Housing is only "scarce" in desirable places, and that's simply tautological. The sum of unfulfilled desires is the contrapositive of scarcity.

Housing is a market in which a very tiny percentage of goods are up for sale at any particular time, and the projected prices of those goods are heavily shared among a huge network of people who profit when the prices are high. The owners of those goods are often heavily leveraged, and can't afford to lower the price significantly, and the transaction and mortgage costs push them to raise the price to cover those costs at the next place they buy.

> They can only extract so much wealth from housing before people move for alternatives.

No such alternative, which is why the market is as lucrative to exploit as health care. Finding an "alternative" to health care is just to find another type of health care, and if you find an alternative to being housed, you've just found a new kind of house.

There's a lot of truth in that, but it's also an oversimplification.

There is plenty of cheap land in California, here, have a quarter acre lot for $15K:

https://www.redfin.com/CA/California-City/Princeton-Ave-9350...

Of course it's cheap since nobody wants to live there. If everyone wants to live in San Francisco, it's going to be much more expensive. Building more helps but in the end there's only so much that can realistically be built in 50 square miles. Some people will always be left out so there will always be some unmet demand, so it'll never be dirt-cheap.

So yes policy obstruction is a thing, but there are also inherent reasons why popular places will never be cheap.

I guarantee you're not talking about homeless people here, but people who live in a home that they are renting, reasonably near the place they work.

edit: also, somehow these so-called poors are always wealthy programmers trying to buy million-dollar houses.

Many people do not want to own a home, they would rather rent. Someone has to be the landlord for all those people, and to all those someones, the home is an investment. You can only get rid of homes as investments if you get rid of renting.

I hate to go all "citation needed" on you, but I'm not sure this is true.

Do I want to pay for upkeep of a property? Probably not. But since renting is basically equivalent to burning money in our economy, any responsible renter will eventually feel a pull towards ownership if only to stop the bleeding.

I think we need a society where renting isn't so expensive AND owning a property isn't so heavily subsidized by tax breaks. The entire housing market is a massive bubble because of investors and speculation. At some point, that bubble prices people out, leading to homelessness and missed opportunities because people aren't willing or able to move.

Much like freedom of car-free movement, housing ought to be a fundamental human right. Not a business or a place to hide your money.

Given the number of people that rent in large cities all over the world for their entire lives, I don't know why you would find my claim doubtful. Many people seem to want to live in large, densely populated areas, and for most people that is always going to mean renting.

> Much like freedom of car-free movement, housing ought to be a fundamental human right

I disagree with this as a blanket statement; neither car-free movement nor housing as a basic right will ever work in areas that are not densely populated. And many people (including me) want to live in areas that are not densely populated. We are quite willing to pay the costs of doing that and don't need handouts.

However, in densely populated areas, I think many people would agree with your statement--but I think they would also say that "housing as a human right", for them, means availability of affordable rentals, not home ownership.

The "for most people that is always going to mean renting" is that part that we could change through large scale collective policy. That's what Singapore has done for example. No one doubts whether people want to live in cities. We are asking whether the model of private landlords is the best way to manage large quantities of housing in cites. Look at Singapore:

"Eighty-two percent of Singapore’s residents live in HDB-built (Housing Development Board) apartments, of which there are more than 900,000. In contrast to both New York and Vienna, HDB encourages public housing residents to purchase their apartments. Nine out of ten HDB residents own their homes. The 50,000 rental units are, according to the HDB website, 'for the truly needy who have no other viable housing options.'" [1]

So yes, people want to live in dense cities. It does NOT automatically follow that they will have to rent. This is a policy choice.

[1] https://charterforcompassion.org/shareable-community-ideas/p...

"Hellscapes" is uncalled for. Many people like living in single family homes. The goal of housing should not be to enforce a single cookie cutter configuration on everybody. It should be to enable a free market in housing so that all of the different preferences people have for housing can have a reasonable chance of being met. I agree zoning laws should not favor single family homes to the detriment of other types, but equally they should not disfavor single family homes.

This can easily go too far in the other direction though, carving up a single family sized living space into 5 tiny 400 sqft apartments. There have to be incentives for mixed sized living spaces.

And yet there are plenty of single family homes and 2500+ sqft apartments if you want that. Just in the USA, if you want to live small - the government forcibly tells you that you’re not welcome here.

To me, it's a scenario of pick your poison - continue to be unaffordable because society is not willing to accept the consequences of its failures, or eat the consequences for a brighter future. In cities like SF, I don't see a world where it will ever get affordable if they insist that everyone needs to live in 1000+ sqft apartments, unless you plan to pack it to the gills with ultra-tall skyscrapers (never happening) or it becomes so undesirable to live there that people just stop moving there (unlikely, but given the rampant human rights violations it commits everyday to its denizens... well maybe that's the most likely scenario).

Aside, Americans don't know what small apartments even mean. The presence of super tiny Tokyo apartments is a great thing IMO, it means that people can still live centrally even if they aren't rich. I think a lot of people would happily accept a well-designed 200 sqft apartment over a 2-hour commute, if society gave them that option, since Tokyo residents do that en masse everyday.

Have you somehow inherited into a rent-controlled apartment still paying the same $5 rent from 1800?

Yes most of the city is rent controlled, this is a ten year old rental contract. Rent is about 600€ and apartment I estimate would be 500-600k. Could also be more though, I'm not exactly up to date.

How many could afford to buy though?

That said, renting in the short term is still something people will want to do. Some people will even want to do it longer term, if they want no responsibilities at all for repair and upkeep or freedom to leave with no strings attached at the end of the lease.

The number of people that end up never owning or wanting to own a home is likely small. But there is a very real case for non-ownership depending on what stage of life people are in and how they want to live their lives.

For someone moving every 6-12 months, spending a month or even two per year on buying properties and ensuring the previous owners aren't hiding issues isn't worth it. If a landlord hides something this type of tenant will only have to deal with it for a year at most, but if a seller hid something they would lose a lot of money on the move.

Moving every 6-12 months isn't the default, but it's relatively common for college students and recent graduates who haven't established roots yet. Next year it's a new city for a different job or a different school. For example, for many fields in the US going to the same university for grad and undergrad is highly discouraged.

(Not disagreeing with any of your other points.)

I think there's nothing wrong with renting, and for folks who just want shelter with a known cost up-front, it's a great solution. The problem is rental costs that creep up and up and up and housing policies that reward the haves (of housing) but indirectly penalize the have-nots (renters) because they miss out on massive tax writeoffs.

I don't have a paper to link to, but reading all the housing threads on HN for years there are always many people who sing the praises of renting for all kinds of reasons that make sense to them.

https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_articl...

And then in Singapore they have very high home ownership rates, so we could also be dramatically reducing the number of people who actually need to rent, reducing the need for private investment:

https://charterforcompassion.org/shareable-community-ideas/p...

Plus your single example of being satisfied with your landlord is not evidence that we should accept landlords across the board. My own landlord sucks at repairing things that need repair, and I find it very frustrating.

https://charterforcompassion.org/shareable-community-ideas/p...

Owning a home, even if its value is deprecating, is fundamentally still more attractive than renting. You get to recoup at least some of your investment, and you don't have property management invading your personal life.

Most people simply can't afford to buy homes in the first place.

Making ownership more accessible would attract a lot of prospective buyers, and getting rid of the landlord role and land investment would likely have that effect.

Investors buy around 10-20% (depending on quarter) of all new properties (and likely because they paid to build most of that share).

That's a far cry from 100%.

A tax was established, yes, but was it reasonable to do so (was it reasonable to expect that it will do much) and did it do anything? It seems the answers are no to both those questions.

I think it's a good signaling tax though. (I'm 50-50 on the extra tax for foreign buyers. Ethically there shouldn't be any difference based on where one's passport is from, but practically of course there is.)

Anyway, the real problem is constrained supply. Vancouver is still a fucking suburb compared to dense cities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evYOhpjMql0

https://www.statista.com/statistics/960174/vacancy-rates-res...

https://www.cbre.nl/-/media/cbre/countrycanada/images/insigh...

https://vancouversun.com/business/real-estate/three-years-in...