Whether big or small. We all have that one thing from Scifi we wished were real. I’d love to see a cool underground city with like a SkyDome or a space hotel for instance.
Whether big or small. We all have that one thing from Scifi we wished were real. I’d love to see a cool underground city with like a SkyDome or a space hotel for instance.
I find it funny who ubi proponents say we need UBI because capitalism failed to have wages match cost of living and simultaneously say UBI will fix it with capitalism.
Housing is expensive because there isn’t enough. If capitalism could fix it, then housing would have at a minimum matched inflation and should have decreased in price because of technology improvements. So giving people more money absolutely cannot fix the housing crisis. UBI would be a handout for landlords.
When demand is the problem in a supply/demand economy, you can’t fix it with more demand (cash).
Along with UBI, there also needs to be UBH, and other basic needs.
Capitalism means that they stop building before the price dips below wildly profitable, because capital is risk adverse. Capitalism won’t, not can’t, fix these problems.
A large institution may be risk averse. But a smaller firm trying to gain ground in the market would likely be more than happy to take on the risk and slimmer margins. After all, if capitalism wasn’t okay with slim margins, then restaurants and grocery stores wouldn’t exist.
Yes, and then that smaller firm fails because they take too many risks that have little chance of success. They end up being bought up by the larger firms, and all their assets put towards those higher value investments.
Sure, that could happen. But at that point, the smaller firm has already done its risky work so the people can benefit from it. And another small firm will step into the market to fill that niche.
New construction works on too long a time frame for this. It’s not liquid enough, and the level of capital you need to engage in the process is not trivial.
Given that capitalism is a system, not an individual with intention, “won’t” is the wrong word.
Capitalism fails to meet housing demand because it is constrained by regulations about things like single family zoning, setbacks, parking minimums, or minimum floor areas; and because the perverse incentives of current taxation schemes regarding the inelastic supply of land don’t incentivize land owners to put their land to its highest and best use.
Housing is a bad example of capitalism failing because the problems developers face are extremely well known and understood. Remove the frivolous regulations, adopt a georgist tax policy, and build good public infrastructure, and you’ll get far more housing than you currently have far faster than you are currently building it. Could government do better? Maybe… but I have yet to see that evidence.
That’s not true because when given an opportunity to build housing, developers always choose to build higher margin premium housing. Capitalism incentivizes profit and there’s no profit in cheap housing.
There is plenty of profit to be made in cheap housing, just like there is plenty of profit to be made in cheap food. You can go to the grocery store right now and buy a tomato for not very much money, and the store that sold it, and trucker who transported it, and the farmer that grew it will all make money - despite food’s famously slim margins.
The situation with housing is more like this: the government has dictated that only 5 acres of land in the country can be used to grow tomatos. And each tomato plant can only grow a maximum of 10 tomatos. If you are a tomato farmer, what do you do? Well, since you can’t grow as many tomatos as you want, you start looking for ways to increase your margin on each tomato you sell - selling the most appealing, perfect, organic tomatos you can.
So it is with housing. When the government finally approves the development of some denser housing in a desireable part of town, the developer wants to build the highest margin housing that they can, since they won’t be able to build 50 more apartment buildings. So they build luxury apartments. However, if the government said “you can build as much and as densly as you like on any plot of land here”, then developers would probably start with more luxury housing, but would likely run out of luxury renters quite quickly. But then they would simply seek out more profit with the slimmer margins available in affordable housing development.
That happens unconditionally under capitalism, there’s no set profit margin where the owner says “I’ve made enough money, time to lower prices and raise wages”.
Competition only exists within a very narrow context within capitalism. If you want the capitalists to do x y z, you don’t deregulate, you simply restrict them from doing anything else and prepare to use every means the government has at their disposal to punish the ones who violate the public trust.
There’s a reason China manages to operate a healthier capitalist system within a very clearly defined bird cage.
Wrt your China example, I will default to my null hypothesis here - China is on the upswing from opening itself to global trade, and has 1 billion people. Any argument in favor of China’s prosperity must demonstrate that they are doing well beyond what we would expect in these circumstances.
And sure. But eventually someone will start trying to undercut others by accepting lower margins.
And of course, this is why we should have and enforce laws against price fixing and collusion.
None of this changes the fact that, even if governments took on the construction of new housing themselves and dedicated themselves to solving the housing shortage, they also wouldn’t be able to build enough new housing fast enough because of their own regulations on how housing must be constructed.
You don’t need need to explicitly collude (though many compabies do) for companies to realize if they lower prices or invest in better technology, so will other companies, and then they’ll all be worse off. We observe this in any mature industry under capitalism.
Food is subsidized and highly regulated by the government.
You can go to the hardware store and buy a screwdriver. Or go to walmart and buy a frying pan. Etc.
Unlike food and housing, a screwdriver isn’t required to live. That’s why food is subsidized and regulated. Whereas non essentials are allowed to compete in a free market.
Food is subsidized because of farm lobbying, which is why there are far more subsidies for the corn that goes into Doritos than there are for spinach and blueberries.
Food is regulated because it can create public health crises. Afaik, most food prices are not regulated beyond anti-gouging and anti price fixing laws, which also apply to screwdrivers.
Food, and screwdrivers, are cheap because they are commodities in a competitive market. Any given tomato or screwdriver is more or less like the next, and customers can always go from Home Depot or Kroger to Lowes or Walmart across the street.
Regardless, you are failing to engage with my actual point, which is that unnecessary restrictions on the production of goods will drive manufacturers to produce only the most high-margin options, which is why developers never seem to build affordable housing.
Now, I’m not unsympathetic to your argument - maybe it really is impossible for profit-seeking entities to build affordable housing under ideal conditions (though then you need to explain how we built affordable housing in the past…). But my argument is: there are some very obvious regulatory and tax reasons for why housing is in such short supply, and these hurdles would need to be overcome by anyone building housing - public or private. So, we should remove these barriers first and see what happens.
Yet you gave the example of food being cheap which has regulations. It’s cheap because it is subsidized. Farmers aren’t the only industry with lobbiests.
We killed the existing land owners so there was a surplus of land.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_Act_of_1949 (required cheap housing to be built to replace any cheap housing torn down.)
The only barrier is the people who vote. If a community votes against a developer, that’s their constitutional right. Which is why I said the supply is the problem. Giving more money to renters does not change the supply. If more housing was built, the price would go down and ubi wouldn’t be needed.