this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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I live in a capitalist country and we fixed homelessness by building more houses
It's not always a question of the quantity of houses, but the affordability. Seeing rent being waaaay higher than mortgages were 30yrs ago is always shocking. The house i sold 15yrs ago for 600k is now worth 1.3m. And it would need a big renovation. This is sheer madness.
Building more housing makes the price go down
It should.
It doesn't in the U.S. At least, for the past decade or so
That’s because zoning laws are keeping new houses from being built and causing there to be not enough supply of housing.
Then how do you explain the fact that when you count up the single family, and multi family homes that have sat empty for at least 12 months, you end up with a number that is 72:1 times higher than the homeless population of the US?
We only build luxury housing, and that gets snapped up by investors, and left to sit empty and rot. Meanwhile we have about 1.5 million people that sleep outside, and get harassed by practically everyone.
Yes, this is another issue, with corporations and investors buying up properties as an incestmen. It needs to be stopped as well
How much supply is needed to bring the price down then?
While I agree that in general there is a problem with zoning laws making it all but illegal to build anything other than single family homes, markets work in such a way that the price is based on what people are "willing" to pay. Where a home is a fundamental necessity, this is already problematic. Nevermind the huge increase in access to money (the advent of mortgages and all of the policy surrounding them) driving up the demand side of the equation.
So when the options are: Homelessness (kind of illegal) Renting (very expensive) Buying (even more expensive)
Foregoing any participation in the housing market isn't really an option.
As a side note: the simple supply/demand model is from econ 101, and I really think it's unwise to make decisions based on first year university textbooks.
Of course, the supply of housing is not the only factor. Another is the investors buying up property which you mentioned, and the fact that people selling houses just know that they can get away with high pricing. Both of these need to be fixed, in addition to the low supply of housing.
There is a thing called real state bubble.
Great for the rich and investment firms, not so great for almost everyone else.
Really? It sounds like a bad thing then.
Nice comment, just wish it'd have something to do with my comment
What country?
Finland, it actually was mentioned earlier in the thread.
I am genuinely curious, I couldn't find what Communism did to Finland. There was the civil war between socialist and non- socialists, but this can't be blamed on one ideology over the other, the Soviets invaded southern Finland to "liberate" the "reds" in the south, but this also isn't able to be blamed on Communism, as it was the Soviets. And then Finland sided with the axis powers and attacked the Soviets, including the siege of Leningrad leading to mass suffering and starvation of "communists".
I do not come from Finland so it's hard for me to know much about the history outside of what I can read. I just pulled most of these facts from Wikipedia (a liberal western source), so if you are willing I would appreciate some insight.
Nothing, that's why the country works and it's the sole reason why Finland is the economical and progressive exception to rest of eastern europe. Had Finland been subjected to forms of fascism, such as communism, we too would have to battle for basic human rights (eg. trans rights are non-existant under communist regimes, and unfortunately that sentiment is still rooted in ex-block values) and economical and institutional downturns rest of the old communist block countries are now hard at work at dismantling. It's crazy how destructive one sick ideology can be to a region and it's people.
But yeah, we did - under capitalism - fix homelessness by literally giving housing to everyone who wanted housing.
Forms of Fascism such as Communism. Lmao. Also what Finland has done to eradicate homelessness would be decried as Socialism and Communism in the United States. I love that your Municipalities own housing and views it as a human right and not as a commodity. The free market didn't fix the housing crisis the government did.
Ok? If the definition of communism is whatever Americans decry as socialist/communist, then a whole lotta things are communist.
Your point being? That Finland isn't a capitalist country? That wide social safety nets can't exist within a capitalist society? Real Communism™ are the things capitalist countries do that end up being good, while somehow actual communist countries aren't real communist countries since they ended up shafted? Any other borderline psychotic conclusion you want me to jump to or is this all?