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pclowes | on: Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents
I dont understand your solution, houses are expensive because there are too few of them in desirable places (otherwise we have plenty). The govt becoming a command economy wrt to housing does not fix the supply. If the govt is just supposed to handle all the supply and demand aspects of housing well I have good news, there is a lot of very cheap housing in former Soviet Republics just not desirable housing.

Also taxing homeowners harder doesnt really solve the problem. CA has insane taxes, SF especially has a giant budget. They just waste it. I dont believe that once the govt raises taxes they will suddenly become efficient and competent.

The idea that the more spread things out the more expensive they are is sound theory. However in practice, per capita taxes in a city are often higher than the rural or suburban regions. One water main should serve more people in a city and its cost amortized across the population should be cheaper.

In practice, cities tend to have tons of programs that drive taxes up. They are free to do that, not necessarily bad, but also not efficient from a tax payer perspective.

jmyeet | parent
There's no reason for houses to be as expensive as they are. They are expensive because we've created incentives to make them more expensive. This is because we treat houses as investments, allow people to hoard housing, build the wrong tyhpe of housing (because it's more profitable), allow non-residents to use housing to park wealth, etc. So voters vote in politicians who put up barriers to build more housing and to defeat any kind of public transit infrastructure even though it would absolutely benefit people who still want to drive (by removing people from the roads who don't). Why? Because taxes.

Housing should be for residents of that city to provide a utility: shelter. Not as an investment vehicle.

It simply doesn't have to be this way. The poster child for this is Vienna [1][2].

Increasing house prices are an illusion of wealth creation. Let's say you buy a house for $200k but over the years it goes up to $800k. But every house costs $800k so you still have only 1 housing unit's worth of wealth. You've simply increased the barrier for younger people to buy houses.

Put another way: increasing house prices are simply stealing from the next generation and that money is really going to the already-wealthy and, to a lesser extent, the old. Just look at the median age of homebuyers in the US, currently 59 [3].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY

[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-soc...

[3]: https://www.apolloacademy.com/median-age-of-all-us-homebuyer...