I can only speak for the UK market where land with permission to build upon is scarce. Land in desirable areas is always scarce and I would imagine that includes many US cities.

In the U.K. there are only a few housebuilders that operate at any scale, and they have the best links into gaining owrmission and buying land to develop.

‘Landbanking’ is the keyword for the phenomenon in the UK, but ultimately the housebuilders slow building when prices aren’t rising to maximise their return. It’s economically rational.

My view is that government should step in and build competing social developments to house those that can’t afford market rent. The first order effect — less homeless, greater security — is nice, the second order effect is even more powerful in my opinion.

Anchoring prices towards cost of production. The UK housing market is now, since we privatised social housing, another asset class and logically the operators of that asset only consider financial returns — not social ones.

As I understand it planning permission doesn’t exist in many parts of the US and so ‘building your own’ is feasible. The only problem is that mass transit into desirable cities also doesn’t exist and so urban sprawl and you have to commute even more insane distances to leverage that land that can be built upon.

This is the area where fundamentalist market thinkers miss the key role government can play because they’re that far down the ‘government is the problem’ rabbit hole they can’t imagine positive market intervention because the market itself is the holy arbiter of creation

> step in and build competing social developments to house those that can’t afford market rent

This makes me super nervous. This means private citizens will compete with government bids on land in desirable areas.

> build competing social developments to house those that can’t afford market rent.

The government participating in the market this way robs the middle class and gives it to the homeless.

In my city in Seattle, the government found its cheaper to buy existing apartments and hotels than to build a brand new building (reducing the housing supply for middle class. Socialized housing is horrible to live in. Rampant indoor drug use (cigs, marijuana, fent, meth), gang and drug violence, and noise. The government can't/wont kick them out, so everyone trying to get back on their feet can't due to the horrible living conditions.

Seattle also requires new private developments to allocate a % of units for low income people, in order to get a massive tax break. This sounds nice on paper, but it also hurt middle/upper class homeowners that have enough land to build 2-4 units on their property.

> This makes me super nervous. This means private citizens will compete with government bids

This is why culturally and politically the west is on the path that it is. In a real democracy the counterbalance to $power is one person, one vote.

If you disable government from taking meaningful action, you remove the power of voting, and $accumulation dominates decision making reducing a citizen’s relative power over their future.

In my opinion this is the underlying force that is the cause of political angst in the US and UK, enabling demagoguery. People have less power now than when their governments put a man on the moon (NASA), or decided to build single-payer healthcare free for everyone (NHS/UK), and just did it through direct employment and ownership.

Those institutions rotted as soon as private provision and crony cost-plus contracts were not only agreed to, but the state itself wasn’t allowed to bake it’s own biscuits.

I’m not saying no private institutions, I’m just saying that by completely disabling government’s direct (ie ownership stakes) involvement in some areas, citizens and taxes subsidise private profits by underwriting the likes of Boeing, or in the UK’s housing situation — private landlords.

I think there’s a balance to be struck, but culturally government ownership or involvement is ideologically frowned upon to such an extent that those governments can’t directly improve the life of the average citizen leading to destabilisation.

At most, in my lifetime, UK and US governments just print money and put it on the table for private firms to grab. In my Great Grandparent’s generation the government built things

If the government starts buying land (creating more demand and reducing the supply), prices will get even worse for people that don't want to live in socialized housing.

The government can do many things, but one thing it should not do is take away homes from the middle class.

How do you feel about taxing land, but not the structure built on it?

I’m probably biased against the idea and so I’ve not given it much thought.

I owned a place and lived in an expensive part of London and over 10-15 years, through normal gentrification, I saw the centre of the city become far less fun as communities were pushed out due to rising prices. Everyone nearby had to be in a specific socioeconomic bracket to be there, which made it a bit, meh.

I’d be worried a land tax wouldn’t be progressive and so whilst it might be an economically efficient to force highest $value use, that might push out character businesses. That happened in London as well. Chain coffee shops everywhere, no sense of community or neighbourhood. No families etc.

It might be tweakable but the reason I’m also biased towards social housing is that’s what existed in the UK and it was only after that got privatised that housing became an issue / an asset class