Universal Housing: A Right to a Home, but Building Stays a Market
Christian Reber, founder of Wunderlist and Pitch, proposes a thought experiment: redesign housing as a universal right while retaining market mechanisms for construction and improvement. Every citizen gets a free home, residential land is publicly owned, and a 10% buffer of available homes ensures mobility. People can build and improve their homes without limit, but cannot use housing as an investment. When a home is vacated, family gets first preference, otherwise it returns to the public pool. Desirable homes are allocated by lottery, and occupants must maintain their homes. Non-citizens can rent, with rents funding the system. Reber argues this eliminates residential land as an investment, redirecting capital toward value creation. He asks: would it work, and what breaks first?
You can invest unlimited money in the quality of your home. You just can’t invest in the scarcity of someone else’s.
- ufmace
It's a silly idea that's full of holes:
> Free use comes with responsibility: whoever occupies a home must keep it in excellent condition and cover its ongoing maintenance costs. If you can’t afford to properly maintain a particular home, you can’t occupy it
Exactly who decides what constitutes "excellent" condition? Exactly what do you do with people who fail to keep their home in what whatever authority figure considers to be "excellent" condition? If I really want a property somebody else has, can I trash it right before inspection day or pay off the inspector to declare it non-excellent? What do you do with the poor hard-working family who just doesn't have the time or money to keep their place in "excellent" condition? What do you do with the mentally ill person who trashes their place every other week and can't afford to fix it?
> For desirable homes or plots, anyone can apply during a fixed period. If demand exceeds supply, the new resident is chosen by lottery, regardless of income, wealth or status
Lottery? Riiiiight. There's just no chance a simple lottery system will be able to manage the issue of to what extent particular homes or areas are desirable. There's no way a lottery system massive enough to even attempt to address the issue will actually be free of influence by wealth and status.
> The country must always keep at least 10% of homes/plots available, creating real choice and mobility
Exactly how is this going to work in practice? Which "10%" is going to be […]
- throwaway173738
“who gets the nicer plots” is probably the most important question. This proposal doesn’t actually change any of the structures that make some land more valuable than others. I’m guessing we’ll get more traction from making more places attractive places to live and work than we will by changing the rules around how land is acquired.
What he’s proposing is essentially feudalism but with money instead of connections.
I’m beginning to suspect that centralization consolidation of corporate structures are more of a causative factor for why land in cities is very expensive. Basically centralization results in small business closures, which reduces opportunity, which cuts the value of affected land. By contrast, if most products are produced by companies of only a few hundred employees, then every region has its own version of everything, and you now need a lot more surface area for the economy. More surface area means people can live more places.
In my mind it all comes back to stronger antitrust enforcement and more progressivism.
- jryan49
Who enforces "you must keep your house in good condition rules" that sounds like a lot of work to enforce. Wouldn't it be fun if a concrete company decides to bribe the government to make everyone replace their concrete every 5 years... This is why we have ownership and assign value to things in the first place.
- dlcarrier
The call for the right to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" in the declaration of independence is based on John Locke's attestation of the right to Life, Liberty, and Property.
If we want to actually treat property as a right, including housing, we need to give it the priority that we give other rights, like life and speech. If someone wants to build a 100 square foot house with a single power outlet and single-pane windows, they should be allowed to do so, because it's better to live in a shed than out in the rough.
- alwa
I feel like all sorts of problems flow from treating homes as fungible commodities. As “a house, not a home,” as it were. Independent of residents’ schools, neighbors, transportation, jobs, culture, churches, family compositions, duties to others, and spectacular variety of lifestyles.
One flavor of that ill is treating homes as financial investments, another flavor haunts social housing schemes over the years; this proposal is a different flavor of the same ill.
> Anyone can take an available plot, pay to build a house on it, and live there for life
So they can either pay an enormous amount to build their own one-off (but make a decision they’ll have to live with forever, no matter the changes in their future circumstances); or they can scrap over secondhand “free” housing stock via lottery? How is a plot created and made available in the first place? Since these don’t have homes on them, presumably they’re carved out of farmland way outside the exurbs, right? When is it 1/4-acre subdivisions, when is it larger or smaller?
I’d invite the author to bend a New Yorker’s ear about the pleasures of affordable housing lotteries… or about NYCHA living.
Speaking of which, how does this work as far as multi-family dwellings, and renewal? Or is the housing stock frozen in time at the moment these SFDs are built, save for the policed “maintenance”? What’s the penalty for somebody who doesn’t “maintain” to the cops’ standards—uprooted and then what? Moved to punitive housing, if they do […]