As it is apparent worldwide - at least in the West - the market is also failing to house people efficiently and effectively. Hence: Public Housing.

Should not cost more than one third of the resident’s liquid income.

Start with university residences - build (or convert to) new in mass.

The market is not failing, the govt is failing by adding onerous regulation and giving into NIMBYism.

And the solution is more govt intervention?

For a train system, a non-state actor will have a hard time getting one of the ground (huge upfront costs, will often make a loss, cooperation of politics super important) and if they do … they will have a monopoly (which also sucks). So having transit publicly owned in some way makes a lot of sense.

But for housing, none of that is true. It’s being built (the amount built mostly depends on government approval, there is no shortage of capital investment), there is no monopoly… what is the problem that more public housing would solve?

The (admittedly outrageous) rent prices in Zürich come from a mismatch of demand and supply. And since Zürich has a lot of rich inhabitants, enough of them are willing to bid up the market rent prices to the current level.

Having a non-market solution for this might lead to cheaper rents, but introduces a lot of other losses and crucially also strangles the supply even more (look at what happened in Berlin when they introduced their moronic rent control law).

This does not follow. You could make it an argument that essential services should be paid enough to live close to work, which would satisfy the criteria that you've laid out.

The most you can conclude from what you've laid out is that something is wrong with the current system. Which, I think very few people would disagree with.

Expensive housing is a problem for everyone even the people who own their home

I feel like I misunderstood something here. I presume the police/firefighters were needed to live near the community because they might need to respond in an emergency. Or possibly for community relations for the police (I know some jurisdictions require you to live in the community you police, at least in the states). If I'm wrong in this assumption, please correct me and supply some more context.

It's not automatically clear why the situation you've laid out includes the additional groups you've listed.

Not really. Other than that you seem to be implying that the categories of people covered need to be able to live in the city, without stating that, and we've only only established this as a requirement for groups that need to respond in an emergency. Necessity only seems to dictate that said groups are present for the parts of their jobs that require them to be present. Commuting seems like a viable option, which should have a depressive effect on housing prices.

Fundamentally, cities with strict zoning laws tend to require commuters (most cities in the west post ~WWII or so). Some petty-tyrant always ends up on the city council and building grinds to a halt. Unless you also want to severely curtail zoning and building regulations, I don't think the proposed public housing is even actually a long-term solution. And if you do want to curtail those, I'd expect it to not be needed very much.

And commuting has a cost too, driving an hour or two each way is expensive

Expensive housing is driving up the cost of everything because, everyone in literally every job is having their wealth extracted by landlords or into buying homes

So yes, home prices means taxes are going way up because all services are now far more expensive to provide because wages need to go up because the col for workers is going up because the businesses they rely on need to pay higher wages and here we are in a vicious cycle

It really doesn’t matter how it’s solved in the long run, but it needed a to be solved

Which seems like a problem that would solve itself eventually. If people's quality of life gets too low, I'd expect a decent chunk of them to move, opening up housing for people who can't/won't move.

There's some downsides to that strategy, so the city may not want to go that route, but as someone in a low CoL area, I don't really have a say in the matter (nor should I, so long as people aren't asking me to subsidize high CoL areas).

In Denmark, the co-operative movement led unions to construct housing for their members. With the fall of unions, the housing organisations that remain now provide thousands of low-cost homes: they weren’t built for profit.

Co-operative housing still gets built at scale in Denmark, but rarely in the big cities; the private companies will outbid them because there is always a willing renter for luxury apartments.

I protested the capital city rent increase by moving out. I understand why students can’t.

One, social housing there is a very old concept, old and because of that, a significant portion of the population (>50%) lives in social housing, therefore because of how democracy works, they can vote themselves a great situation because they're the majority.

But if the amount of population in a city living in social housing is below 50% (most of Europe) then they don't have the democratic political leverage to vote themselves a better public housing situation, so social housing turns into a low quality charity for the poor and ends up turned into ghettos leading to a bad image of social housing leading to people to further voting even less in favor of social housing not wanting more ghettos.

Vienna, having the majority of it's citizens in social housing for a long time now has reached "escape velocity", that's why it works there but in no other EU cities who want to try it now, including in the rest of Austria where social housing is not the norm but more of a safety net for poor people and cities have even sold off a lot of their public housing to private investors in the 2008 crisis meaning replicating Vienna's success today would be impossible.

And secondly, unlike Zurich, Amsterdam, Berlin, etc., Vienna is not a tech hub, meaning it lacks international big wealthy companies with large offices of well paid workers from overseas, and neither is it a low-tax beach destination for wealthy digital nomads so there's not such a big pressure on the rental market from overseas workers with huge salaries pushing up rents and gentrifying everything.

That's the situation for rents. But the situation for buying a property flips on its head and makes Vienna one of the most expensive cities in Europe for buying your own property, far disconnected form average wages that almost nobody could afford to buy something.

But that’s not the reason for expensive rents in big cities.

It’s because many (rich) people want to live there … and due to physical and regulatory limits you can’t build more housing, even for piles of money it would be worth.

Biggest pain point in housing is the limited amounts of land and living space, not the building cost.

> what do you expect your government to do?

There are tonnes of things governments can do:

1. build more dense public housing

2. ban Airbnbs

3. ban private equity from turning the housing market in their private casino table

4. tax the hell out of empty apartments and poorly utilized land that's not for living or relevant economic productivity

5. incentivize remote work for white collar jobs so they don't all have to live in X city just to do things that could be done from anywhere else

Build public housing and only charge a reasonable fee for it.

I don’t know if at the time people protested against the foul smell of the Chicago river. But the government reversed its course to improve the life of its citizens.

Why shouldn’t governments similarly deal with the housing issue using the means they have at their disposal?

(in both cases: the construction of public infrastructure)

By ingreasing taxes it can make the private sector less competitive and redirect virtually all resources on public projects.

In capitalists states you could even argue that this is the only role of the state. Detecting failures in the market, first trying to fix them by light interventions, like law changes or incentives and if still not successful fixing them directly.