this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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for sure, there are many essential needs beyond housing and food. I cannot agree that it works well with food either, starving still exist even in "developed" countries. It looks you are trying to a patch something that really flawed. Unfortunately it is not a way. We should move away from profit oriented society and away from human exploitation.
You'd just swap profit for influence instead. Look at the USSR, they had issues feeding their population, yet the people in power largely got whatever they wanted.
See the famous trip Boris Yeltsin took to a Texas grocery store. At least in those days, capitalism handily beat communism in providing a variety of foods to the average person.
So the profit motive certainly has some benefits. It also has downsides, such as unequal Income distribution. But then, existing examples of communism/socialism also have similar problems.
So I think the discussion about economic system misses the mark. We can regulate capitalism to provide many of the benefits we want, so the discussion should be on what we actually want and what changes we need to make to get there. For housing, we could solve the problems we see in a number of ways, each with downsides, such as:
And so on. Switching the economic model comes with huge costs and I'm not convinced it's actually better than fixing what we have.
I cannot accept your argument since variety of brands for similar product in the store doesn't mean society can feed itself. It is wrong angle to see on the object. Since there is various of factors which could easily destroy such logic from quality of food to affordability (simple a lot of product in store, but people cannot buy it). Much better metric is satisfying the need, in our case in food. So in our case we should look at calories consumption and nutritional value. Look at cia document where conclusion is "American and Soviet citizens eat about the same amount of food each day but the Soviet diet may be more nutritious".
The conclusion is that Americans ate too much, meaning there's more food available than necessary, whereas Soviet citizens ate a better amount, but it consisted largely of less expensive foods like potatoes. Americans ate a lot more fish and meat (21% vs 8%), which is likely a marker for prosperity differences between average citizens. The difference was pretty small (~250 calories according to that document), so I'm not exactly sure what your point is.
In the USSR, we have a few examples of famine, such as Holodomor, and the US stepped in during the famines in the 1920s. Between those two periods, we see millions of deaths, somewhere between 5-10 million.
On the flipside, during the Great Depression in the US, few people starved and life expectancy likely rose. During this period, the US went through the Dust Bowl crisis, which doesn't seem to have resulted in starvation (though it did result in displacement).
So from what I can tell, the US had much more consistent food availability throughout even the worst of crises, whereas the Soviet system seemed to struggle. Granted, starvation wasn't really a thing after 1947, so the USSR seems to have at least met minimum expectations for food production. This is a decent Reddit thread on it, and the result is essentially that farmers don't like collectivization much at all, and sometimes that resulted in huge problems like food shortages, and the USSR often resorted to imports when production wasn't enough:
So basically, the USSR was dependent on food production in the west because its own production was often lacking. So not only did the US have more than enough food production for its own population, but it also had enough to help out the USSR (e.g. this massive grain deal).
Come now, that's far less entertaining than tribalistic shitfling on the Internet, and isn't that the real objective here?
Joking aside, a big solution that should absolutely be on that list is abolition of single-family zoning and a general reduction in the amount of red tape involved in building more housing. There are, and I am not kidding, multiple examples of middle-density housing being blocked because some local NIMBYs tried to have a laundromat protected as a historical landmark. In California, endless demands for environmental reviews can be weaponized such that the legal fees and wasted time make the financials for new housing fall through. And that's even assuming you can find land that isn't exclusively zoned for single-family homes. San Francisco has one of the worst housing markets in the country, and despite that, on 38% of its land, it is illegal to build housing that isn't single family homes. At the end of the day, if you have a million people looking for housing and only a third as many units available, you can either build more, or you can accept that only the richest third of them will get housing. One of those options is much more enticing if you're claiming to care about the poor.
I disagree, we should just make it less attractive. This can happen in a few ways:
And so on. The benefits here are varied, such as:
But as you noted, the above gets blocked by NIMBYs. But it is possible, as we can see in the Netherlands, which has largely reduced its vehicular traffic and improved the residential density. It wasn't always that way, but they made a big push for it and people now don't want to go back.
I totally agree that those are all good things, but I still see no real reason why the government has any business telling a homeowner who wants to split the building into a duplex that it's illegal, because reasons.
The political cost of actually abolishing SF zoning is definitely high though, and proposals to make SF homes less attractive are definitely more politically palatable.
Yup, it's really dumb. SF should have virtually no SFH-exclusive zoning since they're very much space constrained, they should have a lot more mixed zoning (i.e. shops at ground level, housing above).