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Comment by yyy888sss | Hacker News Reader

We actually do need something like this, or at least the right to develop land.

Right now in Australia we have tyranny of the majority, because the 30% of home owners + 30% of mortgage holders have realised they can get rich if the government restricts supply (bans development) and increases demand (adjusts immigration yearly to outpace construction). For a century there seemed to be a 'social contract' that getting young people a home and helping them start families was important for the country, now though that concept seems to be totally dead.

Just creating a legal 'right' to build a house on your land would be the best fix and help a lot, but long term we really need to fix the social contract which held everything together in the first place.

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> For a century there seemed to be a 'social contract' that getting young people a home and helping them start families was important for the country, now though that concept seems to be totally dead.

In fact every federal and most state governments across the political divide have had some form of "first home buyer" grant or program for decades to get people into the market. Often these programs offer reduced interest, lump sums or deposits of 1-10%. This of course decreases supply.

Notice that all of these homeowners (as a collective group) have pulled the rope up behind them. For a lot of them they can't afford their house value to go down as they're on a 35 year mortgage. A 20% drop in house value could effectively destroy 5-10 years of their work paying it off via devaluation.

What would you have people do? These are self-created problems with no easy exit strategy.

Is there no easy exit strategy? I think that if you remove the barriers to making more houses people will do just that; that if there are more houses people will buy them.

Would that fix all the housing problems? Probably not but I think it'd fix a number of them.

Aggressive increase in supply reduces demand, which reduces price of existing stock. Many, many people have a vested interest in keeping that stock at a high price (both single family home owners and investors). Wiping 10 years of payments a family has made off the value of a property overnight isn't popular.

On top of that, housing is a key element of our economy ("safe as houses") and the impact on a big enough drop to make a difference would likely be very bad.

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