It was already solved though (in Singapore and many other places).
Affordable housing is not rocket science nor a novel or hard problem to solve. IMO the root cause is that there's a serious issue with the sustainability of the US political system (and its fiat currency) in general.
> It was already solved though (in Singapore and many other places).
I feel like people saying this don’t understand how radical Singapore’s housing solution is. It starts with the government repossessing most of the land in the city to develop housing. I think that’s alone is a non-starter pretty much anywhere in the United States.
It’s also far from perfect - I could for example talk about how construction in Singapore is for the most part only viable because of cheap labor from surrounding country, the ticking time bomb that is the 99 year lease or the fact that prices have slowly but surely ticked up in recent years, far in excess of inflation.
In addition I'd add that homelessness still exists in Singapore, albeit at a very low level, estimated at about 1,000 people out of a population of 6 million. ChannelNewsAsia did a feature on homelessness here a while ago:
Shift the Overton window and propose projects to eminent-domain the shit out of everything everywhere until eminent-domaining just the empty Sears store to put up housing seems more than reasonable.
Solving housing affordability may first require solving culture, and Singapore is a major historical outlier in that regard because of one Human: Lee Kuan Yew
If people can only name Singapore, Tokyo and Vienna as examples where "housing was fixed", then it's proof that it hasn't been fixed when there's the other millions of cities worldwide left.
it proves it's a solvable problem, so the other 10,000 or so cities (there aren't millions of them) just aren't properly motivated to solve the problem.
The first atomic bomb was hard, because it wasn't known if it was even possible. The second one was still really hard, but once the Americans proved it was possible, everyone else knew it was possible.
>so the other 10,000 or so cities (there aren't millions of them) just aren't properly motivated to solve the problem
Civilizations, human settlements, people's homes and communities aren't fungible commodity widgets solvable and movable through copy-paste solutions like technical challenges, no matter how much HN insists every world challenge from housing to world peace, is as easily solvable as those at their tech jobs.
Just because you can 1:1 reverse engineer a bomb design and have it work the same, doesn't mean you can just take a housing policy that worked in the demographic, geographical, historical and cultural context of one country and just drop it in another country with a completely different context and background, and expect it to just work the same.
This is the tech equivalent of: "well, it was working on my machine".
“Building enough housing” is actually a concept that we can apply everywhere in the world. My city has a million fewer people than it did 50 years ago and inflation adjusted rents are an order of magnitude higher. It’s not because the ability to build enough housing was lost to the sands of time.
Sure. In some company cultures, the developer throws the code over the wall and it's up to the operations team to make it work, so "well, it was working on my machine" is basically saying "go fuck yourself". There are other ways to work though, and so an alternate culture is for SREs to be engaged from the start of the project, so the developer doesn't just throw the code over the wall, and "well, it was working on my machine" is followed by a pairing session with the SWE to figure out the differences between the two as to why it's not working. Of course, modern tools aka Docker make that less of a problem these days, but as with all things, half the side of tech is culture and not the technology itself.
Back to the point though, I didn't claim it's at all easy to solve the housing crisis everywhere in the world, but that there are cities without a housing crisis. However they solved it won't be directly applicable to cities on a different continent in a difference country with a totally different culture, zoning laws, building codes, and entrenched interests.
But it proves it's possible. "All" that has to happen is the right person with sufficient political capital to get it to happen. Such a leader or team doesn't exist in most places, unfortunately, but, again, the point is if there was such an individual, they're not trying to do the impossible, since it's been proven it's possible.
while important, the fiat currency is a second-order issue, imho. the root is self-serving corruption facilitated by an intricate apparatus based on bureaucratic capture. to even appear as a choice on the ballot, one must either be part and parcel of this widespread corruption, or one must take the system by surprise with vast amounts of money and bluster (trump trump something something, fat lot of good that did, though). one of the biggest issues we have is that so much “shadow money” is allowed to influence politics. if the government was originally supposed to be a “check and balance” against accumulation of corporate power against regular people, phenomena like Citizens United et al have guaranteed the undoing of that guardianship. it is a society of grift now, through and through. and of course, being adaptive creatures, we learn from example, and we learn from our enemies, so anyone who once played the “good guy” role is stooping as low as his opponent now. surveying the political landscape, it’s often hard to find anyone spending more time trying to solve problems as opposed to maximizing instagram likes and chances for reelection
NB: there’s that whole discourse about “how are you all multi-millionaires when the pay for senator/representative is at most a few hundred thousand a year?”
Affordable housing is not rocket science nor a novel or hard problem to solve. IMO the root cause is that there's a serious issue with the sustainability of the US political system (and its fiat currency) in general.