(for the people who are fortunate enough to "have a venture" goes unsaid - the rest will be left poor, and they deserve it, for they weren't good / useful enough)
There is absolutely an argument to be made here about regulatory capture with respect to zoning laws, parking minimums, etc making building dense housing impossible. The parent comment started fine and then devolved into typical libertarian drivel about how if we just remove ALL regulations to business, this will definitely get resolved.
How can there be regulations to remove if it's unregulated? There are hundreds of thousands of regulations.
The parent comment looks at regulations on home building (zoning, etc) that are harmful, and extrapolates from that that all regulations are harmful and that the root cause of inequality is regulation preventing poor people from starting venture businesses. Because everyone knows that the startup world is definitely not inequitable at all, where some people walk away with hundreds of millions and others lose everything.
I don't think this is necessarily the case either. In the cases where there are harmful regulations, the answer isn't "more regulations". You might well say "incorrectly regulated", and put the blame where it belongs: on the people writing the regulations.
I'm not arguing that removing regulations will solve it, but it is possible to have an island of misery in the middle of two more pleasant extremes. Meaning that both more and less regulation would make the problem better, just in different ways.
To your point, you can't simply ridicule the solution you don't like and call that an argument.
There is a decent argument to be made that I would agree with that regulatory capture on home building is a serious problem. But that's not the argument that was made, instead the parent comment went on to claim that the actual problem is "freeloaders" and all that government regulation preventing the few worthy people from getting off the ground.
Where on Earth with a housing crisis is "unregulated capitalism"? It can take years simply to get development approval in Australia. If it's anything more than a single family dwelling get ready for a long lengthy process with hundreds of submissions, some even from suburbs over demanding it doesn't get built.
The entire system has been captured by vested interests who know how to drive their own unproductive asset prices up at the expense of society.
But I'd be 100% for us to give everyone housing if and only if we stop incentivizing the unproductive to multiply or letting in the whole world. Sure take care of the suffering, the orphans, the disabled etc. But don't go around paying people to multiply as if they're a cattle herd, it's demeaning and makes people's value trend to zero.
After it trends to zero we then turn around and complain how the "capitalists did it".
So you’re saying regulations are blocking new home construction. Got it.
What you describe is exactly what people mean when they say you “can’t build housing.” In reality you kind of can but only a few homes and only at the very high end. You can only build at the high end because of density limits and zoning and also because complicated regulations and battles with NIMBYs increase costs. When the cost to build is high only big luxury homes can be profitable. Lower margin per unit affordable homes and apartments can’t be funded.
> So you’re saying regulations are blocking new home construction. Got it.
Oh come on, new home construction is doing just fine ... but the homes are 5600 sq ft, $2+ million and 30-40 minute drive from city centre. And it's not regulation requiring it, developers prefer to build condos and monster homes because the ROI is much higher. Regulation is allowing it.
> What you describe is exactly what people mean when they say you “can’t build housing.” In reality you kind of can but only a few homes and only at the very high end.
New housing starts in the US[1] have climbed steadily for the past 10 years until inflation and interest rates in 2022 caused it to drop.
What you are saying is not happening. Maybe some housing development you wanted to happen got blocked, but we ARE building new housing and when we do stop ... it's not regulation that stopped it.
[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/housing-starts
Whenever a dense block of housing is proposed, people abuse zoning regulations here to shut it down. They add on tons of extra costs (mandatory parking etc) and then complain about how much the houses cost.
Go look at your city and see if it's actually legal to build a new mid rise apartment in the city center. I'm guessing, if it's anything like every city I've ever lived in, it's not.
We might just be disagreeing on terminology, there is a difference, in my mind, between regulations that require something bad to happen and regulations that ALLOW something bad to happen. If the regulations ALLOW something bad to happen that's a "lack of regulation"
> Go look at your city and see if it's actually legal to build a new mid rise apartment in the city center.
This might be a US vs. Canada thing ... we are building mid-rise and high-rise in multiple cities around me right now: Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo, Cambridge, Hamilton, Burlington.
What we are NOT building is a lot of apartments. Developers want to build and flip if they are allowed to.
This is good, but even at the peak in 2022 housing starts were lower than they were 20 years ago. Given that the population has grown significantly since then, housing starts per capita effectively never recovered from the 2008 recession.
The point is, you can be frustrated about zoning laws being abused for protectionism by people who want to increase the value of their asset by limiting what can be done by their neighbors, and not immediately go off and claim the actual problem is that people are freeloading off the government and that regulation is keeping the "few people" who want to work from rising to the top.
In the past decade I've seen a ton of young labourers who just do seasonal work and then spend the rest of the year backpacking or living in a cheap country Asia. These are talented and very hard workers, but they have little chance to make a life for themselves in the country they grew up in.
They will loose money if they stay and work the whole year, because of the cost of living, and the progressive taxes, not to mention that all-year employment is usually the 9-5 with no overtime. Better to make a quick buck working hard in the season and then go travel and have a much higher quality of life for much less expenses. You'd be dumb not to do it.
The people who have a chance of owning a home are either those whose parents help them financially or those who manage to get a government or corporate full time job that the bankman likes. The rest are completely screwed, and have been for decades.
No, we really haven't been. It doesn't seem to be well appreciated just how deeply housing construction collapsed at the end of the 2000's and has only recently returned to something approximating the long-term averages. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST
However, there's a still a whole lot of deficit from the decade of underproduction to make up for in that sense.
As you sort of get at - housing production "where the jobs are" has been far shakier. Many of the metro areas that did the best with job creation in the previous decade were among the worst with housing creation. SV, Boston, NYC, etc.
I really need to emphasis an aspect of this for anyone else reading: Wage theft is larger (in dollars) than the next biggest type of theft (robberies) by around 300%.(https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021/) Its not even close. Corporations are literally the biggest thieves in America by a tremendous margin.
> The problem is government regulation. In some places, it's almost impossible to build new houses due to regulations.
Regulation yes, but it's not the lack of building; we're building like crazy all over North America. Many new homes are "lost" and become second or third homes for the wealthy or airbnb rentals. Regulations are not building for high capacity, preferring to sprawl and build monster homes that house few, wealthier people. Regulations are preferring condos to low income rentals.
> I think we have a situation where part of the population is literally voting to appropriate wealth from another part of the population.
Yep, but unintentionally. Governments are cutting taxes on the wealthy while transferring remaining tax money to their investments in the form of corporate welfare.
> Voting for more immigration which drives up demand for houses and voting for more regulations which constrain the supply of housing.
One of the parties in the US and a couple in Canada are literally running on "Immigration is bad" platforms. People aren't voting for immigration, they are getting immigration despite how they are voting.
> t the same time, those people who do not own a house are wising up to the scheme and so they increasingly refuse to work or provide value to society. Instead, they resort to financial schemes, illegal activity, freeloading government benefits; they've checked out from the system.
Ah yes, the welfare queen rant. People aren't "refusing to work", many are sick (physically and/or mentally) and/or homeless and can't take on jobs, not because they are lazy but because no one hires someone who smells like they haven't showered in a month. Companies are the ones resorting to financial schemes and illegal activity; wage theft and union busting is big business. Companies are freeloading FAR more than sick people.
People have "checked out from the system" because the system has abandoned them. When homes are $1M or more, there is no point working a second or harder job in order to afford a home, for many people owning a home is now forever out of reach.
> It seems that we are headed for an economic and political disaster.
We are and the biggest part of the problem is people who have fallen for the "it's big government and poor people who are robbing you blind" story.