>The landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for the natural produce of the earth.
-Adam Smith
Here are all the reasons you can't buy a commoditized "cheaply made" house in Nowhere Minnesota:
A. There is finite land in the world. Burying it in sprawl housing is an American tradition that has wrought disastrous environmental, health, time consuming, wasteful, and systemic consequences across the nation. B. Housing does not exist in a vacuum, not in a way close to what true commodities - things you buy off a shelf for a purpose but otherwise are non-interactive - operate. Housing requires infrastructure in myriad forms from electrical to transit. These structural requirements are systematized and cannot be commoditized meaningfully and thus housing itself is limited by them. C. Housing is limited by your means to sustain it. This means you need a job, and work is going in the opposite direction of commoditization because any repetitious work is being automated. The availability of meaningful employment is shrinking and thus the viable domains of legitimate housing likewise shrink, which is why the flood to California is a thing, why there is so much demand for density, and why a half century of gentrified urban planning has ruined the states housing market. D. Housing is already commoditized. You can buy a manufactured house made at scale for an inflation adjusted cost half of what manually built houses were costing a century ago with more square footage, modern amenities, and the ability to have it installed on a lot over a weekend. If you price out the physical goods cost of manufacturing some of the highest density vertical condo buildings in the world the per-square footage of livable space costs are often below stick built houses. The limiting factor is land - so back to A through C, thats the limiter.
The construction of buildings should be done in a free market that invites competition of builders but with the regulation to recognize those purchasing said structures are rarely educated on quality or safe construction. The distribution of land needs to be radically rethought because the established paradigm of treating it like a segregated consumer good is bankrupting the working class as the aristocracy pours money into property as their Scrooge McDuck money pit of choice.
If car production was outlawed existing car owners would get a windfall. But that's not due to some intrinsic feature of being a car owner. Land is definitely more limited than cars. But it seems to me that land scarcity explains only a portion of the increase in prices in San Francisco.
This article has more on tokyo housing starts relative to sf and nyc: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/what-h...
The difference from ag land is that the builders in tokyo are doing real activity to provide the housing. Lots of businesses benefit from externalities, not just landlords.
Only 43% of SF residents are homeowners, and many fewer are landlords, yet it is very rare for rezoning or higher density legislation to get passed. There are plenty of developers that want to develop in SF and create some competition for the existing landlords, forcing everyone to offer better services. Instead, we get laws like statewide rent control which reduce the potential long term value of new development, further reducing both supply and competition.
Companies capture external value all the time, that isn't the core problem. Improved infrastructure and more wealth in a city would normally attract more competition reducing the total amount of that value that each landlord could capture.
The same way people who own shares in a company that pays dividends profit from work other people do. Those landlords either built the apartment buildings themselves, or spent the capital investment to buy the building from a previous owner.
(to your comment below, HN isn't letting me respond)
So in the end, this isn't about the business model of landlords this is about fundamentally different views on the legitimacy of private property. That's a topic much broader than rent and real estate.
genuinely curious what would that entail, in practical steps
Make it undesirable to sit on large amounts or expensive property, reduce the propensity to resell for gain and put a stop the home ownership casino which in some ways looks like bitcoin speculation over the past two decades.
Give credit for primary residence (and or legit Ag or industrial use, but maybe collecting land taxes from industry is preferable to capital gains even.).
After these deductions tax like crazy for the privilege of squatting on what I think truly is, by nature, communal social property (land). That should dampen down the speculation and return prices to earth while encouraging primary single residence ownership.
Oh, and stop inflating financial bubbles that distort the price of a basic human need. For starters.
Building more housing in desirable places to accomodate shifting demand and growing population is just as important under social housing, but even less likely, since the demand is totally disconnected from the incentives and capital required to do it.
