Re:At the world's oldest social housing, rent hasn't changed...
by gruez on Tuesday August 31, 2021 @08:55AM
(#28367422)
I have a feeling you're being sarcastic, but that's exactly what I'm arguing for. If your city only has enough housing for 100,000 people, but there are 150,000 people who want to live there, there's going 50,000 who can't get a house. In other words, a shortage. That's bad, but that number is going to be the same regardless of how you're redistributing it. The question then becomes, can we make the best out of a bad situation? Distributing by price has benefits that I mentioned. What benefits does giving giving it for below-market prices to people whoever's first on a waiting list provide?
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Re:At the world's oldest social housing, rent hasn't changed...
by cycomanic on Tuesday August 31, 2021 @11:27AM
(#28369253)
It only works though if income distribution is somewhat sane and people actually buy the housing to live or for renting out. The issue is that a small part of the population is so rich that they can afford many apartments/houses without living in them or renting them out. Those individuals have often enough market weight that they can distort the market all by themselves. Creating an arbitrary shortage to drive up prices for example
Re:At the world's oldest social housing, rent hasn't changed...
by dbingham on Tuesday August 31, 2021 @10:00AM
(#28368158)
Except, if you'd ever paid any attention to housing markets in any major city they don't work this way. There are too many other factors and incentives at play. Not least of which is that the profit motive drives developers and landlords to keep costs as high as they possibly can, and they all share that motivation, so you end up with convergent price fixing - where they all just naturally compete on things other than price with out actually colluding to do that.
Markets rarely actually work as advertised.
Re:At the world's oldest social housing, rent hasn't changed...
by luckylion on Tuesday August 31, 2021 @10:16AM
(#28368373)
They do though. It's just that there's so much regulation and other problems that they can't adjust fast enough.
I've lived in Hamburg, Germany, adjacent to an expanding hipster area. Rents rose steadily and every vacant lot was being built upon, industrial zones were repurposed for more housing etc. It's just that that still only gives you a fraction of the apartments you'd need to satisfy demand.
If there was no incentive for investment, I'm sure we'd see even fewer new houses being built, because there's no incentive for the state to move, neither fast nor at all.