So the housing crisis is worse than I thought in a way

 So...doing deeper research on the housing crisis, it really does seem like there's a lot more to it than I thought, and maybe leftists are more right than I thought. Housing is a full blown market failure. Businesses are driven by the profit motive, and they literally aren't making cheap housing because there's no profit in it. So the market is skewing toward the upper end of the market, which is why there's so much pressure on creating luxury housing most people can't afford, and why existing housing is being gentrified to all fudge. We treat housing not as a need people have to have, ya know, people need a place to live. We treat it as an investment for rich people. This is one of the major reasons housing is so expensive.

This is not to say that supply and demand issues aren't present as well, and that we don't have issues with zoning, ricardo's law of rents and related issues (ie, people being tied to cities for jobs and the cities not having enough housing), etc.  It's a very multi faceted problem and to some extent leftists are right, and to some extent, the abundance libs are right. like, they both have points, but neither has a complete monopoly on truth.

However, it does seem clear that no matter what the problem is, we need the government to invest in more social/public housing. The market ain't doing it. And allowing the entire thing to be run by the market is bad. This doesn't mean I'm as socialistic as Mamdani is on this. I dont necessarily want a full blown Red Vienna type system where the majority of it is run by the government and private housing is rare and very expensive. Rather, I'd like some mix of public and private housing. There should be a "public option" so to speak, but we should also have private housing for those who want it, with stronger consumer protections. Quite frankly, I WOULD, ideally, like to see more restrictions on ownership. Like, it's fine if you own your own home. It's not fine if you're a landlord who owns dozens of properties and you make your living that way. These people are just the scalpers of housing and driving up the price for everyone. I've been supporting LVT as a more market based approach here, but I also dont like a purely LVT type system as that could force legitimate homeowners out of their homes. I'd want it targeted primarily at landlords. But yeah. The more I research it, the more I am warming up to what Mamdani is doing and some form of the Red Vienna model. Even if I dont like every aspect about it, the for profit market is just so screwed up that it's making America unlivable for the vast majority of people. I'll keep researching, but yeah, that's where I'm going this time.