And yet we have such terrible poverty.
When I read stories about poor people in America, always there is lurking just below the surface the key element of scarcity. Not food. Not transportation. Not clothing. Not even, surprisingly, health care. The missing factor in all these broken lives is the simplest thing. Space. Some space to fucking sleep and live.
How can such a large country suffer from a bigger housing crisis than we find in jammed up dense countries like Singapore, South Korea, and India?
Why hasn't the market solved this problem?
Believe it or not, its not impossible to manufacture a living space in a factory and assemble it on site in a day, to provide extremely well made and affordable housing structures.
There is space enough in American cities if density is allowed to be increased. In other words if these fake "liberal" NIMBYs in American cities can be persuaded to give up the precious "character" of their neighborhoods, we can make space for everyone. CHEAP space.
The market did solve the problem and then we blew it by undermining the family unit so we have people dependent on the state with no significant family support.
> Believe it or not, its not impossible to manufacture a living space in a factory and assemble it on site in a day, to provide extremely well made and affordable housing structures.
The soviets tried this approach it doesn't work because you end up with a shitload of crappy communist housing blocks. The correct approach is to develop as much high end housing as possible which pushes all other houses down the depth chart. We want the poor living in houses that the rich used to own - not shittier houses.
At some point we have to realize that the issue isn't wealth or even inequality. The harsh reality is a significant number of the population has a several hundred dollar a day drug addiction and no means of taking care of themselves even if they were handed a blank check.
This entire statement just blows my mind.
Getting people to build enough expensive homes for rich people seems to be an already solved problems. People already build homes as expensive as the market will bear and and the rich buy not one but 2 of them or even more and rent them out to others less rich than themselves. The only way to get people to build a glut such as to devalue their own product would be to provide tax incentives or kickbacks effectively funding rich peoples houses with tax money from the middle class.
Supposing you decided to do this building a glut of "top end" housing enough to move the needle as far as price would be an insanely expensive endeavor. Millions of dollars per unit.
There are 74 million single family homes in the US building out 10% more all at the top end at 2 million per would cost 148 trillion dollars. This is actually more than the 25 trillion it would cost just to give every household their own free 200k house.
Building 1% of the present housing supply would only cost a laughable 14.8 trillion and would barely move anyone up much beyond making it easier for the upper middle class to move from nice house to awesome.
The truly funny thing is that no matter how much top end housing we build the poor would never live in the houses the wealthy used to live in because we would literally let it rot to the ground before the rich would sell it to them for anything like they could afford not because they have a several hundred dollar a day drug addition but because they don't have enough wealth to pay for what it actually costs to build and maintain a nice large rich persons house.
Ultimately if we want there to be a bigger supply of affordable housing then we will build more for 100-200k not mansions for 2-5million because poor people can afford the first and you can build 10-50 of one for the cost of the other. It's simple math.
As a final note if we charitably say several hundred is 3-400 a several hundred dollar a day drug habit is between 109k and 146k per year.
The only people that have several hundred dollar a day drug habits for very long are drug lords and CEOs that are fueled by cocaine.
Think of it like a hockey team. If your 4th line Center isn't good enough (or you don't have one) you're better off to add a player that is better than your BEST Center because that improves your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th line. Improving your worst Center only improves your 4th line. Its like that but houses instead of players.