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No Stupid Questions @lemmy.world SubArcticTundra @lemmy.ml

Has any country actually solved the housing crisis?

So there's a ton of countries that I've heard have had truly unaffordable housing for decades, like:

  • The UK
  • Ireland
  • The Netherlands

And I've heard of a ton of countries where the cost of houses was until recently quite affordable where it's also started getting worse:

  • Germany
  • Poland
  • Czechia
  • Hungary
  • The US
  • Australia
  • Canada
  • And I'm sure plenty others
  1. It seems to be a pan-Western bloc thing. Is the cause in all these countries the same?
  2. We've heard of success stories in cities like Vienna where much of the housing stock is municipally owned – but those cities have had it that way for decades. Would their system alleviate the current crisis if established in the aforementioned countries?
  3. What specific policies should I be demanding of our politicians to make housing affordable again? Is there any silver bullet? Has any country demonstrably managed to reverse this crisis yet?
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  • I live in the United States, and as I understand it the housing crisis is caused by several factors.

    1. The lowest level of zoning is typically residential single family. This means small scale owners and developers cannot increase supply by taking a house and adding to it. Either by adding extensions, subletting, or even building a mini-apartment building. To add to this, US regulations require apartment units to have access to 2 staircases, in the event of a fire. This is good for safety, but greatly restricts style of apartments to hotel styles, and increases costs, so smaller apartments don't make as much sense. This requirement should be able to be waved in the case of fire resistant building materials.

    2. Speculative land owning. Some property owners simply sit on properties in developing areas, waiting for its price to increase, and since tax is based on the value of the total property (land+building), a decaying building reduces the cost of owning that land. To fix this, we should be taxing the value of the land instead, punishing speculators, while incentivising people to improve their land (by building housing).

    3. Overuse of cars. Even when places want to expand housing, the complete and utter reliance on cars as transportation in the US leads to backlash for increasing housing, as the perception is that it will increase traffic. To combat this cities need to rethink their transportation strategies to radically increase things like bus and bike lanes. Even when cities do have buses, the strategy funded by the federal government is abysmal. For example instead of running buses that can hold 15 passengers and run every 15 mins, cities will instead run buses that can hold 50 people every hour, and so these buses run mostly empty with 2-3 passengers.

    The main policy changes that we need are less restrictive zoning, tax speculators, and diversify urban transport. But resistance is heavy, many politicians themselves are land holders and do not want to implement these changes, or to anger those that do. Landholders generally have more political voice, power, and wealth.

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