[OrwellianChild]

I sympathize with the desire for a utopian government-run housing arrangement like this, but I think it discards the practical for the ideal...

With less restrictive zoning, more properties and building projects become financially feasible with the banks, builders, and contractors we already have. It costs the government zero money and happens automatically with the stroke of a pen.

It's much more difficult to re-engineer our entire mode of government, taxation, and housing provision than simply removing a few legal restrictions.

[phmqk76]

We don’t need government run housing arrangements. What we need are market regulations, like rent control, that work. Having the government as an available lender, to ensure capital access for developers, isn’t control, it’s working the levers of capitalism to encourage an outcome.

Look at Texas - zoning-free, no rent control, and it’s quickly becoming a housing dystopia. Prices are rising rapidly, and as you build out so quickly, your taxes rise as a clip more than twice most places, to build new schools and hire teachers and build roads, etc. and guess what? Private equity firms are snapping up homes at a huge clip, 25% nationally and much higher in Texas, and then rent them out according to algorithms that maximize their profits (in collusion with other landlords using the same software). Why build a Rube Goldberg machine to impact housing prices though the elimination of zoning, when you can affect it directly through rent control and directly incentivizing new construction of cheap units?