[Dante Hicks]

Originally Posted by milo

Hmm it does fundamentally come down to lack of new stuff being built though doesn't it?

A lot of problems do, yeah. However, high house prices (caused by lack of supply) should in theory increase the amount being funnelled towards maintenance / rennovation. Which has happened to an extent, but not in the social sector (which is insulated from market forces to an extent) and not fast enough to raise standards of housing in the lowest tiers of private rented accomodation.

is there any communist vs capitalist approach to resources you can look at?

Well, housing is obviously dependant on land which is central to how property is handled in a given social system. So yes, but then it becomes entirely a discussion about land and not housing, which might be seen as off-topic.

To keep the momentum going can you decribe what you want done with housing assuming you became in charge?

The problem with largely libertarian type approaches is that you end up saying things like "If I was in charge I'd immediately surrender power and leave people to it..." which is all well and glib, but not really very productive. I don't want to be in charge, I'm not claiming to have some higher guiding knowledge, I'm saying in many instances current social arrangements are both unjust and inefficient for various reasons.

Under the current social system, it's pretty easy to solve a lot of the problems we currently have by simply applying a decent methodology. Building a million new homes (or whatever statistic they're quoting this week) is a sizable technical task but not particularly philosophically challenging. The issues are, as you say, where to put such dwellings (i.e. in the country where NIMBY faggots will moan incessantly or in the city where land is a quadrillion pounds an acre) - but again, I don't really find such talk interesting.