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[SalmonGod]

Most of those houses wouldn't have been built at all, so that's still a delusional point of view.

But clearly there were people who needed them to live in.

Unless the argument is that they needed to live in cheaper homes, in which case you made your argument about quality of housing from potential future threat into already happened reality.

After we already demonstrated the capability to provide that housing.

Edit:

This argument is boiling down in the end to "We did too much of a good thing that we shouldn't have done, because it didn't meet an acceptable standard of profitability for capitalists... because those capitalists already owned enough of the world's wealth that everyone else who still has needs didn't have enough left to offer for them to care."

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I'm kind of curious what will happen when the demographics shift more and more to less wealthy younger generations.  What will companies do if people can no longer afford to buy anything?

That's not happening because (1) Younger generations are smaller because people have less kids than replacement level and (2) when the young generation becomes the main one, the old one dies off, and their wealth becomes the next generation's wealth. Most wealth on paper is in fact tied up in things like owning real estate, which is an inheritable asset that the old generation cannot consume.

No, it's definitely happening. Inheritance is anemic next to financialization, which will destroy existing generational wealth. All those boomer houses aren't going to their kids or grandkids, they're going to the banks so that Chinese billionaires can play asset flipper. Nobody will be allowed to actually own anything that can be rented instead. Your home, your computers, your job, your media...that's just now. We've got a brave new future of renting before the end.

The middle class is and always was a lie to hold off class conflict. But captialists gonna capitalize, and here we are.

[Reelya]

Most of those houses wouldn't have been built at all, so that's still a delusional point of view.

But clearly there were people who needed them to live in.

But ... they didn't exist! It was the fact that someone else was prepared to extend a line of credit that paid for the resources, labor and skills to make those houses. Those sorts houses cost like 20 years worth of wages to create. The only reason the person getting the house is willing to invest that much future-earnings into the property, is because it's theirs.

The socialist alternative isn't to build those same types of houses and provide them as-needed, it's to create low-cost low-quality apartment blocks and issue residency permits for rooms in them. People won't invest extra when there's no benefit to them. Sure, let's stop having private ownership and have houses "people need to live in". Just be prepared for when the standard isn't particularly nice.

[Enemy post]

What if we just have a bed, cabinet, and chest in a 3x1 room?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The houses weren't built by credit. They were built by labor. We demonstrably built them. They did not spring forth by the divine decree of a real estate developer.

That in mind, you have no ground to stand on in claiming that housing can't be offered decently. It is plainly materially possible, obstructed only by the infinite consumption of the ruling class.

[Kagus]

What if we just have a bed, cabinet, and chest in a 3x1 room?

Does it have WiFi?

[Reelya]

The houses weren't built by credit. They were built by labor. We demonstrably built them. They did not spring forth by the divine decree of a real estate developer.

That in mind, you have no ground to stand on in claiming that housing can't be offered decently. It is plainly materially possible, obstructed only by the infinite consumption of the ruling class.

The labor was paid for. In the socialist alternative you'd have to justify why other people should build a new $500,000-labor value house for someone to live in. Of course, we could never justify that, so the level of social investment would have to come way, way down to be equitable. Level of housing would become standardized, with less horrid houses, but less really nice ones built, too.

Basically, in a socialist housing situation, you're never going to get other people to agree to build you a house now that would take you 20 years worth of labor to repay, unless there's some sort of credit system.

[SalmonGod]

And now we're down to comparing capitalism and socialism, and the standard argument that "people are too selfish for socialism to provide nice things".  Impossible to respond to when it comes down to personal evaluations of human nature.  And it still dodges the critique, by saying that it doesn't matter because we can't do better.  But we DID do better.  And then we undid it.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The labor was paid for. In the socialist alternative you'd have to justify why other people should build a new $500,000-labor value house for someone to live in. Of course, we could never justify that, so the level of social investment would have to come way, way down to be equitable. Level of housing would become standardized, with less horrid houses, but less really nice ones built, too.

Actually, the labor was stolen by owners and only partially paid. In an actual alternative we have plenty of room to offer decent housing, seeing as workers can own their own house-building labor instead of losing it all to rich parasites.

Oh, and that part where we don't even need to build new housing to even solve homelessness in the US, since those houses already exist and are empty. Would be a shame if something happened to all those billionaire asset flippers...

And honestly Reelya, you can be as online as possible in arguing down every alternative, but you're not going to argue me out of believing in the society I live amongst every day. Whatever issues may come, there is no excuse and no valid argument in favor of the current system. I will confront literally any set of circumstances including your shoehorned strawman of socialism actually existing before believing that this is a set of circumstances worth settling for.

[Enemy post]

What if we just have a bed, cabinet, and chest in a 3x1 room?

Does it have WiFi?

No, but it has an engraving of cheese.

[Lord Shonus]

But ... they didn't exist! It was the fact that someone else was prepared to extend a line of credit that paid for the resources, labor and skills to make those houses. Those sorts houses cost like 20 years worth of wages to create. The only reason the person getting the house is willing to invest that much future-earnings into the property, is because it's theirs.

The vast majority of the homes that were key to the 2008 meltdown were not new construction. They were houses that had already stood for decades, and often had been sitting vacant for a significant amount of time because the owners hadn't been able to find a buyer and didn't want to play landlord.

[Karnewarrior]

What if we just have a bed, cabinet, and chest in a 3x1 room?

I've seen this show!

[Doomblade187]

Now, the housing shortage present in today's world is in part because rent creep has made areas with actual good jobs unaffordable for most. This can be seen where I live- whenever they develop Atlanta further, the rent goes up, and meaningful affordable housing is never built.

We desperately need at the very least housing and rent regulation.

[hector13]

but then how do the slumlords make their profits

[Reelya]

housing and rent regulation wouldn't actually improve the situation regarding slumlords.

If rents are capped, then there's no incentive to make places any better than they are. If quality is controlled, sure, some slumlords will be driven out of the market, but replaced with what exactly? Guys who weren't market-competitive with the slumlords in the first place, basically. Sure, crappy places with leave the market, but then you have a bigger housing availability problem than you started with.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-01-18/yup-rent-control-does-more-harm-than-good

Rent control is one of the first policies that students traditionally learn about in undergraduate economics classes. The idea is to get young people thinking about how policies intended to help the poor can backfire and hurt them instead. According to the basic theory of supply and demand, rent control causes housing shortages that reduce the number of low-income people who can live in a city. Even worse, rent control will tend to raise demand for housing — and therefore, rents — in other areas.

Rent control, the Econ 101 student learns, helps a few people, but overall does more harm than good.

Over the years, rent control has acquired a special bogeyman status among economists. Assar Lindbeck, a Swedish economist who chaired the Nobel prize committee for many years, once reportedly declared that rent control is “the best way to destroy a city, other than bombing.”
...
Diamond and her colleagues used data from a private company that was able to combine public records to track the addresses of all San Francisco residents between 1980 and 2016, even if they moved out of California. This allowed them to study the effects of a change in San Francisco’s rent control policy in 1995. Previously, all small multi-family buildings were exempt from rent control, but since 1995, only buildings built after 1980 are exempt.

How did this large increase in rent control affect renters? Predictably, people subject to the new policy became less likely to move — between 8 and 9 percent less likely, over the medium to long term.

But not all renters benefitted equally. The new policy created a powerful incentive for landlords either to convert rental units into condominiums or to demolish old buildings and build new ones. Either course forced existing tenants — especially younger renters — to move. Landlords affected by the new 1995 policy tended to reduce rental-unit supply by 15 percent.

There's a graph as well that shows the rate of increase in SF rents went up significantly after 1995 as well, when the new rent control laws were passed.

https://homeguides.sfgate.com/effects-rent-control-8380.html

A oft-cited 1981 study on rent control in many countries concludes that these controls result in a decrease in the supply of housing units. The thinking behind the conclusion as it applies to new construction is that investors do not want to risk capital investment in an area in which profits are constrained. On the other hand, controls that do not apply to new construction, such as San Francisco's, would not deter builders of new units.  In California, a state law called the Ellis Act allows landlords to go out of the rental business, either permanently or up to at least five years, one of the few escapes from rent control available to landlords of rent-controlled buildings. Some have used this law to turn apartments into TICs (tenants in common units), a local version of ownership that occurs as a precursor to condominium mapping. Others, according to one San Francisco newspaper article, use the law to vacate their buildings for a period of five years and then put the building back into the market with market-rate rents.

A 1985 Federal Reserve Bank study on the relationship between housing quality and maintenance and rent control concludes that rent-controlled housing is associated with housing maintained at a lower quality than it would have been had the units not been subject to rent control. On the other hand, a 2009 broad study on the effects of rent control in Los Angeles concluded that most rent-controlled units were maintained as well as non-rent-controlled units. Results may be different because code enforcement efforts in some communities are stronger than in others and rent control provisions are more restrictive in some communities than others, as concluded in a 2003 study.

So, some landlords mitigate the effects of rent control by reducing maintenance. You can crack down on that via regulations and inspections, however that would clearly just shift the problem towards the reduction of available housing problem with rent control. Then, some douchebags wonder why there's homelessness, "despite" strong rent controls, and strong regulations about the minimum quality of dwelling you're allowed to rent out.