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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".
Finland only has approximately 1000 willfully homeless people. I'd call that solving the crisis.
As a Finn, please stop talking about us as some kind of utopia. We haven't solved shit and our government is infested with fascists. I'm preeetty sure there are a lot more than that out there, unless a quarter of those 1000 happen to be around my morning commute.
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?
one of the main reasons people are against state housing is because people with the wrong skin color might get it
What specific policies should I be demanding of our politicians to make housing affordable again?
In my own Portugal, which is a very turistic country and also towards the bottom of the GDP-per-capita scale in the EU, things that would likely work very well would also be:
Portugal currently has a massive house inflation problem (extra massive, because of how low average incomes are here) and a lot of it has to do with residential housing being removed from the housing market and turned into short term turist lets (for example, over 10% of housing in Lisbon has been turned into AirBnB lets) and foreign investors (not just big companies but also individuals, such as well off pensioneers from places like France) pulling prices up by being far less price sensitive than the locals as they're buying residential housing as investments having far more money available than the average Portuguese.
Having lived in both Britain and Portugal during housing bubbles, what I've observed was that the politicians themselves purposefully inflate those bubbles, partly because they themselves are part of the upper middle class or even above (especially in the UK) who can afford to and have Realestate "investments" and hence stand to gain personally (as do their mates) from Realestate prices going up and partly because the way Official GDP (which is supposedly the Real GDP, which has Inflation effects removed) is calculated nowadays means that house price inflation appears as GDP "growth" since the effects of house price increases come in via the "inputted rent" mechanism but the Inflation Indexes used to create that GDP do not include house price inflation, so by sacrificing the lives of many if not most people in the country (especially the young, for example the average age for them to leave their parent's home in Portugal is now above 34 years old and at this point half of all University graduates leave the country as soon as they graduate) they both enrich themselves and can harp in the news all about how they made the GDP go up.
All this has knock on effects on the rest of the Economy, from the braindrain as highly educated young adults leave and the even faster population aging as people can't afford to have kids, to shops closing because most people have less money left over after paying rent or mortgage so spend less, plus the commercial realestate market is also in a bubble so shops too suffer from higher rents. However all this is slow to fully manifest itself plus those who bought their houses before when they were cheaper don't feel directly like the rest, and they generally don't really mentally link the more visible effects (such as more and more empty storefronts) to realestate inflation, much less do more complex analysis of predictable effects, such as how the braindrain and fall in birthrates will impact their pensions in a decade or two.
Austria has, with widespread high quality public housing.
There are some waitlists and whatnot still, but arguably the bigger impact is that the increased housing supply has kept private rents very affordable too.
the increased housing supply has kept private rents very affordable too.
This is very good.
Do you know if Austria had an Ireland-style house price problem before they did this (ie. would it halt the crisis in Ireland now), or is it more that it just prevented the crisis we see in surrounding countries from happening in Austria in the first place?
They've been building big public housing since the 1920s. I live next to a lot of it and it's quite high quality and really pleasant.
Lots of cities/countries has massive public housing (the UK being a great example post WW2) but Vienna is more of an exception in that they didn't follow the trend in the 70s-90s of privatization and stopping investment (although it did slow down at one point).
They were the same way about their tram system, where they kept it rather than ripping it out like most places. Now everyone else wishes they so had a tram network or is trying to rebuild one.
That being said, rents are rising here too, but they are much more reasonable to begin with. I was living in London previously, and now we spend about 30-40% less for a place over twice the size and in a nicer location. Plus finding a place was muuuuuch easier, since it's noticeably less competitive.
Vienna has 50% public housing and as a result basically no homeless population.
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.
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)
Japan has.
Japan is an outlier for numerous reasons, the biggest of which is that housing value there decreases over time (without going into the causes, the result is a feedback loop where housing isn't built to last because it's a poor long-term investment, so it depreciates like other semi-short-lived products, such as cars). This isn't something the government planned, it came about naturally. So I wouldn't say they've "solved" housing so much as their situation has made it a non-issue.
Japan also has longtime low population growth due to a mixture of nationalist anti-immigration and just generally low birthrates. So with the passage of time, less and less older homes will be in use.
This is both false and true. Japan has a few things happening that are keeping rates lower, but the primary thing keeping costs low in Japan is the fact that the units are tiny. I'm not talking a little on the small side, I'm talking 200 square feet or less per person in a family home. No yards either.
If you compare Japan to the dwelling sizes of other nations, it's just as bad or worse per square foot.
The end goal for solving housing should not be to make the rooms as small as possible. Especially in countries where land space isn't the limiting factor.
I mean there are a ton of efficiencies to be gained with using communal resources.
Why can’t a bunch of people share a park rather than needing their own back yard?
Not saying it shouldn’t be an option, but the American obsession with detached housing at the cost of higher density housing is a major contributor to insane housing costs.
By making the rooms smaller you're just kicking the can down the road. Eventually the price inflation will catch up and even those shoeboxes will cost a fortune.
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.
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.
Would the ruling class want this problem solved if it's the only commodity that can't be produced?
I think China is doing something funky, but it's hard to get reliable information about that country
Agreed. We are sorely missing an honest and reliable source of news about China.
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.
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).
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.
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...
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
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.
Look at places in the U.S. who have built a lot more housing -- rents and housing prices have gone down.