Affordable housing is not rocket science nor a novel or hard problem to solve. IMO the root cause is that there's a serious issue with the sustainability of the US political system (and its fiat currency) in general.
I feel like people saying this don’t understand how radical Singapore’s housing solution is. It starts with the government repossessing most of the land in the city to develop housing. I think that’s alone is a non-starter pretty much anywhere in the United States.
It’s also far from perfect - I could for example talk about how construction in Singapore is for the most part only viable because of cheap labor from surrounding country, the ticking time bomb that is the 99 year lease or the fact that prices have slowly but surely ticked up in recent years, far in excess of inflation.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/watch/homeless-singapore/why...
If people can only name Singapore, Tokyo and Vienna as examples where "housing was fixed", then it's proof that it hasn't been fixed when there's the other millions of cities worldwide left.
The first atomic bomb was hard, because it wasn't known if it was even possible. The second one was still really hard, but once the Americans proved it was possible, everyone else knew it was possible.
Civilizations, human settlements, people's homes and communities aren't fungible commodity widgets solvable and movable through copy-paste solutions like technical challenges, no matter how much HN insists every world challenge from housing to world peace, is as easily solvable as those at their tech jobs.
Just because you can 1:1 reverse engineer a bomb design and have it work the same, doesn't mean you can just take a housing policy that worked in the demographic, geographical, historical and cultural context of one country and just drop it in another country with a completely different context and background, and expect it to just work the same.
This is the tech equivalent of: "well, it was working on my machine".
Can I ask which city lost 1 million people in 50 years?
Back to the point though, I didn't claim it's at all easy to solve the housing crisis everywhere in the world, but that there are cities without a housing crisis. However they solved it won't be directly applicable to cities on a different continent in a difference country with a totally different culture, zoning laws, building codes, and entrenched interests.
But it proves it's possible. "All" that has to happen is the right person with sufficient political capital to get it to happen. Such a leader or team doesn't exist in most places, unfortunately, but, again, the point is if there was such an individual, they're not trying to do the impossible, since it's been proven it's possible.
NB: there’s that whole discourse about “how are you all multi-millionaires when the pay for senator/representative is at most a few hundred thousand a year?”
Plus, if you move to a low-CoL area with a high-CoL job then you're not really solving housing, you're just moving your problem elsewhere onto other people making housing unaffordable for them. How many former cheap places to live have been gentrified into oblivion in a short amount of time?
The goal is to make housing affordable AND help preserve local communities and culture(even though that might be contradictory to a degree), not to keep gentrifying and uprooting them in a musical chairs style game and then wonder why communities are dying, family units are dying, birth rates plummet, family support networks are dying, mental illnesses are up, loneliness is up, etc.
The free market could work if housing was a depreciating asset like cars. Too many people in the west would be pissed off if that happened, though. It will come to some countries with collapsing demographics and that won’t be a pretty sight.
Except that's not how it happens. Demographics have been collapsing in many EU countries for a while now and prices have been going nowhere but up at rates beyond wage growth.
Internal migration from rural to urban, and external migration from war torn and impoverished nations also to urban centers, keep pushing demand up regardless of local reproduction numbers.
Sure, you can now buy cheap properties in some empty towns in the south of Italy for example, but to what end if there's no jobs there?
Watching South Korea very closely... for the next 20 years.
But you won't run out of external migrants due to wars, climate change and poverty who want to leave their countries and move to the western developed ones.
Those "communists" who came to power there didn't distribute the wealth to the people, but came to power to pocket it themselves by replacing the monarchies who had all the wealth and power previously to them, but still kept the folk enslaved at gunpoint. You basically switched one undemocratic oppressive regime with another and the average folk kept getting the short stick both times.
So be careful when you wish for major revolutions. Doesn't necessarily mean that with new management, things will always turn out better for you this time.
The beauty of this is that we can do terror and violence to the enemy by just existing peacefully, as queer people. The enemy is literally just that cowardly, we could say "boo, I exist" at them, and we don't have to kill anyone.
Automating things, making those automations queer inclusive, and maintaining control of the things that we automated, by making them open source, is how we ram that victory home.
Tada! Queer automated open source communism for the win. Now you either want to work for the revolution, are terrified of it like bonkers because I said queer as if I'm proud of it, or you have critical ideas about how to improve it! And that's exactly how a revolution should be!
Viva! We can be gay! We can do crimes! We can automate the things! And we can win!
Housing will get more expensive and the rich will keep getting richer, as per usual, while the politicians will keep making vague empty political promises about housing affordability when the election time comes.
I'm not holding my breath this will be solved ever in my lifetime, unless war or a violent revolution resets the monopoly board.