That won't magically make enough housing appear on the market. Many of the major cities where jobs can be found have a chronic shortage of housing, at all levels of value.
We need to build housing like there's a WAR effort, like there's an actual battle against homelessness by building enough homes for everyone who wants to live in an area. NIMBY and 'sense of character' are the major issues that prevent this, along with the perverse incentive of existing residents to prefer the rising 'value' of their house due to artificial market scarcity.
It seems like this is true, and depressingly short term thinking on the part of governments. Social housing can be an asset for the state, and if not profitable at least less costly in the long term than current piecemeal approaches.
There are a plenty of people who want to build more housing, and they would make a lot of money doing that if it wasn't illegal. The problem is not capitalism, it's statism.
It's an infinite loop. Build more housing to suck in more jobs and people. Then you need even more housing since people from now-depleted surroundings come in. Rinse and repeat.
It's not capitalism or statism. It's lack of safeguards to prevent concentrating too many people and economy into too tiny pieces of land.
We need to build housing like there's a WAR effort, like there's an actual battle against homelessness by building enough homes for everyone who wants to live in an area. NIMBY and 'sense of character' are the major issues that prevent this, along with the perverse incentive of existing residents to prefer the rising 'value' of their house due to artificial market scarcity.