Comment on How Airbnb accidentally screwed the US housing market and made $100 billion
sudneo@lemm.ee 7 months agoAgree. Social housing has been one of the first areas to suffer from cuts everywhere. It is a problem on its own, which short term rental makes worse.
The problem is that building is basically an irreversible use of land. It’s only recently that we started seeing land as a commodity (few centuries) and with the current state of affairs, it’s insane to leave it as such. Soil is too precious and too scarce to let market inefficiencies waste it. We should really explore all options before we decide to simply build more, especially in Europe where the population growth is basically null.
barsoap@lemm.ee 7 months ago
The build more thing is in urban areas to accommodate urbanisation. Coming to think of it the 49 Euro ticket might actually reverse some of that because there’s tons of smaller towns, sometimes villages, with proper train connection to the next large city. Low prices drive usage which prompts higher train frequencies which, infrastructure permitting, takes even more pressure off the metropolitan housing market.
That said urbanisation isn’t in itself a bad thing – it makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons to not have a gazillion tiny villages, it’d just be another form of sprawl. Here in SH, if every train station we do have had a small urban core around it surrounded by village structures in cargo bike distance, that’d actually be quite nice. The state was very good at doing that in the Hamburg metropolitan area, focussing development on a couple of axes radiating out from Hamburg but it should become more of a general pattern.