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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   19671 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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You put stuff in someone else's name and then rent it out anyways.

My programmer friend wasn't advocating for a law with the intention that everyone would break it. He genuinely thought that 'one house per person' was a good policy.

I think it's a good policy. Shelter is not like other goods - you can literally only use one house at a time, and you must have one house as a roof over your head. So you enforce no superfluous houses per person, and if you want to move, you sell your house and buy another house. Obviously you need a few other bits to make it work: hotels for people who need to be somewhere temporarily, sublets for people who can't afford a full house. But freeing up the majority of the supply and making the market much more fluid should do a lot of good work.

Or, you know, you can just build up. Demolish the houses and build skyscrapers. Just let people profit from owning real estate and they will trip over themselves to do it for you.

No need to ration the supply when you can just increase it.

It's funny, all the YIMBYs want this or claim to, but when there's complaints about the cost of housing, it's always a single-family detached home used as the benchmark for complaining.

It's not going to happen, and even if it were, unless massive changes were made they would just become assets in the same way. Britain's housing market is hugely dysfunctional because houses are assets first and shelter second: it's hugely sticky, people just point-blank refuse to sell if the market starts turning down and they have very little incentive to. The market is so sticky that prices almost can't change.

Britain's housing market is hugely dysfunctional because houses are assets first and shelter second

I thought it was because (1) by-right zoning doesn't exist, so instead literally every single attempt to build housing has to run the gauntlet of getting permission from the govt., and (2) urban growth boundaries stymie building near large cities.

So if supply - demand curves are generally accurate, you want to decrease price but limiting supply, and think price will come down?

decrease price but limiting supply (by???)

Eh? No? If you assume that most renters would prefer to own, which in my experience is true and is also the default assumption of the vast majority of discussion, then most people are paying rent when they would prefer to be paying mortgages but can't because landlords have driven up the price of housing to sell it back to people, often literally making you pay their mortgage in the process. The point is to increase the supply of buyable houses, driving down the price of the asset and moving them from 'financial asset and moneyspinner with that income priced in' back to 'shelter'.

The main problem is transferability of mortgages but buy-to-let pretty much has to be predicated on rent being greater than mortgage payments in any case so I think it must be possible to work something out.

I mean, you've essentially made full-property rentals illegal. So if you have a family and want to move city, but don't want to buy, tough. If you are young and starting out but want your own place, tough. And it doesn't make housing any cheaper or more abundant, it just makes it less convenient for everyone. There's a reason that even the most insane socialist hell-holes haven't pursued this policy, because it's the sloppiest of slopulism.

Your reply doesn't seem to deal in any way with the consequences of making housing abundant. The picture you are painting is just 'like now, but you aren't allowed to rent any more', and you don't seem to be engaging in any way with the massive systemic changes that would likely result in effectively 2Xing the amount of housing in the country and vastly increasing the buy/sell frequency of houses.

(Only 60% of housing in the UK is owner-occupier, and if we assume at least another 5% of that is second-homes, that's 2X the housing stock.)

EDIT: not 2x because obviously you have renters living in the houses already, I'm being thick.

It appears about 3% of houses in the UK are second homes (not rented out).

Ok, but what do people who can't afford a down payment but want to live in a house do? Someone has to own a house in order to rent it out.

Subletting seems ok. The idea is to prevent massing property empires, as e.g. the Swiss do by requiring that every building be partially occupied by a Swiss person. But if you zoom out I think this question becomes pretty similar to the question of what to do if you can't afford rent: you do something with your life so you can afford rent, like move, or you're homeless.

Obviously the paradigm assumes that if you free up the 40% of UK homes that are not currently owner-occupier then it produces a big, big drop in price. If not, you've failed and should put the previous paradigm back in.

I think something like this happened in late Republican Rome.

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