That presupposes we want home building to be driven by investors who are looking to make the highest ROI.

Isn't the healthier option that people who want homes get them built? You don't need a general investor in that loop, except if we're talking bout "mass housing" but even then, those are generally property developers and they are unlikely to use those dollars for non-property development.

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epistasis 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's an is/ought fallacy.

Most people don't want to be their own builder. All of society is set up in the US to prevent people who want a home from building their own, from the permitting to the financing to the actual contracting. Except for the very wealthy.

A good chunk of people, perhaps most, want a house close to jobs and shops and schools and parks and museums and all those sorts of amenities.

Specialization into the very difficulty job of designing, permitting, and constructing housing makes sense. Not only is it a difficult job requiring tons of knowledge that a random person neither cares about nor needs to know about, specialized builders are far far far more efficient at building housing, and getting more housing completed for less money.

I didn't presuppose that housing should be built based on ROI, it just is that way, due to the realities of housing construction. I do think we need a public builder, modeled specifically after Finland's housing builder, as they have figured out some really great ways. Such a public builder has several economic advantages: provides a competitive floor for the private for-profit builders, and perhaps just as importantly a public builder can operate during the bottom of the economic cycle, employing construction workers through the downturn and providing much needed housing through the downturn thereby shortening the economic downturn.

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mistrial9 2 hours ago | parent [-]

the US state of Texas does break the mold of that unfortunately accurate overview, I am told..

	▲	epistasis an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I think Texas bucked the trend, because they did not try to remove profit from home building and in fact made it cheaper to build housing. Homeowners and landlords profit from high housing prices, and in most economically productive metro areas local politics is controlled by homeowners and landlords. They therefore try to stop housing production, using sneaky and deceptive language like "taking the profits away from developers" which in turns mean that the landlords make even higher profits from unproductive scarcity. That's just one of many factors of housing production, and in many places, high interest rates on loans, and high construction costs, are also barriers equivalent in cost to local permitting problems. Subsidized construction loans, or lower interest rate mortgage loans only for the first owner of a new building might be one way to break out of the current environment. At least it's one of the very few levers that a government could have here, after fixing permitting to be fast, efficient, and cheap. Building a larger and more efficient construction workforce is hard and not easy for a government to stimulate, except through increasing the size of the construction market through other means, and then ensuring that there's a true market of builders rather than a monopoly.

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jstanley 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The only way people who want homes get them built without an ROI to an investor is if they pay for it themselves.

Providing ROI to investors is a good thing if you want people to invest in something, because it means common self-interest will ensure it gets done.

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andsoitis 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Do you have a solution that would steer people who would build homes but who are investing in AI?

And to zoom out, aren't there other things that are EVEN MORE important to invest in than building homes?

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jstanley 2 hours ago | parent [-]

People who want houses have to be willing to either pay more for them or pay higher mortgage rates, I don't know what else you want me to suggest?

Where else is investor ROI going to come from?

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andsoitis an hour ago | parent [-]

What I'm trying to say is what is your concrete plan to incentivize investment AWAY from AI and towards housing? You can't tell people they're not allowed to invest in the thing that they think is gonna make them the most money.

Put differently, it is easy to say "there should be more investment in X and more in Y" but it takes concrete incentives to change that behavior.

Fro example, if you have a 401(K) or some other investments, should YOU be forced to redirect that into housing?

	▲	jstanley 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> what is your concrete plan to incentivize investment AWAY from AI and towards housing? I don't have one and don't think trying to nudge people this way is a good thing to do. > You can't tell people they're not allowed to invest in the thing that they think is gonna make them the most money. Exactly. > "there should be more investment in X and more in Y" I'm not the one saying that, you are!