Okay, let’s explore this. Everyone votes for themselves to live in London’s best penthouse. Crafty clever me, expecting this situation, bribe a few of my friends to vote for me to live in the penthouse instead. Perhaps I slip them some money under the table - or if we’ve abolished money - I promise to do some amount of work for them, give them something valuable I have, promise to cook for them, whatever. So, I’ve got the penthouse. Yay democracy?
Or, to expand more, lots of people recognize this strategy, so everyone with some degree of wealth starts buying votes anywhere they can get them. Ultimately, the people with the most wealth wind up getting the best housing as loads of goods and favors get exchanged. At this point, oops, you have a market again.
Now, you might just say that it should be randomized. But in that case, if I get assigned a shitty unit, perhaps I might just go to someone who got a nice unit and offer them an exchange of some kind. Perhaps I don’t have any valuable goods, but I’m a talented painter and offer to paint them several nice pieces. Ultimately, they find it to be an acceptable deal and agree to swap apartments. Lots and lots of people would be doing the same thing, and as the government wouldn’t actually be able to monitory everyone’s location all the time to ensure they’re living where they’re supposed to be, once again, you have a market.
That’s a severe lack of imagination concerning democracy, man. It isn’t just voting for which house you want. It’s coming to an agreement about how houses are distributed.
Hey, I’m wide open here. Please, share your ideas. By what process is this agreement reached? Given a scarcity of nice apartments, who gets them, and how is that decided? Genuinely, I’m curious as to what kind of system you’re imagining, particularly given that, by definition, it has to make most people content, and given a scarce resource, most people won’t get what they want, so some other criteria has to decide who gets what.
Sorry, I ought to resist the urge to reply when I don’t have time to type much.
You also need to consider that housing isn’t just some static thing, especially in anything resembling socialism. There will also be much work from people in renovating existing housing and building new houses. I would imagine mansions being divided into apartments, slums being rebuilt or fixed into decent homes, and this level of connection to each others, and to the labour of building a better world, will also influence how people decide who gets what and who lives where.
In the democratic process, we start with the general agreement that everyone deserves somewhere to live. From there, we get more and more specific, but never so specific as to say “this person deserves this house”. For example, families need space for each member of the family. Individuals need less space, but there is room to argue you may need space for working if you’re a craftsperson. Standards and precedents.
Also consider that this is transitional and temporary. This is how to get from marketised housing, toward communal housing. This initial phase wouldn’t describe moving forward from there. Once these general rules are in place, they won’t be static. Once everyone is housed, the priority is no longer getting everyone housed, but making living easier, including continuing the work of raising the standard of living, renovating homes, moving people into nicer homes, and so on. This will settle into a comfortable standard for everyone, and can build from there.
So, what’s standing out to me is that you recognize that shortage of supply is a key problem here. Rebuilding slums, renovating old housing stock, and building new units are some of the obvious solutions. What I would like to emphasize is that solving that problem does not in any way require the elimination of markets, and indeed, a big part of why we’re in the mess in the first place is due to excessive zoning regulations and perverse incentives caused by allowing people to block construction and building on property that they don’t own. A huge reason why governments like China and the USSR were able to manage housing is precisely because they didn’t have to listen to Mary and David complaining about how a commie block would ruin the neighborhood character, but that doesn’t require socialism. Simply removing local control of zoning would do a massive amount to alleviate this. In addition, because I would also readily admit that housing markets may not adequately provide as well for the poor, I have to add that there is no reason why any government can’t build more public housing today to serve those who do get left behind.
The core issue here is that we have not enough housing for too many people. The simple solution is of course to simply build more until we have more than enough, and tell anyone who complains along the way to cordially fuck off. None of that requires the elimination of markets as a concept. I do think you’re dramatically glossing over how messy a community-driven process of deciding who lives where would be (have you ever attended a public city council meeting?), but regardless, that isn’t even remotely necessary to solve the actual root issue. Indeed, in healthy housing markets in the past (at least in terms of cost), such as 1950s America in the post-war boom, or early 1900s New York City, the common thread is not socialism: it’s having more than enough housing for everyone who wants it, such that while the rich of course had their mansions and whatnot, there was still enough housing to go around for everyone.
The fundamental problem here is that, when you have X people seeking half as many housing units, then either the richest half get the housing, or those richest half are going to find some other way to get them by offering the poorer half something else. The only way to solve this is to add more housing units; everything else is just increasingly elaborate band-aids.
There absolutely is in the places where people want to live. That’s the entire reason why the prices have gotten so expensive. If you have ten homes open up in London, and you have 30 people who want to move there - 5 bankers, 5 tech workers, 10 middle class office workers, and 10 service workers, the bankers and tech workers will get those units, thus driving up the price. Houses in the countryside have essentially no relevance to housing in London, except that people who are priced out will eventually have to flee out to them.
I do absolutely agree that housing is should not be seen as an investment vehicle, but the next question that’s worth asking is why is it such an effective investment in the first place? The simple answer is that because new supply is so drastically constricted relevant to demand, the price keeps going up very reliably. If you simply flood the market with enough supply to actually meet the demand, housing immediately stops being a productive investment. Indeed, new construction in the States has actually slowed the pace of rent increases in several cities in the past year.
You can also look a a city like Tokyo, where despite massive demand, housing prices are still reasonably affordable due to them actually building enough to meet that demand and having extremely effective public transit and enough density to make that viable.
To throw another example where I could find some data, New York City, from 2010 to 2020, added 200,000 housing units. In that same time span, the population increased by 500,000. This is a very explicit example of demand outstripping supply.
Okay, let’s explore this. Everyone votes for themselves to live in London’s best penthouse. Crafty clever me, expecting this situation, bribe a few of my friends to vote for me to live in the penthouse instead. Perhaps I slip them some money under the table - or if we’ve abolished money - I promise to do some amount of work for them, give them something valuable I have, promise to cook for them, whatever. So, I’ve got the penthouse. Yay democracy?
Or, to expand more, lots of people recognize this strategy, so everyone with some degree of wealth starts buying votes anywhere they can get them. Ultimately, the people with the most wealth wind up getting the best housing as loads of goods and favors get exchanged. At this point, oops, you have a market again.
Now, you might just say that it should be randomized. But in that case, if I get assigned a shitty unit, perhaps I might just go to someone who got a nice unit and offer them an exchange of some kind. Perhaps I don’t have any valuable goods, but I’m a talented painter and offer to paint them several nice pieces. Ultimately, they find it to be an acceptable deal and agree to swap apartments. Lots and lots of people would be doing the same thing, and as the government wouldn’t actually be able to monitory everyone’s location all the time to ensure they’re living where they’re supposed to be, once again, you have a market.
That’s a severe lack of imagination concerning democracy, man. It isn’t just voting for which house you want. It’s coming to an agreement about how houses are distributed.
Hey, I’m wide open here. Please, share your ideas. By what process is this agreement reached? Given a scarcity of nice apartments, who gets them, and how is that decided? Genuinely, I’m curious as to what kind of system you’re imagining, particularly given that, by definition, it has to make most people content, and given a scarce resource, most people won’t get what they want, so some other criteria has to decide who gets what.
Sorry, I ought to resist the urge to reply when I don’t have time to type much.
You also need to consider that housing isn’t just some static thing, especially in anything resembling socialism. There will also be much work from people in renovating existing housing and building new houses. I would imagine mansions being divided into apartments, slums being rebuilt or fixed into decent homes, and this level of connection to each others, and to the labour of building a better world, will also influence how people decide who gets what and who lives where.
In the democratic process, we start with the general agreement that everyone deserves somewhere to live. From there, we get more and more specific, but never so specific as to say “this person deserves this house”. For example, families need space for each member of the family. Individuals need less space, but there is room to argue you may need space for working if you’re a craftsperson. Standards and precedents.
Also consider that this is transitional and temporary. This is how to get from marketised housing, toward communal housing. This initial phase wouldn’t describe moving forward from there. Once these general rules are in place, they won’t be static. Once everyone is housed, the priority is no longer getting everyone housed, but making living easier, including continuing the work of raising the standard of living, renovating homes, moving people into nicer homes, and so on. This will settle into a comfortable standard for everyone, and can build from there.
So, what’s standing out to me is that you recognize that shortage of supply is a key problem here. Rebuilding slums, renovating old housing stock, and building new units are some of the obvious solutions. What I would like to emphasize is that solving that problem does not in any way require the elimination of markets, and indeed, a big part of why we’re in the mess in the first place is due to excessive zoning regulations and perverse incentives caused by allowing people to block construction and building on property that they don’t own. A huge reason why governments like China and the USSR were able to manage housing is precisely because they didn’t have to listen to Mary and David complaining about how a commie block would ruin the neighborhood character, but that doesn’t require socialism. Simply removing local control of zoning would do a massive amount to alleviate this. In addition, because I would also readily admit that housing markets may not adequately provide as well for the poor, I have to add that there is no reason why any government can’t build more public housing today to serve those who do get left behind.
The core issue here is that we have not enough housing for too many people. The simple solution is of course to simply build more until we have more than enough, and tell anyone who complains along the way to cordially fuck off. None of that requires the elimination of markets as a concept. I do think you’re dramatically glossing over how messy a community-driven process of deciding who lives where would be (have you ever attended a public city council meeting?), but regardless, that isn’t even remotely necessary to solve the actual root issue. Indeed, in healthy housing markets in the past (at least in terms of cost), such as 1950s America in the post-war boom, or early 1900s New York City, the common thread is not socialism: it’s having more than enough housing for everyone who wants it, such that while the rich of course had their mansions and whatnot, there was still enough housing to go around for everyone.
The fundamental problem here is that, when you have X people seeking half as many housing units, then either the richest half get the housing, or those richest half are going to find some other way to get them by offering the poorer half something else. The only way to solve this is to add more housing units; everything else is just increasingly elaborate band-aids.
You are basing all of this on the assumption that there are too many people and not enough homes.
This is false.
Also, a market treats housing as a commodity. This is fundamentally at odds with the fact that housing is a basic need.
There absolutely is in the places where people want to live. That’s the entire reason why the prices have gotten so expensive. If you have ten homes open up in London, and you have 30 people who want to move there - 5 bankers, 5 tech workers, 10 middle class office workers, and 10 service workers, the bankers and tech workers will get those units, thus driving up the price. Houses in the countryside have essentially no relevance to housing in London, except that people who are priced out will eventually have to flee out to them.
I do absolutely agree that housing is should not be seen as an investment vehicle, but the next question that’s worth asking is why is it such an effective investment in the first place? The simple answer is that because new supply is so drastically constricted relevant to demand, the price keeps going up very reliably. If you simply flood the market with enough supply to actually meet the demand, housing immediately stops being a productive investment. Indeed, new construction in the States has actually slowed the pace of rent increases in several cities in the past year.
You can also look a a city like Tokyo, where despite massive demand, housing prices are still reasonably affordable due to them actually building enough to meet that demand and having extremely effective public transit and enough density to make that viable.
To throw another example where I could find some data, New York City, from 2010 to 2020, added 200,000 housing units. In that same time span, the population increased by 500,000. This is a very explicit example of demand outstripping supply.