Hacker News Reader

This is absolutely true, but also another way of saying: "Housing is expensive because people who make the rules want it expensive. People who make the rules want it expensive because they own houses."

To solve this you either have to convince homeowners to not want what they want, or get non homeowners to vote.

View on HN

Neither solution is really tenable. People vote where their money is and non-homeowners -- a minority in the U.S. -- are subject to externalities which prevent them from forming efficient voting blocks.

The most realistic path out of this situation is that homeownership becomes increasingly inaccessible to the point where it hurts more people than it helps (i.e.: when the majority of voters cannot afford to own property). This will take a long time on the macro scale, considering the current 65% homeownership rate and the generational nature of property transfers. The micro scale will change faster wherever unattainable homeownership is already the reality, but it will ultimately be bottlenecked by state-level legislation. City governments lack the resources/authority to meaningfully incentivize developers or otherwise remove obsolete building codes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com