So there’s a ton of countries that I’ve heard have had truly unaffordable housing for decades, like:
- The UK
- Ireland
- The Netherlands
And I’ve heard of a ton of countries where the cost of houses was until recently quite affordable where it’s also started getting worse:
- Germany
- Poland
- Czechia
- Hungary
- The US
- Australia
- Canada
- And I’m sure plenty others
- It seems to be a pan-Western bloc thing. Is the cause in all these countries the same?
- We’ve heard of success stories in cities like Vienna where much of the housing stock is municipally owned – but those cities have had it that way for decades. Would their system alleviate the current crisis if established in the aforementioned countries?
- What specific policies should I be demanding of our politicians to make housing affordable again? Is there any silver bullet? Has any country demonstrably managed to reverse this crisis yet?
Finland only has approximately 1000 willfully homeless people. I’d call that solving the crisis.
They also have a relatively small monocultural population and really cold winters.
True, but they could just decide to ignore homeless people like most of the US and other capitalist countries have, but they didn’t.
If they did ignore it, by spring there would be less homelessness.
How does having a monocultural population make housing easier?
That’s good to hear, although it’s kinda beyond the scope of my question. I’m asking more about how to stop prices rising when they’ve suddenly started quickly rising and people don’t know why.
I was impressed with Singapore when i was there a while back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_and_Development_Board
Yea, the technique of the government simply owning all the land and doing all the development does work. It just can’t really be applied to any western country without a massive revolt when they confiscate all the land from private owners. The government could never afford to pay for all of it, so it would have to be seized without payment.
Downtown Los Angeles has a high rise that was abandoned by the owner/builder. It’s covered in graffiti. They could start there.
Every time I see it i die a little inside
You don’t need to seize it, just tax it enough that land ownership is no longer profitable
I’ve advocated for LVT in the last couple of weeks even.
Also, hasn’t it been demonstrated that the government directly deciding the allocation of resources leads to massively clumsy solutions? I’m surprised it hasn’t impeded Singapore’s renowned efficiency.
Some governments can do it for some industries.
Public healthcare in most developed countries is generally pretty decent, though obviously not without flaws the allocation is clearly better for society than the US private healthcare system.
For allocation of food, it’s pretty shit. Too many people want too many different things in that scenario and it has never really worked in practice.
True. Although I was refering more to the allocation of commodities (food, land) than of services
How could they be coaxed to similary abandon their property like that? What current incentives exist that prevent them from having to do that particular needful?
They couldn’t. The only way this happens is if ownership rates drop well below half the population and renters vote in a political party that can wrest control back from land owners.
Fascinating. I didn’t expect a country known for neoliberalism like Singapore to have fully nationalised land ownership (haven’t read the whole wiki article admittedly)
What specific policies should I be demanding of our politicians to make housing affordable again?
The answer is Georgism combined with no zoning, but people aren’t ready to hear about that yet.
By Georgism I mean a very high tax (80+%) on the unimproved value of land. It prevents land speculation and returns the value of the land to the public. Houses would be incredibly cheap, because you couldn’t make money by merely owning land. The only reason to own a house would be to live in it, or to provide a true service for people who would actually prefer to rent.
This guy sees the cat
I suppose it depends on how you’d define “solved”. If we’re talking about basically eliminating homelessness, Cuba has done immense work in that regard. Say what you will about the Cuban government, but Cuba has a near-zero homeless population because the government has built a ton of housing and caps rent at 10% of individual income in that state-owned housing. Cuba is also a country with a tradition of multi-generational extended family homes, so there’s a greater chance that you’d be able to move in with a family member if you fell on hard times. Home ownership rate is around 85% compared to 65% in the US. All of this is nothing new, though, so it’s hard to say if it’s the answer to current issues of housing that’s largely driven by corporate greed, but it certainly sounds like it couldn’t hurt. Granted, I’ve seen people give examples of homes that are rather small and spartan, where the walls are made of bare cinderblock and generally aren’t very pretty, but that’s way better than being homeless even if some of the housing isn’t as nice as others. I’ve also examples of state-owned housing lived in by the same kinds of people, but are really quite nice as well. Whether the US government would ever do this, though, seems unlikely. Not at the scale we’d need and not for so cheap, anyway, especially not with Trump coming to office. I can’t really speak for the governments of other countries, however, and I’m no expert on Cuba either, so I could have gotten some things wrong. The US embargo to Cuba since the 90s also means that Cuba has had a more difficult time procuring building materials for the low-cost housing that’s helped so many, which has led to an increase in size and number for those extended family homes over the years.
Yeah. I was in Cuba recently. A lot of poverty but very safe (in Havana at least, where I was. Can’t speak to the rest but I’m told it’s similar). Nobody sleeping in the streets. People were fed, though with very limited choices and portion.
Then you look at some cities in the USA, the richest country on earth and there’s people living in the streets, begging for food. You feel unsafe waiting down the street. Tons of desperation and even those with housing feel like they’re walking a tightrope.
Not saying Cuba’s situation is “better”, it’s definitely nuanced though. And we should really see what Cuba could do if the US would stop trying to cripple it as it has for to many decades. It’s unjustifiable and disgusting.
🇨🇺♥️
You make a very important point about life which I realized recently: that things are not necessarily better/worse, just ‘different’.
China also has a massive homelessness problem, so it’s definitely not a “pan-Western bloc” thing. This is despite China executing every landlord and building enough homes, turns out people get assigned to a home in a region where they don’t actually live or work…
I live in the United States, and as I understand it the housing crisis is caused by several factors.
-
The lowest level of zoning is typically residential single family. This means small scale owners and developers cannot increase supply by taking a house and adding to it. Either by adding extensions, subletting, or even building a mini-apartment building. To add to this, US regulations require apartment units to have access to 2 staircases, in the event of a fire. This is good for safety, but greatly restricts style of apartments to hotel styles, and increases costs, so smaller apartments don’t make as much sense. This requirement should be able to be waved in the case of fire resistant building materials.
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Speculative land owning. Some property owners simply sit on properties in developing areas, waiting for its price to increase, and since tax is based on the value of the total property (land+building), a decaying building reduces the cost of owning that land. To fix this, we should be taxing the value of the land instead, punishing speculators, while incentivising people to improve their land (by building housing).
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Overuse of cars. Even when places want to expand housing, the complete and utter reliance on cars as transportation in the US leads to backlash for increasing housing, as the perception is that it will increase traffic. To combat this cities need to rethink their transportation strategies to radically increase things like bus and bike lanes. Even when cities do have buses, the strategy funded by the federal government is abysmal. For example instead of running buses that can hold 15 passengers and run every 15 mins, cities will instead run buses that can hold 50 people every hour, and so these buses run mostly empty with 2-3 passengers.
The main policy changes that we need are less restrictive zoning, tax speculators, and diversify urban transport. But resistance is heavy, many politicians themselves are land holders and do not want to implement these changes, or to anger those that do. Landholders generally have more political voice, power, and wealth.
By “resistance” you mean “rich people and their money, along with the laws that have kept them rich”
While yes, the rich are the main problem, the bulk of resistance is the middle class. They don’t want to see the value of their property go down, or see increased traffic. Even though the suggested policy changes would help them too! The brainwashing is strong among people, not just the rich.
It’s also hard, because to make meaningful changes, you need progress in at least 2 of these areas at the same time, which means you need to get people and politicians to agree on how to fix the problem!
I see many people blaming corporate ownership as a problem, and in our current system is it is. But implementing my proposed changes would make it unpalatable for exploitive corporations, without needing to explicitly ban them!
Agreed, most of us are idiots who don’t want to create change if it means even the tiniest amount of momentary inconvenience.
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How Britain (Almost) Solved the Housing Crisis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZpLiJdIGbs so we didn’t and then we did and then we didn’t
Ooh I watched this when it was released. So essentially vast municipal ownership. Definitely something I can get behind but it takes decades.
Society doesn’t change overnight
Crises are going to continue being crises as long as the wealth inequality of people worldwide continues increasing.
Think of it like this. There’s a finite amount of money in the world. Right?
The wealth of billionaires has doubled in the last few years. That money came from somewhere. Still with me?
Ok, so… if the wealth of the wealthiest people has doubled, that amount of money they gained was previously held by the less wealthy, but it has now been consolidated into the wealthier people’s bank accounts.
So. How do we solve the housing crisis (or any crisis)? Step 1 has to be to undo the consolidation of wealth. Solving crises without addressing the consolidation of wealth is a pipe dream.
Feel free to hunt for legal mechanisms for achieving that. But I think you’ll find there are institutions and propaganda preventing those mechanisms from being effective.
Vienna is not as good a situation as it may look. Their public housing stock is only great if you can’t get into it. There are waitlists years long, and you have to live in the city already to be eligible to get on the waitlist. Private housing is still expensive.
Yes, USSR.
I wonder what the USSR would look like today if it still existed. Probably not good.
It’d look exactly like Russia but bigger. Same corruption, same authoritarianism, same human rights abuse, same power imbalance etc.
Better than Putin Russia, that for sure.
I think it would look like “better EU”, but EU itself would be better than in our timeline.
EDIT: I think alternative timeline EU would be even better than our timeline because it would have example of union, that focuses on quality of life instead of “number must go up”. Also it is worth noting, that I said this assuming USSR would either survive as it was politically in 1991 or reborn as result of parlament winning in October of 1993.
EDIT2: Also I said it with assumption that USSR would learn, that feeding people to military machine is bad for everything.
I think the EU could easily be far more leftist if that’s who won in the national + EP elections. I think its constitutional design is relatively apolitical
I think its constitutional design is relatively apolitical
Relatively as long as we are talking about variations of parlamentary republic or other system without Great Leader. For example we can compare EU and USA of our timeline: one has functioning healthcare, public transport and labour laws, while other has system, that allows only for two right-wing parties to exist, both of which compete for sucking corporate dicks more. All this while election of Great Leader takes all attention from parlamentary and local elections.
And as you have said “if that’s who won in the national + EP elections”. Having oligarchy neigbour instead of leftist one makes domestic oligarchs more likely to win.
People are not ready to hear this, but the problem is that “Housing” is being treated as a market, not a basic human right. As long as governments are full of homeowners who will lose a lot of money should the house prices go down as a result of abundance, the problem will keep getting worse.
In most countries, the middle class is seduced into thinking of buying a house as an “investment”.
I’ve always read that Japan seems to always be ahead of this issue due to its laws.
It’s mostly supply and demand. In Tokyo and Osaka / satellite cities, prices are going up, everywhere else they are dirt cheap.
However, in urban areas prices still aren’t as crazy unaffordable as you may think, because Japan has a very narrow wage gap (everyone in Japan thinks they are middle class, and their not wrong compared to other countries).
Another thing that makes Japan different to other housing markets, and is affected by the laws, is earthquake concerns. What other countries would call ‘established’ dwellings, they call ‘second hand’. Laws are updated every ten years or so that mean newer dwellings are much safer than older ones. Knockdown/rebuild is so common that there is competitive prices, as there’s plenty of builders to choose from. The builders are also very efficient, and apart from safety law, regulations are low (you can build whatever you like, so long as it’s robust), so labour costs are much lower compared to other countries.
If you go on Suumo.jp you’ll find plenty of very affordable houses, even in good areas/good rail links, but it’s because they don’t expect anyone will live in the house as-is - the buyer will most likely “reform” it (massive rennovation) or replace.
The state of the Japanese housing market is due mostly to cultural/economic/low immigration. If you want a policy solution other high-income countries can use to solve housing issues, the state-capitalism solution of the Singapore HDB is the best model I’ve come across. Second would probably be Vienna’s focus on social housing.
Thank you kind stranger, that was a nice and interesting review!
Japan also has a population in decline.
Seems like an important enough factor to mention.
Home prices in (many) metro areas are riding steadily. Edit: some cities where the primary industry for the area is declining, this trend is going the other way
In many rural areas home prices have fallen dramatically due to a combination of migration to cities and overall declining population.
If this is a comment about homeless people, there are still plenty of homeless people all over Japan.
Look at places in the U.S. who have built a lot more housing – rents and housing prices have gone down.
- Relax/change zoning requirements
- Give subsidies to developers for affordable housing
There’s a bunch of available housing in my area, but it’s just super expensive. I guess building more might work. My only concern is I only see larger 3+ BR housing or shared housing behind built. The days is affordable 1 to 2 bedroom houses are over. If you want something smaller, you are stuck with condo and high HOAs. Personally, I think they should bring back trailer parks and force ownership to be local.
Trailer parks have the same problem as suburbs of being super low density. They should stack the trailers on top of each other to save space.
Edit: ok I guess what I’m suggesting are those builders’ prefabs
Not everyone wants to live in a trailer park.
Smaller housing would need to be subsidized because it costs a lot to build relative to what it could be sold for.
China has essentially zero homeless iirc. Most people own their homes
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340706113_Homelessness_and_the_Universal_Family_in_Chin
China has a roughly 20% migrant worker population living in notably unsanitary conditions who do not own their homes. This is a direct result of their economic policy.
They have a massive homeless population. It just looks different than in other parts of the world.
I will take your word for it for now but will definitely be doing sone research on this. I should know more about china than I do right now
This is why I linked a published academic paper on the matter. You don’t need to take my word for it.
I’ll be reading it when I am not drunk anymore, should have mentioned.
Enjoy ;-)
So do most people here in Czechia. We have had capitalism for 35 years and for the first 30 house prices were stable and affordable (with no large municipal sector). Something has happened within the last 5 years and I’d like to know if it’s the same cause as in the other countries and how it can be reversed.
Such is the path of decommunization. Most post-soviet countries have or will experience something similar as capitalists take the housing for profit.
I definitely do fear something like that happening. Still, how would you explain the 30 years under capitalism when it was working fine? Why didn’t the capitalists swoop in in year 1 (or 15)?
Capitalism hadn’t advanced towards late stage yet.
Your ideal time was always a transitory period. This end result is inevitable.
Even if you pass reforms now… that is only kicking the can into your children’s or grandchildren faces.
