Comment by Tsagadai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tsagadai | Hacker News Reader

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Housing is almost impossible to fix at this point. Housing is seen more as an asset class than a social requirement (although, not everyone thinks this way there are enough people with money that it doesn't matter what they think, it is an asset class). The majority of the issues you highlight are caused by the amount of capital moving into real estate and the amount of resistance to change is directly proportional to how much the house is worth. Almost any change in housing will be universally opposed by owners unless it improves their house values (sometimes a change may improve one set of owners while diminishing another but that just makes for more media friendly conflict).

Tenements and social housing have been tried and mostly failed. Interest rates and taxation only have a marginal affect until they reach extremes. Emigration from an area has been shown to lower prices but at great social and economic cost.

Then there is demand, everyone needs somewhere to live. Don't just consider local demand, consider international demand. How culturally, economically or socially appealing an area is to an international audience (that is, does nearly everyone want to live there).

I view it as almost impossible for housing to improve for everyone while it is an asset and there would need to be utterly draconian or utopian changes to switch high quality housing from an asset to something universally available.

A thought experiment: What about building a new city in the middle of nowhere, with the sole goal of extremely reducing living costs , and designing the laws specifically for that ,including making housing costs extremely cheap?

No need for thought experiments, we have history. Company towns are good examples of this (see [Roxby Downs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roxby_Downs,_South_Australia)) as are cult headquarters. An oil rig is another example, housing costs are usually free (covered by employment), living facilities are provided free of charge and costs are usually fixed through corporate oversight and union opposition to changes. The funny thing is, most people don't want to live in places like that.

Well i've Googled "company towns", and the first result is "company towns| slavery by a different name". No wonder nobody wanted to live there.

So it's probably can be done better.

The UK government built a bunch of "new towns" in England in the '50s and '60s, to take pressure off the housing situation in London at the time. The biggest is Milton Keynes, near Bletchley Park. It's a bit soulless in the same way as US suburbs, being built for the age of the car (roundabouts as far as the eye can see!), but it's 45 minutes from central London on the train, and was affordable for regular people to buy houses there. The new towns schemes seem largely successful 50 years later, and I can only imagine the reason we've not continued is because of the change in political taste for large infrastructure projects since then.

You will always have a chicken and egg problem with jobs. Company towns are one solution and as people pointed out, they can be horrible. But I think a fantastic idea would be developing an empty area, say, 45 minutes from a job hub, and running bus shuttles or trains there. Imagine a stop along the California High Speed Rail project that could get you to San Jose or San Francisco in 45 minutes.

From there, I think you'd want a few things: - Henry George-style taxation by the local city on land values - Maximize the place:non-place ratio. Maximize space for parks, buildings, plazas and minimize space for parking lots, roads for cars etc. - Small lot sizes, row houses, and 4-6 story apartment buildings with excellent noise insulation - Dense enough so that cars are not necessary most of the time. Saves lots of land and the costs of operating cars

If we don't change this you can forget it. Land is the issue, it's been the issue for hundreds of years.

The ability to expand into free land was what made the USA different. You could take a job for the man on subsistence wages or set up yourself. That's why you had to have slavery. In the UK with land enclosure the prison is the country.

We should tax land and stop the exploitation of workers by rentiers.

How does LVT achieve your goals while property tax, which we already have, does not?

Property tax doesn't go nearly far enough. LVT would replace income tax for the majority of workers.

Right now tax on capital gain is far less than income tax.

Except that like everywhere else on the globe that isn't Antarctica there were already people there that needed to be displaced. Someone else's asset was stolen and sold (for very little initially, but sold nonetheless). Land (in absolute terms) has little to do with property prices compared to where the land is geographically, politically and socially.

Land tax will help marginally with inequity but the majority of the cost will just be passed on to renters (like what happens now). Taxing vacant buildings higher will increase supply which should depress rents slightly. None of that stops housing becoming an investment and a financial asset though which is the root cause of unaffordability.

LVT is set by location. Property prices are set by location.

LVT can't be passed onto renters. It does stop land speculation. It's the opposite of what you say.

If LVT could be passed onto renters then why, given the market can apparently bear higher prices, are our genius landlords not charging us more already? That's how prices are set my friend, they don't sum up the input costs and add 5% profit.

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