this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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What could go right? If apartments cost $100, everyone would own one and there would be no speculative market in them — no rental market at all probably.
If housing was truly abundant, we would still have landlords. The key difference is they would actually have to compete as a service provider instead of as mere land hoarders. "Landlord" would be an honest job for once.
Landlords like to say that many people prefer to rent because then they don't have to worry about maintenance, doing home repairs, etc. But most people rent simply because they can't afford to purchase a home themselves. Instead of helping people avoid maintenance, landlords in practice do everything possible to avoid spending a penny on any kind of maintenance. They're able to be so stingy because people need somewhere to live. With most rentals, you're simply paying for access to housing, the quality of the service is an afterthought. Very few people have the luxury of rejecting a potential apartment or rental home simply because the landlord has a reputation of poor responsiveness to maintenance requests.
With abundant housing, landlords would be more like hotels operators in vacation destinations. No one would stay at a resort hotel if the rooms were falling apart and full of mold. It's a luxury purchase that people can go without, so they can afford to demand quality. With abundant housing, rental housing becomes a luxury good.
For example, let's say anyone who wanted could buy a home with an affordable mortgage. Maybe the government subsidizes the mass production of housing units. Just flood the market with new homes and condos. Make it so there are 1.5 housing units for every 1 household. Or imagine some federal program to double the number of housing units in the US. And then offer low down payment and subsidized mortgages so basically anyone can get one.
In order to compete with that, landlords would have to offer a high quality of customer service. They would have to appeal to those who actually would prefer to rent. They would have to attract those who honestly just hate doing maintenance and don't want to futz around with it. Those who wanted to not have to do home maintenance could rent, and they would seek out landlords who actually properly maintained their units. With dirt cheap housing available, any landlord that didn't provide excellent customer service would quickly be driven out of business. Instead of being in the land speculation business, they would be in the customer service business. "Landlord" would actually be a real job for a change.
The problem isn't landlords it's land_barons_ rich fucks and corps treating housing as a business working the bottom line.
Not the first gen home buyer getting a 2 FAM or 3 FAM and renting out the spare unit. Not even when they get enough to buy a single and keep the multi as thier first step into making generational wealth.
Its the fuckers that buy up housing to rent at above market and do nothing they don't legally have to maintain them.
Oh and they leave them empty for months on end instead of lowering rent to get the units all filled out.
Lots of new apartments are being built in my state but 90% is "luxury" crap that's just going to keep raising rent.
15 years ago I rented an apartment, in the US, for $250 a month.
This policy is called rent control and it doesn't work. New York has it and rent is still astronomical. All you would do is eliminate any incentive to build new housing, which is the actual source of the problem
“It doesn’t work” because profits. If you are in socialized housing there is no need for profit. It’s also kinda absurd to think that, were rent fixed, that there would not be a sea change in how housing and regulations surrounding housing works. It’s myopic to simply say “fixed rent costs = landlords stopping maintaining property” or some such. It would have to be comprehensive, not a sudden, poorly thought out decree like trump would do.
A world in which we all live in project housing is a dark one indeed
Christ dude don’t be so damn binary. Both your comments are. There is nobody saying everyone will or must live in socialized housing in this hypothetical.
Then why bring it up? We're talking about a system of private housing with a profit incentive
There's always a need for profit, otherwise you end up with Chinese ghost cities with millions of empty and rotting homes. They will also become a huge environmental catastrophe there quite soon.
Another binary choice someone is inventing. Nobody said it all had to be socialized.
Imagine there's no possessions.. I wonder if you can..
Yeah, I don't want to live in a stone age.
I'm not sure we could go back to the stone age, as a society. That would require collective amnesia. We can't simply forget electricity and wavefunctions, QSARs.
Mind you, some people are still living a stone age mindset.
There are other options than a single choice to regress.
The majority of the population doesn't even know ohm's law, what wave functions are you even talking about? Remove a bunch of engineers and the whole world will be back in stone age in no time.
Erwin Schroedingers wavefunctions for atomic orbitals. Yeah, I'm not so confident.