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If you think banning Airbnb is going to solve the housing crisis outside touristic spots, I think you might be in for a rude awakening.
Gotta build more, specifically denser, and at a large scale. Probably lots of rentals with landlords not in it for profit, think Vienna-style.
All landlords are in it for the profit. They should instead do more condominiums, so you can own the space you live in. We shouldn't have to live the rest of our lives paying rent.
Government-owned apartments don't need to have a profit-focus, and can instead have a service-focus.
You'll still be paying continuously for a condominium - there are plenty of things related to living in one of those that aren't free. Having an ownership-focused model of housing and incentivizing as such comes with a whole host of undesirable problems as well, so it's not strictly speaking a silver bullet. That being said, housing coops can under the right circumstances be a force for good.
True, but he means nationalized, so publicly owned, publicly funded.
Not only is rent there seen as temporary ownership (same in Germany), with really strong protections but the rent itself is like $300-$400 euros a month, barely anything for a top tier apartment that's basically a solarpunk megabuilding.
I honestly think that's preferable to paying mortgages for also for-profit banks and 'climbing the ladder'.
The lack of ownership as an option also prevents the accumulation of such wealth that someone can buy it all out and make it all worse again
I didn't even think about nationalized housing. Although I'm sure it will be lobbied against hard here in the US.
Most landlords. I was a landlord for a while because I was underwater on my mortgage, I had just gotten divorced, and I wanted to move closer to work. I rented the house out at a loss so I could afford an apartment.
So...instead of paying rent to the landlord, people will be paying a mortgage to the bank?
Gotta build more, specifically denser, and at a large scale.
This sounds like cyberpunk megabuildings
It's more like lots of rowhouses and like 5-10 story apartment mixed-use apartment buildings - hardly a cyberpunk kind-of deal.
An interesting thing is that megabuildings only make sense in the most extreme of circumstances, think Manhattan-levels of location desirability. After a while, adding more floors becomes exponentially more expensive because of the new engineering challenges. Hence it's rarely worth it.
My hope is that it wouldn't be as bad as one might think. Dense living arrangements are more profitable for cities and local businesses and can allow cities to focus on infrastructure improvement and welfare. A problem with the megabuildings could be if they are solely owned by megacorps, but hopefully people will start looking into housing cooperatives to reduce costs and put more power in the hands of tenants. It doesn't have to be like we only build skyscrapers either, but imo we need to have more of a gradient in terms of building height depending on distance to the city center; different apartment building heights have their own benefits. This is just my dream, though.
Except right now, we have enough housing for every person in the country. We just don't have them filled because it's not profitable. Lowering the incentives companies or individuals have for buying houses to keep them empty will ABSOLUTELY curb the rampant housing prices.
Buying houses to keep empty is mostly a land speculation-kind of deal, probably best solved by something like a Land Value-Tax.
Back to the claim though, I'm highly skeptical that the U.S would have a huge surplus of houses in areas where there truly is demand for people to live, i.e. larger cities.
This is an unpopular opinion especially with Americans. But, we are building houses for private ownership like it can be infinite but on a finite earth. This is inevitably rising the prices.
With the Vienna model, people can afford a rent and we resolve the prive ownership issue.