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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.
What do you think a sublet is exactly?
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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.
Apartments are a necessarily evil but are considerably worse for human flourishing than even small houses, and if there are ways to address the failure of the housing market without building more of them, we should take them even at a significant premium, for the sake of our species' dignity. Backyards should be the default for any family with children, not a luxury. I'm a very literal NIMBY in this sense. Humans need greenery in their lives, little humans need space to run and play and goof around.
(No, public parks don't make up for this. Even if you live very close by, a trip to the park is a whole thing, you need to get the kid dressed, drive or walk them, and then watch them the whole time. Going more than once a week is a tall order. The mental health benefits for the kid, and peace-of-mind benefits for the parents, don't remotely compare to the availability of a private garden that they can run out into at ~any hour of the day or night if they're going a bit stir-crazy in their bedroom.)
I agree that backyards are incredibly elite, but how do you solve traffic from the ever increasing urban sprawl? Especially considering the ever increasing urbanization and demand to live in megacities that have all the economic growth
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There aren't. Pigeonhole principle; if you have housing for 1,000,000 people but 1,500,000 people want to live in the city, 500,000 of those will either be homeless or forced to live elsewhere, and the 1,000,000 winners will have to spend all their money bidding up against each other for the privilege.
Yes, houses with backyards are much nicer than apartments, all else being equal, but all else is not equal. Giving every family their own detached home and backyard is not possible. It's like trying to make sure all kids are above average. The fertility and quality of life hit from young adults not being able to afford housing is much larger than the fertility and quality hit from not having backyards. And since most people don't need a whole house to themselves, most people living in detached family housing end up becoming roommates, which is its own indignity against the human spirit.
That's putting it too strongly. Making all kids above average is a logical impossibility even if you had a literal magic wand. There would, on the other hand, be nothing logically or scientifically impossible about ordering society so that every (family of) citizen(s) is guaranteed a house, though barring space colonization it may require population caps once all available land has been tiled with houses.
Regardless, if we agree houses are superior to apartments, I maintain that demolishing houses to make room for apartments should be regarded as a product of dire straits, an extremely regrettable thing to do, to be undertaken only when the humanitarian concerns are overwhelming. To do otherwise is sheer Repugnant Conclusion stuff - depriving people of an actually good life for the sake of making some other people's sucky lives fractionally less sucky. 1,000,000 happy house-owners and 500,000 disgruntled apartment-owners is preferable to 1,500,000 slightly-less-disgruntled, but still fundamentally unfulfilled and frustrated apartment owners.
(And all this is without going into my objection to demolishing living spaces at all; I think it's deeply regrettable that we live in a society where living in the same house from birth to death, over multiple generations, has become abnormal; I suspect that we're like fish not seeing water with regards to widespread psychological issues caused by a majority of the population being cut off from their childhood homes in adulthood. Humans did not use to live like this. We're not built for it.)
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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.
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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.
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.
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So if supply - demand curves are generally accurate, you want to decrease price but limiting supply, and think price will come down?
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.
If everyone can only own one home, then it seems you fixed supply.
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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.
How exactly do the policy of making it illegal to pay to own another house make housing twice as abundant? Your policy seems to be missing a way to address the actual hard part. I agree this demand is already over subscribed so slashing it won't necessarily being a death blow, but it definitely doesn't juice supply to reduce demand.
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It appears about 3% of houses in the UK are second homes (not rented out).
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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.
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