. Our housing situation is deliberately chosen over the last 100 years. We could have continued down that path beyond WW1 but realize it was done for a specific purpose at a specific point in time because the government realized it needed to bootstrap a nation for war.
What changed? Mostly a shift toward neoliberal policies in the '70s and '80s that framed government intervention as inefficient and market solutions as inherently superior. We offloaded housing policy to private developers and then acted shocked when affordability cratered.
We don’t need to reinvent anything—we just need the political will to do what we already did once, and quite successfully.
Instead of addressing systemic issues like housing, wages, climate change and healthcare, we started screaming about the culture wars (thanks Reagan). It was easier (and more profitable) to stir outrage over symbolic issues than to solve material problems. We could’ve been building homes, but we got tricked into yelling about bathrooms and book bans instead.
There was an era where the landed gentry were aware of this. There was an era where company owners were aware of this. There was an era where governments were aware of this.
Now it's bad for return on capital and/or socialism.
As fun as it might be to dunk on strawman republicans, those developments weren't exactly showered with praise from the left either. The same housing was being decried as being "company towns" or whatever.
Company scrip is what a lot of people take issue with, I assume, as they should.
No? People also complain how it limits your career prospects (because there aren't any competitors to jump ship to), or how the company ends up with outsized political influence.
No amount of banging on and on about immigrants will change that.
So, like Cronus eating his kids, many countries around the world have chosen to sacrifice affordability for their kids in order to squeeze out a few more decades of good living.
It's just like the problem the US & its peers have with unfunded liabilities: a huge chunk of retirement savings in tied up the stock market, specifically, the SP500 that has a PE ratio of 30. Are you willing to bet that these companies will stay profitable at their current rate for 30y, without slipping?
It's a question without easy answers, because as the workforce reduces (low birth rates), there are fewer workers paying into Social Security and bidding stock markets to new heights. As a result, everyone withdrawing ends up with less cash and fewer goods.
Houses are suffering from being at the front of the interest of BlackRock and other almighty lobbies
Blackrock and "other almighty lobbies" (Chamber of Commerce?) are showing up to city council meetings to block housing from getting built?