So...Zohran Mamdani actually isn't new to the topic of housing. He's been having ideas in his head for years, much like I do in mine, and we get an idea of what he actually thinks for NYC here. It's a video by the gravel institute in which he outlines what he thinks the problems are, and how to fix them. I will be honest, I don't fully align with his vision, but I can say I at least partially agree with him here.
Defining the problem
In Mamdani's view, the problem is the market. He argues that the for profit model is just misaligned with the public good, where the market is more focused on appealing to the upper class, when in reality, we need housing to be made affordable and accessible to all. This leads to a situation where we got empty apartments combined with homeless people on the street, and people paying exorbitant amounts of money on rent. This is partially true. I don't deny this, but it's a bit of a simplification.
Mamdani is...a socialist. Like, that's his whole ideology, and socialists are one dimensional. I mean, yeah, the commodification of housing is an issue, the market isn't fully meeting peoples' needs. The whole market is geared toward making money off of property values, and that's an issue.
However, it's more complicated than that. What's really driving things since 2020 is the fact that we have a legit housing shortage. Some of it is the locations, too many people wanna live in big cities, what happens when supply exceeds demand? You get high rents. COVID spurred a lot of people moving out of existing housing arrangements because staying home at the time created tension with family members and room mates. Most people wanted to live alone, and the market couldn't accommodate that. I've heard stuff more recently like AI is allowing landlords to fix housing prices, that's problematic. But yeah, it's not just greedy landlords and housing developers, it's also genuine supply and demand issues and shortages happening.
Which brings us to solutions, what's Mamdani's solution?
Solving the problem
For Mamdani, the answer is simple, he wants to do the "Red Vienna" model from a hundred years ago. It basically created public housing that brought down rents and was attractive to live in. And yeah. He wants to build lots of public housing to the point that it is the dominant model of housing. And...I'm mixed on this.
One thing I will say, any solution to the housing crisis is going to involve building more housing. It's that simple. We need more housing. The government building a lot of public housing is a way to house people. Now, we diverge from here on this. His plan is, ultimately, to make public housing the default option for most people. I'm a bit more capitalist than that. To make a healthcare comparison, he's thinking medicare for all, I'm thinking public option. I want public housing, and I would gear it toward low income residents, with rent being affordable even to a basic income recipient who doesn't work, but that's the thing. It would be lower income housing mostly for me. The point is to build lots of cheap units. Mamdani wants more luxurious units and he seems to imagine the government options eventually taking over the majority of the market.
I'm leery of this. I'm not really on board with a socialist vision for housing. I researched the USSR's model for housing, for example, and found that rather than use market mechanisms to ensure everyone had a place to live, they just forced people to live together in collectives, and even in the later years when they invested in mass single family apartments, they were low quality drab apartment blocks that didn't really suit the needs of the people, and peoples' freedom of movement was tightly controlled.
Even today, China, a self described "communist" nation has gone more capitalist, building tons of housing, but having a market model. You pay rent, you have some places cost more than others due to supply and demand, their big thing is they BUILD BUILD BUILD. Really, building housing is important. We need to BUILD BUILD BUILD. But....we want a market based model IMO. We need a system of prices, freedom of movement, and supply and demand. I don't want to see the government run all housing. I don't think it's a good idea.
But that said, there's also more to it. We need zoning reform. We need to do something about cities in general IMO. Like....the big problem with cities is everyone wants to live there, the demand is high, the supply is low, you can only fit so many people in a confined space, and there's tons of stakeholders who are afraid reform would screw them leading to a NIMBY situation. Honestly? I think UBI would even help. I mean, a lot of supply and demand is driven by ricardo's law of rent. The closer you are to city center, the higher your rent because the more attractive the further away, the lower it is. People are tied to these city centers in part because THAT'S WHERE ALL THE JOBS ARE! Everyone has to pay rent, everyone commute to work, the shorter the commute the more you pay, it makes sense, doesn't it? So...by having UBI and decoupling income from work, this would allow us to spread out more. Smaller cities and towns might be more attractive. And we can theoretically build more housing in these locations more easily. Obviously, the government will need to build millions of units of housing across the country still, but yeah, alleviating pressure from the cities would allow us to reduce rent prices in those cities, and if we also create housing in these less dense areas, well, that should keep rent low there too.
We should want rent to be low. Ya know?
And yeah on the private side of the market, we want tougher consumer protections. Quite frankly, I think we should incentivize the market to prioritize first time home buyers over landlords and house flippers who drive up the cost of housing. I think we should make it economically punitive to own more than one home, or to own more land than any one person or family unit could reasonably need. I support a georgist approach there. LVT. And LVT would fund the housing thing thus fixing the problem from both ends.
But yeah, it's complicated.
Conclusion
Having looked at Mamdani's housing plan, i think he has the right idea, and it's small enough scale to NOT be full on socialism, since, let's be honest, mass building apartments is expensive and mamdani's budget is limited so his ambitions are limited, so we agree more, but yeah, I will still say if we look at pure ideology, we do diverge. I can get behind much of his housing plan since either way, we do need to build more housing. BUT....yeah, this is the difference between me being a human centered capitalist and mamdani being a socialist. He envisions the government taking over most housing in the country. I don't want that. I mostly want a housing market, but I want to have a hybrid model that works for the people. So I'm a bit more conservative. Socialists focus too much on "decommodifying" things, and with certain market failures like healthcare, education, that can work, but with housing? Eh...I support a more "liberal" approach that gives us a hybrid model. Still, mamdani's ideas are interesting and worth engaging with.
Let's see how he does!
No comments:
Post a Comment