Hacker News Reader

Comment by Anotheroneagain | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this is a good comparison. The core problem we face is overproduction. Vastly more can be produced than can be consumed. When you try to boost the economy by "job creation" and investing more money, you essentially pay people to keep other people busy. It isn't serfdom, they don't serve their lords, who take a share of their work. They work to reduce the available workforce, so that overproduction is avoided, and markets don't crash like they did in 1929.

View on HN

Overproduction of what? Not of houses. Not of medical services (it takes forever to get an appointment). Yes, maybe there was/is overproduction of software nonsense, but I don't think that's overproduction overall in the economy; rather it's a misallocation.

Of course of houses. Houses are the best example - they can be built for invested money, then bought as an investment, closing the loop. The fact that you can't afford one is secondary, there are thousands of empty houses anywhere, their prices are just kept high by the incoming capital.

USA housing starts is collapsing.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST

It's no wonder why house prices are so high when we are (inadvertently) cutting housing supply.

USA production of houses needs to be twice as much compared to 50 years ago to keep up with population growth... But we've lost housing production in recent years, not gained it. We are moving in the wrong direction.

----------

There's plenty of debate on why housing starts is declining. I don't care too much of the details though, the focus needs to be a concerted effort to reverse the trend and fix our country wide housing problem

I suppose that everyone began to realize that it must end sooner or later, especially after Evergrande's collapse.

Nobody's going to live in those houses. What would you want to reverse for what reason?

America is not China.

China built a ton of fake houses all around. America in contrast has too few houses, an influx of immigrants (both legal and illegal), and an entire generation of young 20-to-30s year olds who want a house before they start raising a family.

The houses are clearly needed here in America. Its not like China's Evergrande fake-house bullshit. When my terrible childhood home in the Ghetto is selling for $500,000, I know that there's some bullshit supply/demand issues right now. Okay, the former Ghetto has been gentrified a bit. But thats still causing some knock-on-effects that are preventing new families from moving in right now... No one likes a declining crime-infested area where everyone's leaving / trying to escape from. But the area has over-boomed now and not enough new houses/dense houses have been built, so there's suddenly a housing shortage after 20 years.

Etc. etc. etc. Some areas (Ex: Detroit) have entire neighborhoods of terrible houses that no one wants. But other areas need new houses. The only solution is to consistently build houses as demand comes up.

Never pull the fake bullshit that Evergrande did. But similarly, never stop building houses either. There's a balance here.

The houses aren't fake. They were bought as an investment (it isn't uncommon in China to own several) with no people to live in them. The rest of the world hasn't collapsed yet, but the problem is the same. You can imagine it as Bitcoin: it has no value, but the prices stay high as long as people pour more money in than they pull out.

Americans all want SFH but we have reached the reasonable limit of house density in most metro areas within commutable distances. That “commute circle” kept expanding from street cars, to car transit, to highway arterials to suburbs and exurbs. But we need another jump in commute speed/distance to open up the next circle of suburbs/exurbs but we haven’t had any such jump since the 70s.

Maybe high speed rail to city centers with ample parking, that was sort of the hyperloop but that was a sham.

I think the best thing for US housing will be FSD — we can designate arterial highways during commute times as FSD only and have them operate at higher speeds like 100 mph — though I know efficiency drops significantly so hopefully we are fully electric by then too.

And the pandemic showed that we don't need to all commute. That remote work, does work.

Remote work mandates for companies would actually help revitalize americana economy, and provide more housing availability. While also reducing housing pressure from cities.

Heck, people living in smaller cities will likely also have better inter-personal relationships and more fulfilling lives.

But these companies that employ people are now anti-remote-work using made-up statistics.

It did look like remote work would help the housing issue and allow people to migrate to second and third size cities, but that is backpedaling now and you need to be able to go to your office which gets us back to the original problem

Maybe that's true in some places, but where I live empty houses are rented/purchased immediately

> The core problem we face is overproduction. Vastly more can be produced than can be consumed.

Varoufakis agrees overproduction is a problem and alludes to it in many places. The Global Minotaur - "Profit can only be envisaged if the level of overall future demand is strong. Unfortunately, the future is unknowable. The only thing business folk know for sure is demand is never strong for long..."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com