• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That has nothing to do with what someone is willing to pay

      It has to do with what one is capable of paying, which plays into willingness.

      Extortion isn’t involved in free market transactions.

      Extortion is an extension of monopoly pricing. If you can threaten someone’s access to a necessary good/service, then you are functionally extorting them.

      That’s before you get into cartelization, vexatious litigation, and other hostile business practices

      Plenty of people are willing to mortgage their future for something they want now but have no current liquid assets to purchase it with.

      As an alternative to renting in a hostile rental environment sure.

      But offer them a real supply of public at-cost housing, and I think you’ll discover quite a few people don’t want that mortgage after all.

      Even price gouging, particularly in the field of end stage medical care, is a sort of willing payment.

      If you need to threaten someone’s health or safety to extract payment, it isn’t willing.

      I’m not so familiar with promotion that creates the illusion of scarcity

      :-/

      Okay, sure.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          But what is the cost of housing?

          Land, labor, and materials.

          Where do the materials come from to build the housing?

          Via natural deposits of resources.

          Where does the labor come from to build the housing?

          Via expertise accumulated by individuals through education and practice.

          And the land for this housing, is that obtained from the free market?

          No. Primary accumulation happens when individuals occupy vacant real estate or through violent expulsion of existing residents.

          Once this housing is built, it transforms from “cost” to whatever the market is willing to pay.

          Again, no. That’s not how public housing is allocated or valued.

          And, the opposite situation, when the public housing isn’t in a desirable area, and the residents don’t maintain the housing, who pays for the maintenance?

          Areas become desireable through their improvement. Public housing transforms vacant real estate into a desirable place to live.

          On the flip side, residents do a poor job of maintaining housing when they lack the time, the expertise, the resources, and the energy to keep it up. This is not unique to public property by any stretch. Private homes also fall into disrepair when the owners lack upkeep skills or the money and time to provide proper maintenance. State and municipal governments pay enormous sums to affect “Slum Clearance” in order to evict and renovate low-income housing into property desirable for high-income investment. And federal governments subsidize the financial wing of real estate even more heavily.

          We’re happy to spend absurd GDP-buckling sums to financialize real estate to the benefit of a handful of magnets. Surely you can see the virtue in paying a fraction of these sums to mobilize a professional workforce capable of maintaining property at-cost.

          Easy to hand-wave a solution, harder to make it fit in the real world.

          It is exactly the opposite. Given the political authority and the financial resources of a major metropolitan city, providing at-cost housing and maintenance is downright trivial. But acquiring that political capital is the challenge, as you are fighting the economic propaganda of a thousand fiscal parasites who have all grown fat off privatization.

            • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              popular / market opinion will make some properties more valuable than your fixed number, and some properties less.

              What happened to price being set by individual willing to buy? How did we get back to anonymous markets again?

              You can talk “market rate” or you can talk “biggest sucker”. But the wholesale rate is very different from individual sales made under false pretexts.

              you’ll have the overpriced properties abandoned and the underpriced properties fully occupied.

              You’ll have the “overpriced” properties fill up after the “underpriced” properties, with some uncleared inventory unless demand exceeds supply.

              But surplus housing is preferable to homelessness.

            • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Programs like low cost housing currently cost a great deal of political capital.

              They cost physical capital. They generate political capital, as they create a consistency that will support the politicians who support the program.

              Social Security / Medicare are the Ur-examples. Enormous constituencies that love to punish politicians who in any way threaten their benefits.