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- Hacker News
- A land value tax with citizen's dividend reaches all of the goals he is trying to hit here, without any of the very obvious drawbacks. Just do that instead.by ItsMonkk
- “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.” - F.A. Hayek
> What if we completely redesign housing: making it a universal right, while keeping market-like mechanisms for creating and improving it?
What follows is a list that basically says the State ultimately owns everything, but markets kind of exist insofar as it coincides with a goal of the State (universal housing). This is basically Fascism.
by jack_h - We've tried this in so many ways. Go look at any housing where the residents have no ownership stake and don't pay anything and tell me if you'd want your family living there.by SoftTalker
- The call for the right to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" in the declaration of independence is based on John Locke's attestation of the right to Life, Liberty, and Property.
If we want to actually treat property as a right, including housing, we need to give it the priority that we give other rights, like life and speech. If someone wants to build a 100 square foot house with a single power outlet and single-pane windows, they should be allowed to do so, because it's better to live in a shed than out in the rough.
by dlcarrier - I think it's fair to require, at least in incorporated/dense areas, some minimum standards for sanitation, fire safety, and other aspects that present a health hazard to neighbors who are living near enough to be affected.
Note that this is not "on-site parking minimums", "minimum lot sizes", "minimum front and side setbacks", etc. But, it is "indoor plumbing", "appropriate sewer or septic", and things like that that when done incorrectly present a present health hazard to neighbors.
You want to build 100 square feet and an outhouse on land you own out in the boonies? Be my guest. In the city? No.
by sokoloff - In the USA step one would be to somehow build like 30 million houses so that the 10% extra rule could be established. That is an immense undertaking. Totally doable but it will take more than one government administration so has effectively zero chance of success.by bradfa
- We already have a 10% rental vacancy rates in Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, (https://ksdata.ku.edu/ksdata/ksah/housing/4house1.pdf) despite some of those states having the fastest growing populations (https://www.visualcapitalist.com/us-population-growth-by-sta...), so if the remaining states adopted their approval process for building housing, we could get there without much difficulty.
That alone would probably be enough of a relief on housing that we wouldn't need to take any of the more drastic measures, and it effectively costs nothing fiscally to implement.
by dlcarrier - I feel like all sorts of problems flow from treating homes as fungible commodities. As “a house, not a home,” as it were. Independent of residents’ schools, neighbors, transportation, jobs, culture, churches, family compositions, duties to others, and spectacular variety of lifestyles.
One flavor of that ill is treating homes as financial investments, another flavor haunts social housing schemes over the years; this proposal is a different flavor of the same ill.
> Anyone can take an available plot, pay to build a house on it, and live there for life
So they can either pay an enormous amount to build their own one-off (but make a decision they’ll have to live with forever, no matter the changes in their future circumstances); or they can scrap over secondhand “free” housing stock via lottery? How is a plot created and made available in the first place? Since these don’t have homes on them, presumably they’re carved out of farmland way outside the exurbs, right? When is it 1/4-acre subdivisions, when is it larger or smaller?
I’d invite the author to bend a New Yorker’s ear about the pleasures of affordable housing lotteries… or about NYCHA living.
Speaking of which, how does this work as far as multi-family dwellings, and renewal? Or is the housing stock frozen in time at the moment these SFDs are built, save for the policed “maintenance”? What’s the penalty for somebody who doesn’t “maintain” to the cops’ standards—uprooted and then what? Moved to punitive housing, if they don’t have a few hundred thousand dollars to fund building a new house on an available plot?
by alwa - > Free use comes with responsibility: whoever occupies a home must keep it in excellent condition and cover its ongoing maintenance costs. If you can’t afford to properly maintain a particular home, you can’t occupy it
That’s likely to be the loophole: have high costs fir maintenance and boom, you’re creating a method to evict people.
Also, who defines what “excellent conditions” means? Some kind if HOA? And who’s checking? What happens when somebody fails at keeping a house in “excellent condition” ? Do they get evicted? Where do they go? If they couldn’t keep up with the previous house and are now burdened with the costs of moving somewhere else (maybe even in the same city) how can they keep up with maintenance of another house?
Yeah, once again… “sounds good, doesn’t work”.
by znpy - Agreed and then some.
It's a decent thought experiment, but I think the lesson would be why housing (and many social problems) are so difficult to solve. But, the original tweet seems to frame it more like, "Why haven't we done this already?!"
by overtone1000 - They said "I discussed with my family at the dinner table," but it looks more like "I discussed with my roommates after we got super high."by trevithick
- We should make structurally-sound one-thousand floor loosely-tapered pyramid-like megastructure buildings. This shape will make it structurally secure. The lower floors can be free, with the subsidization diminishing as the floors get higher. The higher floors can get progressively expensive. The higher floors literally pay for the lower floors. Sunlight can be transferred to the interior with optical cables, also downward from the very top. A significant portion of the internal volume will be non-residential space, with commercial or public value. The entire outer surface will be a sunlight and air collector that disperses the light and air throughout the interior. The pyramid should connect to itself and other pyramids via horizontal elevators. Vertical elevator requirements won't be brutally high if people can spend much of their time in the structure.by OutOfHere
- With a pyramid shaped building, the value of a location is more about whether or not it has windows then how high it is.by dlcarrier
- > The higher floors literally pay for the lower floors
This happens already. Lots of social housing exists, and it's paid for by wealthy people's taxes. It's like how economy class tickets on aeroplanes can be below cost because of the higher-tier ticket-holders' ticket prices.
- Who enforces "you must keep your house in good condition rules" that sounds like a lot of work to enforce. Wouldn't it be fun if a concrete company decides to bribe the government to make everyone replace their concrete every 5 years... This is why we have ownership and assign value to things in the first place.by jryan49
- “who gets the nicer plots” is probably the most important question. This proposal doesn’t actually change any of the structures that make some land more valuable than others. I’m guessing we’ll get more traction from making more places attractive places to live and work than we will by changing the rules around how land is acquired.
What he’s proposing is essentially feudalism but with money instead of connections.
I’m beginning to suspect that centralization consolidation of corporate structures are more of a causative factor for why land in cities is very expensive. Basically centralization results in small business closures, which reduces opportunity, which cuts the value of affected land. By contrast, if most products are produced by companies of only a few hundred employees, then every region has its own version of everything, and you now need a lot more surface area for the economy. More surface area means people can live more places.
In my mind it all comes back to stronger antitrust enforcement and more progressivism.
- > I’m beginning to suspect that centralization consolidation of corporate structures are more of a causative factor for why land in cities is very expensive.
The reason is that there are far more people coming in than there is room to keep up with demand, so dwellings are chopped up into smaller dwellings and rented out, and house prices rocket. Cities are only so big, and putting endless additional people in them can be great if you own property, but terrible if you don't.
- It's misregulation and boomerocracy eating their seed crop in societies where land is set up as an investment and most boomers put their life savings into real estate in the 80s/90s since the stock market was not properly accessible and the dot com bust scared the rest away from it.
Since the old boomers vote, are retired and thus have more free time to be political and are a large voting block, the democracies satisfy their short term needs since they need their votes to be a viable political party. Trump knows exactly what to do to fix it, but he knows it's completely politically unviable so he doesn't, and he states the entire logic in public speeches so it isn't a secret either.
Japan is pretty much where you want to be wrt to land. Free market land use, but national zoning regulations and a bunch of other things to prevent housing bubbles. Japan had their 'never again' real estate bubble in the 80s & 90s, so their boomers-in-power don't want real estate to be a speculative bubble and thus at least real estate is affordable even in Tokyo even with a near 0% interest rate for a very long time.
When the boomers die and millennials become the olds, they will probably implement the regulations to not allow real estate to be a bubble, because they had their 'never again' real estate bubble ruining their economic formative years in 2008 and onwards. The millennial equivalent will be index funds, which will have different deleterious effects.
by novok - It's a silly idea that's full of holes:
> Free use comes with responsibility: whoever occupies a home must keep it in excellent condition and cover its ongoing maintenance costs. If you can’t afford to properly maintain a particular home, you can’t occupy it
Exactly who decides what constitutes "excellent" condition? Exactly what do you do with people who fail to keep their home in what whatever authority figure considers to be "excellent" condition? If I really want a property somebody else has, can I trash it right before inspection day or pay off the inspector to declare it non-excellent? What do you do with the poor hard-working family who just doesn't have the time or money to keep their place in "excellent" condition? What do you do with the mentally ill person who trashes their place every other week and can't afford to fix it?
> For desirable homes or plots, anyone can apply during a fixed period. If demand exceeds supply, the new resident is chosen by lottery, regardless of income, wealth or status
Lottery? Riiiiight. There's just no chance a simple lottery system will be able to manage the issue of to what extent particular homes or areas are desirable. There's no way a lottery system massive enough to even attempt to address the issue will actually be free of influence by wealth and status.
> The country must always keep at least 10% of homes/plots available, creating real choice and mobility
Exactly how is this going to work in practice? Which "10%" is going to be kept available, and how do we make it available? If we have a desirable city center with under 10% free, do we have to kick some people out to keep that 10%, or do we kick some people out for a while to build denser/taller buildings? Or will our "10%" only be in the undesirable areas?
If I'm a rich person, can I pay off a poor person who happens to have a nicer house to move out to a somewhat less nice house so I can move in? What if I say, I'll pay you to voluntarily move out, or I'll pay someone else to trash the place or pay off the inspector to get you kicked out?
Nobody is smart enough to dream up a new system in 10 minutes that actually covers every possible use-case and situation more fairly than our current capitalistic system that has existed and had all of its rules in practice and iterated over for hundreds of years.
by ufmace - Since everyone gets a "free" house, employers would immediately cut everyone's wages by about third to pay the taxes that would be necessary to implement this scheme. So your disposable income (less mortgage/rent) would stay the same and you'd be paying rent indirectly through taxes.by SoftTalker
- > Exactly who decides what constitutes "excellent" condition?
In my country, some people have decided that a Homeowner's Association (HOA) is the body that decides, and for those who don't want to live subject to an HOA, their city, county, and/or an AI make that decision. And of course the companies insuring the homes also have a say in the condition of the properties they insure.
Right now, for example, a city in my area has decided to place cameras on all the municipal and trash vehicles. Those cameras take pictures of everybody's house at least once a month, and AI flags any pictures that it decides appear to show a property to be in less than excellent condition. A human at city hall is allegedly tasked with reviewing all those flagged pictures, and notices and fines get sent to the homeowners that the human decides needs to be notified and fined for the condition of their property.
I suspect that someone will be able to chime in that insurance companies are buying overhead and satellite imagery of all the homes that they insure, and that they also have AI inspecting the properties they insure for roof damage, debris surrounding the property, and checking that branches aren't encroaching on roofs, and flagging any images that would indicate that the policy should be cancelled for non-compliance.
I imagine that this system or something resembling it would be carried over to ensure that the properties are kept in "excellent" condition.
by zzgo