If you want to promote affordable housing, you shouldn't demonize the people who are going to increase the housing supply. You'll leave behind blustering politicians, and no capital - public or private - to develop anything.

The problem is the ones wanting to increase the housing supply are for-profit investors, and affordable housing shouldn’t be about profit. That’s my takeaway of this deadlock. Perhaps the government should directly build housing, or subsidize the cost and have it be owned and operated by the city.

Why do you think the government is more efficient at building housing than private companies?

Every city I've seen try this ran into substantial cost over runs and ended up with 12 1 br condos to rent to poor people at the cost of 6 million dollars.

Why shouldn't it be about profit, we use a profit motive for the manufacturing of everything else in our economy, why is housing the exception?

Housing should be an exception because it’s a place for someone to stay and necessary for survival. Food can be prepared at home, people can take public transit to get around to earn money, and entertainment isn’t necessarily required for survival. But a house is a cornerstone for building your life out, and as such I don’t think it should be about maximizing profit.

If it costs the government more money to build shittier housing should we still use it government to build housing?

The government is far more efficient when it's competent because it has access to eminent domain and is recession proof. It doesn't need to deal with margin calls during recessions, has much less risk doing development, and doesnt need profit to fund new investments, so it can move faster and cheaper with greater scale.

You've never seen it work because you're presumably American, and as the title points out, America can't build anything anymore. If you care about you're country's wellbeing, that needs to be fixed, and building affordable housing efficiently and more hands on without piles of unaccountable subcontractors is a great way to get started.

In which countries can the government build housing more cheaply and efficiently than the private sector?

Sure. Singapore and Vienna (not a country, but done at a city scale) are good examples.

I'm pretty sure Singapore usings contractors to build the HDBs and doesn't employee labourers themselves.

But also Singapore's construction per sq ft isn't insanely cheaper than the US. You're looking at $120 per sq ft and you would expect Singapore to be much cheaper because they have $2-3/hr labourers, less labor laws, and far less environmental restrictions.

And the HDBs don't really house the poor but the middle class. The poor live in cramped dormitories for foreign immigrants.

I don't think that there is anything wrong with public housing being extended to the middle class or even the upper class. As long as it pushes housing prices down.

Labourers in Singapore do not make 2-3$/h anymore. Nowadays it's closer to 10$/h for the bare minimum. Yet prices are still at 120$/sqft or thereabouts.

The HDB in Singapore owns a controlling stake in many contractors, but yes the general construction is often handled by contractors. That's still different from the US methodology that subcontracts everything from design to maintenance, and it maintains the structural advantages of the government building housing I put forth above.

I genuinely believe that it’s a fallacy to try and build affordable housing. Build housing, and some housing will become more affordable.

I think the problem is that a lot of investing in real estate isn't creating more housing, it's extracting wealth from people who have a need to be housed. like if you buy a second home to rent out, you didn't create housing. You just made it less affordable for people to build wealth.

> This mindset is where these issues come from in the first place. Housing as become more and more an investment, and groups of people (immigrants, disabled folks, poor people) are not as good of investments, so they're avoided by private investors.

This only happens when supply is artificially constrained. The private markets want to serve as many people as they can - that's how you maximize profit. But when you can only sell 100 units and there is demand for 1000, obviously you want to sell to the richest 100 buyers.

The solution to the problem is to increase supply. Rent control, zoning, et al reduce supply.

> Where's a profit in cheap housing/low rents?

1. The size of the housing problem grossly outsizes the budget of the public sector. Its not even close - this problem can only be addressed through private capital. 2. Private capital will only build things that are profitable with a comfortable margin considering unexpected costs and other, possibly more efficient allocations of the same capital. 3. Every regulation/requirement you throw at housing developers increases the minimum cost of new housing. As it currently stands, its mostly a physical impossibility to build middle class housing in SF profitably given existing requirements (which effectively add a couple hundred thousand to each unit). This means that no middle class housing will be built.

If you want more affordable housing, you fundamentally need to change the incentive to build affordable housing. You can't do this and chase off developers at the same time.

Real estate investors are not typically developers. They also generally are opposed to things YIMBYs support since as mentioned it would cut into their profits. YIMBYs, though not a monolith, largely support rent control and public housing. They also support private development. The goal is to reduce housing costs, and a variety of means are necessary.