> Free use comes with responsibility: whoever occupies a home must keep it in excellent condition and cover its ongoing maintenance costs. If you can’t afford to properly maintain a particular home, you can’t occupy it
Exactly who decides what constitutes "excellent" condition? Exactly what do you do with people who fail to keep their home in what whatever authority figure considers to be "excellent" condition? If I really want a property somebody else has, can I trash it right before inspection day or pay off the inspector to declare it non-excellent? What do you do with the poor hard-working family who just doesn't have the time or money to keep their place in "excellent" condition? What do you do with the mentally ill person who trashes their place every other week and can't afford to fix it?
> For desirable homes or plots, anyone can apply during a fixed period. If demand exceeds supply, the new resident is chosen by lottery, regardless of income, wealth or status
Lottery? Riiiiight. There's just no chance a simple lottery system will be able to manage the issue of to what extent particular homes or areas are desirable. There's no way a lottery system massive enough to even attempt to address the issue will actually be free of influence by wealth and status.
> The country must always keep at least 10% of homes/plots available, creating real choice and mobility
Exactly how is this going to work in practice? Which "10%" is going to be kept available, and how do we make it available? If we have a desirable city center with under 10% free, do we have to kick some people out to keep that 10%, or do we kick some people out for a while to build denser/taller buildings? Or will our "10%" only be in the undesirable areas?
If I'm a rich person, can I pay off a poor person who happens to have a nicer house to move out to a somewhat less nice house so I can move in? What if I say, I'll pay you to voluntarily move out, or I'll pay someone else to trash the place or pay off the inspector to get you kicked out?
Nobody is smart enough to dream up a new system in 10 minutes that actually covers every possible use-case and situation more fairly than our current capitalistic system that has existed and had all of its rules in practice and iterated over for hundreds of years.
In my country, some people have decided that a Homeowner's Association (HOA) is the body that decides, and for those who don't want to live subject to an HOA, their city, county, and/or an AI make that decision. And of course the companies insuring the homes also have a say in the condition of the properties they insure.
Right now, for example, a city in my area has decided to place cameras on all the municipal and trash vehicles. Those cameras take pictures of everybody's house at least once a month, and AI flags any pictures that it decides appear to show a property to be in less than excellent condition. A human at city hall is allegedly tasked with reviewing all those flagged pictures, and notices and fines get sent to the homeowners that the human decides needs to be notified and fined for the condition of their property.
I suspect that someone will be able to chime in that insurance companies are buying overhead and satellite imagery of all the homes that they insure, and that they also have AI inspecting the properties they insure for roof damage, debris surrounding the property, and checking that branches aren't encroaching on roofs, and flagging any images that would indicate that the policy should be cancelled for non-compliance.
I imagine that this system or something resembling it would be carried over to ensure that the properties are kept in "excellent" condition.
What he’s proposing is essentially feudalism but with money instead of connections.
I’m beginning to suspect that centralization consolidation of corporate structures are more of a causative factor for why land in cities is very expensive. Basically centralization results in small business closures, which reduces opportunity, which cuts the value of affected land. By contrast, if most products are produced by companies of only a few hundred employees, then every region has its own version of everything, and you now need a lot more surface area for the economy. More surface area means people can live more places.
In my mind it all comes back to stronger antitrust enforcement and more progressivism.
Since the old boomers vote, are retired and thus have more free time to be political and are a large voting block, the democracies satisfy their short term needs since they need their votes to be a viable political party. Trump knows exactly what to do to fix it, but he knows it's completely politically unviable so he doesn't, and he states the entire logic in public speeches so it isn't a secret either.
Japan is pretty much where you want to be wrt to land. Free market land use, but national zoning regulations and a bunch of other things to prevent housing bubbles. Japan had their 'never again' real estate bubble in the 80s & 90s, so their boomers-in-power don't want real estate to be a speculative bubble and thus at least real estate is affordable even in Tokyo even with a near 0% interest rate for a very long time.
When the boomers die and millennials become the olds, they will probably implement the regulations to not allow real estate to be a bubble, because they had their 'never again' real estate bubble ruining their economic formative years in 2008 and onwards. The millennial equivalent will be index funds, which will have different deleterious effects.
The reason is that there are far more people coming in than there is room to keep up with demand, so dwellings are chopped up into smaller dwellings and rented out, and house prices rocket. Cities are only so big, and putting endless additional people in them can be great if you own property, but terrible if you don't.
If we want to actually treat property as a right, including housing, we need to give it the priority that we give other rights, like life and speech. If someone wants to build a 100 square foot house with a single power outlet and single-pane windows, they should be allowed to do so, because it's better to live in a shed than out in the rough.
Note that this is not "on-site parking minimums", "minimum lot sizes", "minimum front and side setbacks", etc. But, it is "indoor plumbing", "appropriate sewer or septic", and things like that that when done incorrectly present a present health hazard to neighbors.
You want to build 100 square feet and an outhouse on land you own out in the boonies? Be my guest. In the city? No.
One flavor of that ill is treating homes as financial investments, another flavor haunts social housing schemes over the years; this proposal is a different flavor of the same ill.
> Anyone can take an available plot, pay to build a house on it, and live there for life
So they can either pay an enormous amount to build their own one-off (but make a decision they’ll have to live with forever, no matter the changes in their future circumstances); or they can scrap over secondhand “free” housing stock via lottery? How is a plot created and made available in the first place? Since these don’t have homes on them, presumably they’re carved out of farmland way outside the exurbs, right? When is it 1/4-acre subdivisions, when is it larger or smaller?
I’d invite the author to bend a New Yorker’s ear about the pleasures of affordable housing lotteries… or about NYCHA living.
Speaking of which, how does this work as far as multi-family dwellings, and renewal? Or is the housing stock frozen in time at the moment these SFDs are built, save for the policed “maintenance”? What’s the penalty for somebody who doesn’t “maintain” to the cops’ standards—uprooted and then what? Moved to punitive housing, if they don’t have a few hundred thousand dollars to fund building a new house on an available plot?
That alone would probably be enough of a relief on housing that we wouldn't need to take any of the more drastic measures, and it effectively costs nothing fiscally to implement.
> What if we completely redesign housing: making it a universal right, while keeping market-like mechanisms for creating and improving it?
What follows is a list that basically says the State ultimately owns everything, but markets kind of exist insofar as it coincides with a goal of the State (universal housing). This is basically Fascism.
There's still plenty of parts of the world where people live off the land, and under Georgism, those people would need to be taxed. Imagine arresting all of the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island, because they occupy land but don't pay taxes on it.
This happens already. Lots of social housing exists, and it's paid for by wealthy people's taxes. It's like how economy class tickets on aeroplanes can be below cost because of the higher-tier ticket-holders' ticket prices.
That’s likely to be the loophole: have high costs fir maintenance and boom, you’re creating a method to evict people.
Also, who defines what “excellent conditions” means? Some kind if HOA? And who’s checking? What happens when somebody fails at keeping a house in “excellent condition” ? Do they get evicted? Where do they go? If they couldn’t keep up with the previous house and are now burdened with the costs of moving somewhere else (maybe even in the same city) how can they keep up with maintenance of another house?
Yeah, once again… “sounds good, doesn’t work”.
It's a decent thought experiment, but I think the lesson would be why housing (and many social problems) are so difficult to solve. But, the original tweet seems to frame it more like, "Why haven't we done this already?!"
They’ll say anything to justify the inequality and abuse haha
If we’re right at the limit of 180 million occupied, I still can’t form a new household and move into any of the 20 million available homes, because that would violate the 10% rule.
Now, if instead I want to take an open plot and build a house, do I have to build ten in order to occupy one, so the 10% rule can be complied with?
Suppose a couple wants to separate and there are exactly 20 million vacant houses: “sorry, per the law, nothing is available…”
Different govts can develop this rudimentary but useful idea to serve their citizens. We hear some stories where families remain in constant fear of losing the roof over their heads while lots and lots of houses and buildings in India remain empty or are meagerly occupied. Lots of people are right away rejecting the idea but every idea has pros and cons and govts withtheir vast financial resources (printing fiat money which they do for oligarch friends) and administrative resources like police and construction departments can develop something by firstly working on a pilot project in a couple of towns and then tweaking the scheme as nuances become clear. India gives yearly gifts of 5 lakh crore rupees in tax benefits to the top oligarch friends. I'm sure universal housing for the entire world can be solved by India itself with this much money in one year itself