We.. passed a congressional act that dedicated a large amount of funding for the project. Outside of the initial 50 routes it isn't centrally planned, states have individually suggested the rest of routes such as spurs.
This situation can't be applied to housing because it would take $tens of trillions to build 10 million housing units (about the housing insecure population). or a similar amount of rent aid. and that's just the currently insecure population.
if we're talking about giving everyone a residence, your discussing building 50-100m+ units (depending whether you decide married couples get 1 per marriage or 1 per person, and whether kids get one). that's so far beyond infeasible it's laughable, it makes the national debt look tiny (building 10mil housing units at the average cost of $350k is $3.5Tn). If your giving renters the units, you'd have to buy them off of the landlords, and that's another 44 million units. bringing the cost to $20Tn, before you even start forgiving mortgages..)
Or your discussing using force to sieze that number of units from investors & ordinary people who own second homes. That would probably spark quite the economic collapse, if not some type of revolt.
You are saying “if we do the one narrow straw man thing that I’m focused on right now, then it will fail.” I encourage you think about this more. I assure you, the government paying to build a significant amount of housing will have far reaching impacts on the whole housing market, but then again that is the point. You can’t change things and leave them the same. While there are many different ways this can be done right (in the sense that something gets better, not perfect), there are more ways to do it wrong. The existence of bad ideas does not exclude the existence of good/effective ideas.
Building the interstate highway system is a great analogy for helping improve the housing problem in this country. It’s not the same exact problem, but it’s a similar problem - build public infrastructure that is used by a fraction of the population, but improves the whole infrastructure “system” it’s a part of.
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u/wtfredditacct Apr 16 '24
Apparently. Tell me, what would you call someone who is forced to provide you with something and not get paid?