Investment into housing development, zoning fixes, market rate housing, co-ops, and a LVT is the solution.

You can’t be serious? Let’s review.

Investment into housing development

By who…? Come on, be honest, who do you think is going to do this 🤣

zoning fixes

That allow who to build more housing?

market rate housing

Is literally what the West has right now.

Co-Ops

We have these now.

and a LVT

This is a fine step. Most states have property taxes now that include the land that a rental sits on.

If you can’t pay for your own housing, your choices are either for the government to pay for it, or for the private sector to pay for it. In either event the entity that owns your house, that isn’t you, is your landlord. If you can’t pay for your own housing, and you don’t want the private sector or the government to provide it for you, then you’re homeless.

not to mention, many big developers aren’t paying cash to construct housing. they get a loan or establish a line of credit with or brokered via investors/banks/funds. the first rule of doing anything under capitalism is to use somebody else’s money to do it, and all those loans drawing on lines of credit ultimately leads back to the central bank anyway.

it’s a massive shell game to obscure the fact that workers do all the work to create the products and services and then have to pay their shitty wages right back to access the very things they create, just so maybe 2-3 million megarich assholes can roll around in piles of money and make an income for doing literally nothing.

landlords are among the most nakedly parasitic sectors of society, and even then we still get bootlicking bozos pretending they “provide” housing or are somehow responsible for the community infrastructure that makes living in the place where the house exists desirable.

Food is also a basic human need, and markets seem to work well-enough for that. The core difference is that, while we have an extreme abundance of food to the point of waste, cities have been underbuilding housing for decades and there are far more people wanting to move to them than available housing units, so only the richest people get the housing. This puts a lot of positive pressure on housing prices

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You can rent from someone else. That’s actually easier than moving cities, states, or countries.

hmmm

Western countries already provide resources for our less fortunate friends and neighbors. But we don’t use the police power of the state to force those resources on people that don’t want them. We also don’t round them up and force them to fight for our Moscovi overlords that are just a itsy-bitsy more equal than the rest of us. Hmmmm

Well, then tell the government to come clean my gutter.

Exactly the answer I was expecting. People don’t buy things, credit cards do.

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I used to be a bourgeois land owner, but then I took an arrow to the knee.

Did you see that poor person? Filthy creatures.

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I argued that the solution is both, not one or the other. You provided me an example of an extreme in the other direction. I also think libertarianism and anarchy does not work. Please re-read my comment.

I think the solution lies somewhere between government and markets.

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:

A system of state and collective farms, known as sovkhozes and kolkhozes, respectively, placed the rural population in a system intended to be unprecedentedly productive and fair but which turned out to be chronically inefficient and lacking in fairness… However, Marxist–Leninist ideology did not allow for any substantial amount of market mechanism to coexist alongside central planning, so the private plot fraction of Soviet agriculture, which was its most productive, remained confined to a limited role. Throughout its later decades the Soviet Union never stopped using substantial portions of the precious metals mined each year in Siberia to pay for grain imports, which has been taken by various authors as an economic indicator showing that the country’s agriculture was never as successful as it ought to have been.

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).

abolition of single-family zoning

I disagree, we should just make it less attractive. This can happen in a few ways:

• improve mass transit, and encourage higher density along transit arteries
• make vehicular traffic less convenient by routing it around city centers instead of through - i.e. encourages mass transit use
• increase property tax and reduce sales tax - basically encourage using less space and using more services (i.e. rely on the local shop, not your own food storage room)

And so on. The benefits here are varied, such as:

• less traffic in city centers
• more green space, since the space isn’t occupied by as many SFH
• less road maintenance because you need fewer roads
• healthier people since using a bicycle or walking would be more convenient than driving

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.

You know, so long as we can agree that lack of supply is the core issue, the rest of all that is really just details haha. I’m not hugely confident of public housing’s track record in the US (though there’s obviously a lot that went into that), but whether it’s new public housing or just loosening zoning and allowing the market to actually meet demand, I don’t really care so long as there are units.

If you don’t think that housing has to be paid for, via any number of reasonable means, then you’re explicitly arguing that you deserve the labor of others. That’s called stealing. And slavery.

If you want to have a reasonable conversation, tell us how you think the workers that produce the materials and build the housing should be paid. The only pathetic thing is when people refuse to answer this question.

The average person is not a landlord

To use it for a business

This is wealth extraction

Or enjoyment

So you’re okay with some rich person owning acreage as long as it’s for their own enjoyment but not for a normal dude who has an investment property and is holding out for a renter that will adequately cover his costs and generate some profit?

For doing dick all

Yeah because they just plucked the property off of a tree… people often work years and years to get enough for a property investment and it can take 30 years to pay it off. Throughout all that time they are responsible for maintenance, insurance and a litany of other things to keep it from falling into disrepair.

So, so many reasons…

At the individual level drugs are a HUGE reaaon, mental illness, poor care for veterans etc Although there is SOME government housing and charitable housing for people that need it.

At a macro level there is money printing, endless war, corporate welfare, cronyism etc

Let’s face it though we could probably house everyone in Europe within South Dakota alone. Not to mention most homeless people are in extremely expensive areas like LA, Austin, Seattle and New York.

Passing an ill-conceived law that will have unintended consequences should be way, way low on the list of ways to lower housing prices. Especially since it’s highly likely it won’t be enforced properly.

You forget that for one to acquire said property one must first “exploit” one’s self. What I do with the earnings from my exploitation is my business.