alt Hacker NewsIt wouldn't work. Good luck trying to enact that. Also, the amount of leftism in this thread is like a pure-sugar-diet for Marxists. When houses have no value, people don't value them. Look at what happens when you give large amounts of people free housing, what do they do with it?
I don't know about the left/right. But like I said, when I read this idea, it was presented as an argument that the housing market was not capitalist enough, and that was the issue. In order to properly make it capitalist, so it can act like our other markets, you need to ban rent-seeking and landlordism which are pre-capitalism models that date from the old days.
It would not allow for example the government to hand out "cheap to rent housing either".