Eminent domain requires reimbursement, and is horrendously unpopular. Trying to scoop up land from middle class people around cities in the West isn’t politically feasible. Those people vote.

There’s no politically realistic future where governments could build enough row homes to house the poor in places where there is economic opportunity. The land is too expensive, and trying to wrench it away by force of law would die in the courts or the ballot booth. This is a hopelessly utopian idea.

Markets are great at producing lots of cheap stuff, we could let housing work the same way.

> There’s no politically realistic future where governments could build enough row homes to house the poor in places where there is economic opportunity

Some politically realistic futures where this kind of thing had widespread support:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Communist_Revolution

> This is a hopelessly utopian idea

I'd argue that "let's keep doing markets despite the suffering we see around us" is a hopelessly dystopian idea, but...

I wouldn’t say the Cuban or Chinese revolutions have provided great housing solutions. Not to mention the wanton slaughter of the Russian and Chinese civil wars which killed millions of innocent people.

No one is saying let’s keep doing markets”. The article and many posts like mine are arguing that building new and more dense housing has been illegal in most of the US for decades, which has lead to a housing shortage. We should make it legal to build more housing, so that the market can build more housing.

I’m not wholly opposed to some public housing, but it needs to be carefully financed and well maintained.

My point was that the political will to make large swaths of land public has existed in the past, and if people keep getting more and more desperate it'll happen again, hopefully not violently.

But ok back to your point: so market capitalism works - but in housing we haven't had markets because of gov interference. So what's an area where we have a free unconstrained market for a basic human necessity, that doesn't cause deep deep suffering?

Food, water, housing, heathcare, safety - these are things that when solved by "the market" necessarily exclude a small but significant portion of people. Market capitalism is the wrong tool for basic needs. Prove me wrong ;)

We reached max depth. But with respect to food and water, no one in any market economy dies down f hunger or thirst. During the last century every famine was in a war zone or command economy. We produce so much food now that we’re making ourselves sick from eating too much.

There are certainly issues in places with access to fresh food and we need to better maintain plumbing in some cities. Those are more complicated issues though and involve culture and government.

We don't have a free market for food in the US or Canada. Very few people outright starve here, but that's largely due to food banks, food stamps, other government or charitably funded non-market forces that prevent starvation.

> 45 million Americans rely on stipends from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to buy food each month

Yes, we have a lot of food here, but in a pure market, without money you don't get any of it.

Water is almost 100% public.

Yeah It’s clearly more complicated than just a textbook market.