I don't disagree with you in that we need some serious behavior modifications in this country. However, I think that the government could be used to make such necessary behavior modifications.
One is shelter for the poor. I've stated this several times in other threads. I am critical for the government having provided government-backed loans to the poor for houses they can't afford that were built for the middle class. That's just stupid.
correct; it was. no amount of wishing will allow government fiat to change economic reality and turn people who can't afford houses into people who can. politicians cannot be put in charge of housing, because their incentives are completely different from those of the market, and the result will be malinvestment
Instead, I think the government should use the authority of law to mandate that housing developers cannot ignore the housing needs of the poor.
aaand here you make the same error as those you critique. what are the 'housing needs' of the poor? we used to classify as 'poor' (we rated foodstamps); we rented an apartment and thought we were doing pretty well for ourselves. we are moving up (we will make a little over 40k this year) square into the middle class, and still we rent because we are saving a good downpayment. we've bumped up our size of apartment (to account for a second child), but as much as we want a house we don't think that we are being unfairly 'denied' our own land by 'society' due to the fact that the government has not tried to push us into one or push others to build one for us.
if i may recommend an
excellent piece on this:
Behind the housing boom and bust was one of those alluring but undefined phrases that are so popular in politics -- "affordable housing." It is hard for me to know specifically what politicians are talking about when they use this phrase. But then politics is about evoking emotions, not examining specifics...
After three years of living in rented rooms, I began living in Marine Corps barracks, which didn't cost me anything. That was certainly affordable.
As a civilian again, in 1954 I rented my first apartment, a studio apartment -- small but affordable. But a year later, I went off to college and lived in dormitories on various campuses for the next six years. None was fancy but all of them were affordable.
After completing my academic studies, I rented another studio apartment.
In 1969, I rented my first house, which I could now afford, after several years as a faculty member at various colleges and universities. A dozen years later, I began to buy my first house.
While the specifics will differ from person to person, my general pattern was not unusual. Most people pay for what they can afford at the time.
What, then, is the "problem" that politicians claim to be solving when they talk about creating "affordable housing"?..
If you think it through, that is a policy for disaster. We cannot all go around buying whatever we want, whether or not we have enough money to afford it, and have somebody else make up the difference. For society as a whole, there is no somebody else...
It is certainly no longer considered to be the individual's own responsibility to acquire the work skills to be able to earn enough to afford better housing as the years passed. Why do that when the government can simply "spread the wealth around," to use another political phrase?
The ultimate irony is that increasing government intervention in the housing market has generally made housing less affordable than before, by any standard..
My position is this. Most housing developers focus on the people who are middle class or wealthier when they build houses. However there is a demand for shelter for people who earn minimum wage. But land is a commodity, so housing developers build housing only for the middle class or wealthier so they can get a better long term profit.
if there is demand for poor housing, then i'm going to need a
much better explanation for why nobody is willing to make a profit meeting that demand than 'land is a commodity'. if there is demand then what is artificially depressing supply?
If I had my way, I would write a law requiring housing developers to build a certain percentage of low-income housing designed and built to be affordable to people earning a minimum wage. These could be very small, efficient multi-story homes. By forcing housing developers to dedicate to building these types of homes, they will use their ingenuity to create such homes.
....or stop building homes alltogether. or jack up prices to make up for the loss you are trying to force them to incur. or simply build slums and charge full price for them.
but it is worth noting that the market has
already created the kind of house you are describing. they are called 'condominiums'; and where profit
can be made on them, they are being built.
brother, i get where you're going with this, but this is a policy almost guaranteed to create a housing
shortage. which would drive up prices and make the issue you are trying to address
worse.
This way, the poor can actually get housing they can afford and the government isn't making risky mortgages, and housing developers will earn a profit.
housing developers will earn a profit?
A) if that were the case, then they would be doing this already. a company that turns down profit is one that is quickly replaced by a competitor that doesn't.
B) simply arguing that developers' 'ingenuity' will magically make housing affordable to those who can't afford it when it is declared so by fiat makes no more sense than declaring that banks 'ingenuity' can make
loans affordable to those who cannot afford it.
The only thing that inhibits this is housing developers' desire to earn even more of a profit to cater to the demands of the middle class. But in doing so, they ignore the needs of the poor.
it's not a question of what you consider to be their 'needs', it's a question of supply and demand. housing has fallen sharply in the last few years; if there was profit to be made in
any market, they would be hunting it down like starving cheetahs after a gazelle. that they are not indicates that there is no profit to be made in building a house for 30,000 on a piece of land worth 100,000 and then selling it for 50,000.
So there's a lot of ways to look at the scenario.
well it's still worth a look to see what government can do to help lower the cost of housing in America.
for example; the government owns massive swaths of unimproved land that it does not use. in a time of historical deficits and record debt, it seems that the income generated by the sale of this land would certainly come in handy, and the increase in the supply of land would push down its' price.