> a single person working full-time will earn enough to support a household of four including housing (mortgage/rent), food, healthcare, and education.
Here’s the problem - some people will still make the choice to have ‘get ahead’ by having both partners work. They will then use their relatively greater economic power to get better housing and more stuff. So others will join them, and they will bid up housing (because it’s the most important thing) until we’re back to where we started and even those who don’t want to do that now have to.
It’s a sorta tragedy of the commons situation.
The only real solution there is for governments to look at social housing, and also to try to produce A glut of house building.
Because until we have one or the other (or both) people will just keep bidding up accomodation to the edge of what’s affordable on two incomes.
Simpler "fixes": Prevent corporations from owning single family homes and don't allow anyone to own more than one single family home.
It'd crash the housing market, making homes MUCH more affordable, immediately. As corporations—who currently own 25% of all single family homes in some markets—are forced to sell off their inventory.
They could still own multi-family dwellings, just not single family homes.
The wealthy would just build multi-family dwellings for themselves, owned by corporations (that they own), and rent them to themselves. So it wouldn't really interfere with their rich lives much.
Yes, there will likely be that phenomenon, but will it occur faster than the approx 2% level of optimum inflation?
>>The only real solution there is for governments to look at social housing, and also to try to produce A glut of house building.
Creating a universally-available baseline lodging situation for everyone is certainly a public good that would yield a LOT of benefits from eliminating homelessness (benefiting not only the homeless but also everyone who their problems affect) to promoting family stability.
Whether the best way is to incentivize a glut, subsidize social housing, or just provide a housing stipend for anyone in need, another system, or some combination of all-of-the-above should be subject to study and experimentation.
Here’s the problem - some people will still make the choice to have ‘get ahead’ by having both partners work. They will then use their relatively greater economic power to get better housing and more stuff. So others will join them, and they will bid up housing (because it’s the most important thing) until we’re back to where we started and even those who don’t want to do that now have to.
It’s a sorta tragedy of the commons situation.
The only real solution there is for governments to look at social housing, and also to try to produce A glut of house building.
Because until we have one or the other (or both) people will just keep bidding up accomodation to the edge of what’s affordable on two incomes.