> And that's just the cost that the developers have to bear. The local government and utilities have to expend a lot of money for all the infrastructure: roads, public transport, water/sewage, electricity (the electricity demand of even a "small" dense housing unit are pretty massive), internet, schools, higher education, general amenities (e.g. parks), planning for shopping and other venues... that's where all the NIMBYism is coming from because that shit ain't cheap.

Shopping centers don’t need to be added in most cases. Existing shops can just get more business, no? And if new shopping centers are needed, _developers_ can bear the construction cost, not you the taxpayer. Don’t forget that more residents means more taxpayer money for the city long term.

If you want to talk “expensive”, i think suburbia is a better example. Most of suburbia has a negative ROI when you factor in roads and other utilities. And so few taxpayers, compared to a city. Suburbia has some pros though, i won’t deny that.

People don’t like change, period. It’s fine to admit it, really. But we can’t have no change AND housing for our young adults at the same time. US population is still growing last i checked.

Most of the country isn't Seattle or Hong Kong or SF, hemmed in on all sides by mountains and bays. In most of the country, the city could just choose to build more city. All it needs is infrastructure, rezoning, planning permission. And the ability to forgo treating single-family-home subdivisions as immortal, inviolate monuments to the American Way.

The megacity of >10M people is the basic functional economic unit in 2025, the minimum healthy employment market, the level at which we can provide a reasonable opportunity for productive jobs in a specialized role and a reasonable opportunity to hire someone in a specialized role*; Their largesse is taxed or remitted to cover the cities of ~1M, the cities of ~100k, and especially the towns of ~1k-10k.

...

*The example a number of economists like to bring up is: If I'm a skilled sushi chef, how long would it take to replace this employer with a better one? How long would it take them to replace me? A thriving economy is an economy that ensures lots of mutually beneficial employment arrangements, in which no one feels trapped, and in which bad management or bad work is punished with replacement, but also which has the slack to absorb random things like interpersonal conflicts or an employee that needs to move for family reasons.

If there are a hundred sushi places within commuting distance, probably at least one of them is hiring. If one chef gets hit by a bus, the business can be back in operation the next day by poaching an apprentice a few blocks away for higher pay. There is always reserve capacity waiting in the wings, as a megacity encourages economic resiliency.

If there are only two sushi places within commuting distance, and I sever my relationship with this one, the other one is probably not hiring, so I am a slave to their bad management and conversely they are a slave to my bad work because it would be so difficult to find another person like me. The quality of goods and services provided to the general consumer suffers significantly, the material precarity of my life suffers significantly. Things become brittle - if the business goes under for random reasons, odds are pretty good that my town becomes a town without sushi. Even if everything is working perfectly... what's my leverage as far as pay raises? What's their leverage as far as work output/quality? We're stuck with each other.

That seems like a general thing, not specific to housing. Having the government provide some kind of basic service in all essential areas would do wonders to provide a baseline for the market. Private businesses usually complain about "unfair competition", but if you can't provide the service that is either better or cheaper than government does, why should we care about your business at all?

i’d like to learn more about this specifically. Can you recommend reading material on this? Or do you have any specific countries or cities in mind?

The two main theorems of welfare economics show why free markets are great: a market equilibrium is pareto-optimal and vice versa.

The problem is that the conditions under which these theorems holds are completely unrealistic: perfect competition (which is predicated on decreasing economies of scale), so no monopolies, perfect information, no externalities, no public goods, etc.

Given that, it is imperative to regulate markets, and provide some goods through the public sector.

It's only an inevitable outcome if you enable people to acquire enough capital to distort markets in their favor. But this is not something inherent in the notion of the free market itself - rather, it is driven by the property rights arrangement, which is actually somewhat orthogonal to free markets. Where government exists in the first place, its monopoly on violence essentially means that property rights are that which said government recognizes as such and uses force to protect, if necessary. It doesn't have to protect arbitrary accumulation of capital, though.

i guess in my mind, the less a government meddles with the market, the better. Unless it’s with the intention of eliminating scams and enforcing fairness in the buying and selling process - regardless of race or your status.

But i do agree that in practice, we rarely see governments try a truly free market.

It's an outcome of the way money is structured.

Debtors borrow. They get money and spend it. The person holding the money gets paid to not return it (interest). It's like the system is maximally stupid and designed to exacerbate wealth inequality.

The fungibility argument is bullshit here and just serves to obscure. Let's say 10% of money holders refuse to return the money, then 10% of borrowers are screwed. The borrowers can play a game of musical chairs to "decide" who is going to get screwed, but it doesn't change that 10% get screwed.

Oh and the best part? You can't escape money, because it's like a public utility and even if you come up with an alternative, you'll still have to pay taxes, in money. Meaning that money is not just a monopoly, it's inescapable.

Maybe so but none of those things replace the concept of a market, they are different ways to control a market, which is absolutely required and woefully neglected in many countries and many areas. But I don't understand the idea that markets themselves are the problem.

If you are a doctor and you want to practice medicine to get money to pay for fish, you are engaging with a market even if that market is single payer (ie the government).

If the single payer pays too little to get fish, you will start fishing instead of practicing medicine. If the single payer pays a lot the fishermen will start wondering why you get so much when they are the ones actually catching the fish. And they will increase the price of fish, forcing your one payer to pay more.

A very simplified view of things of course but my point is that it's still a market. I seriously can't imagine a mechanism better than a market so I was curious what the GP had in mind.

The problem with housing isn't markets, it's the lack of a proper market. The economic system in many countries is tied to mortgages in a way that various cogs in the financial machine can't under any circumstance allow housing to depreciate over time. Homeowners don't own their homes, they pay the banks. And the bank is valued based on the assets it has in the form of home loans.

So the value of homes has to go up. It's important for politicians, it's important for banks, it's important for existing homeowners. Which makes it a massive problem for non-homeowners.

If this was a proper market, houses would be built to meet demand. But as things are now, that would trigger a massive depression. We saw a glimpse of it in 2008.