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Comment by llimos | Hacker News Reader

I'm generally in favour of letting free markets sort themselves out, but housing isn't a normal market.

In a normal market, when demand goes up supply usually follows. If a lot of people are buying Widget A, pushing the price up, more factories will pop up to manufacture Widget A, bringing the price down again.

But housing is a zero-sum game - the amount of land is finite, the amount the authorities let you build on is even more limited, so the market can't fix itself, it's not a normal market. That's why you do need some kind of intervention to protect the participants. This is all apart from the fact that it's a basic human need.

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Some people are completely against landlords existing. Perhaps you've mistaken me for one of those? Or perhaps I just didn't explain myself clearly enough?

To be clear, I'm not against landlords existing. My guiding principle is that landlords need to exist because forcing people to own property isn't practical or even desirable. There is significant friction with buying and selling houses even if you can get over the financial barriers (eg downpayments).

The simplest way I can put it is that I believe in this guiding principle: Landlords should be part of their community.

What does this mean? Some examples:

1. I'm all for multifamily housing where the owners have 1-2 rental units on their property. This style of housing exists in small pockets of the US as generally a legacy but is now outlawed almost everywhere (most of the US makes anything other than single family housing illegal to build).

2. In the case where the landlord doesn't live on the property they should (IMHO) generally live in the same locale. This is what I mean when I said "New York should be for New Yorkers". Perhaps a better way to say that is "New York should be by and for New Yorkers". Obviously you can substitute any city name there. NYC is just an example; and

3. When it comes to apartments, generally I favour purpose-built rental apartments being built for this rather than renting out condos. Again though local ownership is better.

Housing is not zero sum at current US density levels. You can put one house on a half acre or you can put 3-4 10-story apartment buildings on it with 20 3-bedrooms each. We immorally choose to have a housing shortage to keep the poors out.

Zero-sum because the authorities made it zero-sum is still zero-sum.

You can't start a company that says "let's increase the supply of housing because demand is high." You can do that with most other markets.

What I think you're saying is it ought to not be zero-sum because there's enough land - perhaps. I was talking about the ability of market participants to increase supply.

The free market is a miracle worker in anything that doesn't involve necessities. I don't really count food though because it generally has enough competition and liquidity to keep it in check, but if it gets (really) bad then it too.

But medical and housing? Yeah, it has no problem destroying peoples lives.

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