> The administration released a “Housing Supply Action Plan” that officials said would produce more housing supply, including affordable units, in the next five years.

Aaaand it's priced in.

> The White House also urged lawmakers to pass Biden’s 2023 budget request, which includes a proposal for $10 billion in HUD grants to increase accessibility to affordable housing.

"The House on Tuesday night passed a $40 billion military and humanitarian aid package" (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/10/us/politics/congress-ukra...)

... how anyone can treat politics seriously is beyond me.

(edit: would love some actual replies into A - how the market is not going to price this in and B - how a package 1 / 4 of some foreign aid is really going to help up)

You are right. This package is simultaneously ineffective and of a trivial size compared to the US housing market. The primary result, as per usual, is to shift taxpayer dollars towards landowners and mortgage lenders.

The primary way to actually improve the housing market is to shift taxes away from improvements and onto land value. This would remove the disincentive to build and add a disincentive to engage in idle speculation.

Secondarily, we should remove the local regulatory hurdles that constrain supply, such as restrictive zoning, mandatory parking minimums, etc.

This proposal seems weak and likely to backfire. The biggest problem with housing is not enough being built where it is needed. There is no particular lack of clever financing so that part really doesn't bring much to bear on the problem. Affordable housing units are dominated by old stock which is one reason why we need to maintain the rate of construction. Some kind of federal guidelines for limiting regulations and hearings might address the friction that builders experience.

“Affordable housing” is a just euphemism for subsidizing employers’ low wages at the taxpayers’ expense.

This plan is even worse, in that they’ll also provide “rental and downpayment assistance”, causing home prices to skyrocket in exactly the same way as college tuition.

I find it funny that the average American liberal might be (rightfully) outraged that a Walmart employee is on food stamps, complaining that the government is subsidizing Walmart paying below living wages - but then turn around and advocate for the government to build affordable housing for the same worker.

Affordable housing has a supply problem. Food doesn't.

There's still a short term housing affordability issue even if we do address supply issues. Social or subsidized housing are still good along with increasing the availability of higher density housing near jobs and services.

We dedicate globally 40 mil. km2 of land to meat & dairy production, 39 mil. km2 to forests and just 1.5 mil. km2 to urban and built-up lands [0].

Switching to plant-based foods (at least removing beef & dairy from our diets) would free up 30 mil. km2 of land.

We can have enough plant-based dairy and proteins to feed the population many times over, simultaneously decrease our carbon footprint, stop anthropogenic extinction and increase housing availability.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/01/Global-land-use-g...

While there are arguments like that for going vegetarian, it doesn't really apply here.

The US still has plenty of land that could be used for housing that currently isn't used at all. Last I checked, I think there's even currently enough housing for everyone in the US. The problem is that the land and houses aren't where people want to live, because of jobs or family or etc.

E.g. Detroit has a bunch of cheap and open housing. Rural areas could probably have 10x the current population density without touching agriculture.

Carbon footprint arguments are fair, but a change in diet is unlikely to change the cost of living in San Francisco, New York, LA, etc.

> Rural areas could probably have 10x the current population density without touching agriculture.

This does not apply in central Europe.

Real estate market in Europe is severely constrained now. There is a demand overhang (for every property you've got hundreds of interested buyers) for family housing (I'm not monitoring situation in other markets) even in rural areas, at the same time all villages/cities are limiting new construction by zoning and/or building regulations.

My suspicion is that increasing the area of land intended for urban construction should decrease the house prices and increase their availability.

Please stop it. The pasture land out in the country isn't suffering from a housing shortage. The mega cities simply need more high density housing as always.

I didn't study that plan for too long, but I don't think it's about mega cities only.

There is a tendency to limit expansion of villages/cities into surrounding areas for some decades now (in Europe, not sure about US). And that surrounding areas would be (mostly) agricultural land.

Many young people have trouble buying places to live in because the prices are too high - in some areas houses cost multiples than few decades ago (inflation adjusted).

Mega cities/high density housing are a solution for a crowded world without remote work/work from home, concentrating people into as small area as possible, not without its cons, of course.

Single family housing on the other hand (usually) offers higher quality of life, and is more desirable (for many, at least). And for that the solution may be creating new cities/suburban areas, therefore we would need to allocate more land, land not currently used for housing, of which we have plenty - although the current political/administrative notion is that we don't have where to expand, because agriculture land is sacred/not to be touched/built on.

P.S. I know the article is about US and I'm talking mostly about Europe. But European politicians have a tendency to copy down US policies in quick succession, so my comment may be relevant.

P.P.S. To say it clearly, I don't think that helping new homeowners to get into debt by providing down payment assistance (for housing units overpriced because of existing regulation) is better than lowering prices of said properties by changing zoning/building rules.

Just saying it's boorish to always insert your wishes that people stop eating meat or reduce their intake when it's not even tangential to the discussion. Everybody's totally sick of it, this site doesn't allow religious proselytizing nor should it allow every single discussion to be side tracked into an argument about sustainability, eating the bugs, living in pods, and the like.

There is NO housing crisis in the broader US. Just in the large mega cities and their bedroom communities. Many places suffer from a LACK of residents actually. We all learned how Zoom works because of COVID and some folks took that to heart and moved away from the big cities. In certain areas housing is booming. In others, it's seeing a decline. NYC has seen almost 2 million residents leave in the last 2 years.

You think the housing problem we're facing would be alleviated by putting apartment buildings in my cattle pasture?

I was a vegan for 10 years, now I only eat meat. I bought into the sustainability argument for a long time.

I will not return to a plant based food diet -- and many people will agree with me, often quite aggressively. Eating beef is so important that I will spend my last dollar buying that expensive hamburger.

What I am trying to say is your line of coercion is a waste of time and doomed to fail. You cannot force dietary habits on people with an argument of sustainability. I don't care if the planet ends, I just want my damn steak, and that is a primal urge far stronger than sustainability ethics.

Nice! While this doesn't go as far as I'd hope, it's good to see increasing housing supply being taken up as an actual political goal. Multifamily housing has entered the overton window.

There are 200,000 people entering America from the Southern Border, each month, illegally. That's a lot of houses 'gotta be built:

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/13/migrant-enc...

Why not just enforce existing laws against illegal entry to the country, and deport the 10-20 million already inside the USA? That would free up a lot of real estate.

You are probably not going to get any sympathy for your hard line attitude here, this is hacker news, not daily stormer. You might want to grow some compassion too.

The tech industry was built and maintained by immigrants, and all families are immigrants to new lands at some point in their history. Look around, you will see there are folks that are doing things that you will not do for money. If you want those things to stop and collapse society, keeping pushing for deportation of the labor pool.

Anything the government touches ends up costing more.

That isn't even remotely close to being true. In fact we know that each dollar the government spends usually generates income somewhere else down the line.

The government is not a business.

> In fact we know that each dollar the government spends usually generates income somewhere else down the line.

That's kind of a non-sequitor; downstream income has nothing to do with the cost of the good. Somebody could quadruple the price of steel, but people down the line will still make income.

Student loans is a great example here. Government comes in, gives everyone financing, and the price of college just so happens to rise to the level of financing the government will offer.

I don't see a way this ends well. If they offer it to everyone, housing prices simply factor that in. If they only offer it to the very poor, it just collapses two existing housing brackets into one (the very poor can spend like they're only kind of poor, making very poor cease to exist as a category and lumping the existing "very poor" housing into the "kind of poor" category).

We need more housing or lower demand. That's the solution. Anything else is just shuffling around hardships.

No, it's a nonprofit, and the people getting all the networking and perks are at the helm.

"Solutions brought to you by the government" tend to do the opposite of what they intended. I shall remain skeptical.

Well, I wouldn't say they do the opposite of what's intended, they just do the opposite of whatever lie they told you to get you to accept it.

In this instance, the proposal is to dramatically increase the price of housing by giving away free money to people that they can only use if they buy housing

> Well, I wouldn't say they do the opposite of what's intended, they just do the opposite of whatever lie they told you to get you to accept it.

They also have the nasty side effect of doing far more than anyone intended.

Like that time they gave away subsidized loans for college and then acted surprised when the price of college increased.

Ya, then they promised to forgive all of the loans so that people would be willing to take out even bigger ones to drive prices up even higher.

The purpose, of course, was a massive transfer of wealth to the colleges and universities which were an important political ally and perpetual source of newly-indoctrinated voters. But people wouldn't have supported "giving a trillion dollars to the elite colleges that support the party"

The only promise the government made to forgive loans is the public service loan forgiveness program, which was designed to encourage people to work in underserved areas without offering a large enough salary to attract talent on the normal market. Essentially it is a weird subsidy for undesired jobs.

Some politicians promised a more generic student loan forgiveness, but politicians promise a bunch of things.

I think you have causation backwards. The price of college kept going up, so the government started offering loans.

That wasn’t the goal?

They gave out subsidized loans so more people could go to college… and guess what, more people went to college.

How about "Solutions brought to you by giant corporations"? At least you can vote politicians out of office.

You can vote corporations out of business. You just vote with your wallet. Very effective.

Yeh remember when Comcast was rated the worst company in America year over year? Wonder what ever happened to them?

They were given monopoly rights to broadband provisioning by governments.

So were others but they weren't rated worst company in America for many years in a row.

When giant corporations own or buy 90% of everything then voting with your wallet is not effective at all.

Plus if they're large enough the government will bail them out when they fail assuring there's less room for a better replacement to sprout up.

Clearly works well. See Nestle.

Statistically, nobody stopped buying Nestlé, this seems like a dead example.

No. That is the reason it's a great example. Nestle perpetuates horrors around the world and barely enough people know or care enough to even stop purchasing their products. "Voting with your wallet" is apparently not a very effective deterrent because it doesn't stop anything. Even a company who does as much damage to the world as Nestle.

https://www.zmescience.com/science/nestle-company-pollution-...

If Google or Comcast puts me on their shit list it's just a big inconvenience.

If government puts me on their shit list I wind up in a cage.

If your local power company thinks still you owe them $50 after you move out of a rental you might get harassed by collectors and have your credit dinged. If your local government thinks you owe them $50 there's a good chance eventually wind up with a warrant out for your arrest. It gets even worse when you consider how often these kinds of entities make paper pushing errors.

The entity we entrust with the power to use violence shouldn't be sticking its fingers in anything where we aren't willing to accept more violence.

Except the dust bowl, or polio, or gps, or the bill of rights, or...

You know, the people who say this and the people who want to defund the police ought to get together sometime; you'd think they'd be natural allies, but no.

"in the next 5 years"

This means that when it goes south Biden can let the next president handle the fallout.

I mean, it takes time to build structures. If the US only did what could be done in one term, it'd be shortsighted and get nothing done. Similar to how some companies let the quest for quarterly profits overcome all.