this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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But what is the cost of housing?
Where do the materials come from to build the housing? Are those suppliers allowed to make a profit? And their suppliers?
Where does the labor come from to build the housing? Are the laborers paid by the job or by the hour?
And the land for this housing, is that obtained from the free market? Anybody price gouging there, or taking kickbacks?
Once this housing is built, it transforms from "cost" to whatever the market is willing to pay. If the land was downtown, on high bluff riverfront, "at cost" for free via eminent domain, one would assume that housing will become quite a bit more valuable than it cost to build the moment it is made available to the open market. How do we protect this housing as "at cost"? Is it first come, first served? Life estates? Transferred to children, spouses, designated heirs?
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?
Easy to hand-wave a solution, harder to make it fit in the real world. At least let's try to be minimizing:
there's far too much of that already.
Land, labor, and materials.
Via natural deposits of resources.
Via expertise accumulated by individuals through education and practice.
No. Primary accumulation happens when individuals occupy vacant real estate or through violent expulsion of existing residents.
Again, no. That's not how public housing is allocated or valued.
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.
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.
Not just acquiring, but maintaining that political capital. Programs like low cost housing currently cost a great deal of political capital. The majority of people seem not to vote in their own best interests, so here we are.
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.
All historical evidence to the contrary... it's a nice theory.
Have they? Really punished those politicians who threatened to slash the benefits? Because I've seen lots of threats of slashing and no punished politicians yet. I do hope we get to that phase in the next election, but the threats of slashing were made loud and clear before November 2024.
As soon as you set "cost" for properties, popular / market opinion will make some properties more valuable than your fixed number, and some properties less. If the cost of acquisition of these properties doesn't approximate the market value, you'll have the overpriced properties abandoned and the underpriced properties fully occupied.
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 fill up after the "underpriced" properties, with some uncleared inventory unless demand exceeds supply.
But surplus housing is preferable to homelessness.
They are one in the same. The anonymous market is an estimate of what an individual will be willing and able to pay, the true value is cash in hand after surrender of title.
Where has a "wholesale rate" ever existed for titled real-estate? You might buy a piece of land and sub-divide it, but each transaction is its own negotiation of value between seller and buyer.
With what? Second class citizens who can't get what they really want?
We've got oodles of surplus housing, what we lack is a rational distribution of wealth.
Your world, maybe. Not the one I want me or my children to live in.
What other means is there for primary accumulation if you're not finding vacant land or taking occupied property?
Are you creating new real estate from nothing?
"Primary accumulation" as you call it was pretty well finished many generations ago in most of the world.
Since then, written records of ownership, payment of property taxes, etc. have established title which is transferred legally in exchange for "good and valuable consideration" - usually money.