Hacker News Reader

Comment by potatototoo99 | Hacker News Reader

What? Only "socially important jobs" could buy the cheaper apartments? What the hell

For prices to go down, it doesn't really matter who gets to live in these apartments, as long as enough demand is taken off the market.

And usually, with few exceptions, socially acceptable jobs are the ones which pay little compared to the effort they require, and also compared to the (non-monetary) value they bring to society. You also want these people in your city because sure it's great that you have tech workers, lawyers and bankers, but who is going to be in the hospitals?

Why not? It makes sense - not every job is equal and some are both important and usually not paid enough.

Society or your local town won't collapse if there's not enough web developers but it may do if it lacks firefighters.

That would be a payment, just not with money, right? So why it's better than just paying this money directly and letting the person decide, rather than introducing an extra step by putting the money into a development and then giving the property instead? The direct payment looks more efficient to me.

If you have a thousand people competing for 700 apartments, prices will adjust until 300 are priced out of the apartments. Giving the 200 of those people with socially recognized jobs enough money to not be priced out any more will still mean that 300 will be priced out, it will just be different people.

In other words, rents will just increase. The solution is to build 300 more apartments, and make them available at the bottom of the market, not the top.

But it's highly unlikely that all 200 of those people would choose to spend that extra money bidding up those apartments, and that's the whole point. Distorting another market as a proxy is worse than directly addressing the compensation issue.

The real estate market is extremely distorted by local governments, through imposing restrictions on where houses can be built, how large they can be, etc. To some degree this makes sense, because you want people to be able to enjoy nature or the city wants to be able to plan which roads to build out, but on the other hand, the focus on SFH urban sprawl plus the prospensity to avoid density increases leads to extreme price increases and losses to quality of life. There is huge demand for walkable high density neighborhoods, but the market cannot meet it because government.

That could be true indeed. I am just arguing in the scenario of "what if we build lots of flats", hah!

I do wonder how did similar scenarios worked out historically?

Speaking about historically, that was implemented in Soviet Union, and I don't think it worked well. Though it certainly gave extra tools to the government to control the people.

Yes? Why is that hard to accept? Jobs with positive externalities are by definition undercompensated.

Why don't you just pay them more? Seems easier than setting up a social credit system.

I would guess because people don't like paying taxes even when the taxes are there to account for the externalities.

This is the Singapore model. Tbf I think it's fine to help most of the people to have places to live in

Reply on news.ycombinator.com