alt Hacker News > anyone pushing such reform would be obliterating the average Joe's net worth.
Replies
fc417fc802 • last Thursday at 1:41 AM
What I'm describing is a systemic dysfunction due to financial incentives.
The "crisis" is specifically the high cost of housing. So if whatever you do doesn't lower the price then by definition you've failed to solve the problem.
It's certainly a dichotomy but I don't see how it's false?
> We can easily build twice as much in high cost areas (with the strongest job markets) with little impact on existing home owners.
It's certainly possible to encounter nonlinear behavior. If some aspect has saturated then we might build quite a bit without seeing any substantial price movement. But eventually prices would start to decline.
That doesn't really make sense. The problem we're trying to solve is that housing is too expensive. If we do things that end up lowering the cost of housing, then the saleable value of "average Joe's" house will also go down. You can't say that newly-built housing will be (for example) 20% less expensive, but existing housing will keep its value; that's just not how the housing market works.
I'm not sure if "obliterated" is the right word to use, but if making housing affordable means a 20% drop in home prices (which is perhaps not even enough in some places), average Joe existing homeowner is going to run into financial trouble once that happens.
> We can easily build twice as much in high cost areas (with the strongest job markets) with little impact on existing home owners.
If that's the case, then all that new housing will also cost more or less exactly the same as the existing housing stock costs, and the problem will not have been solved yet.