Housing shortfall, costs and affordability

[kzurell]

Vienna is the example to follow: (from Wikipedia)

[...]Vienna directly owns the most public housing stock of any city in Europe, at approximately 220,000 municipal units.[47][59][60] A quarter of Vienna's population lives in public housing.[47] According to Viennese law, rents in public housing can only be increased if a given years inflation exceeds 5 percent.[48] City-owned public housing makes up around half of Vienna's social housing stock.[48]

Another 200,000 dwellings[47] are limited-profit housing associations [de][note 4] (LPHAs). LPHAs are a type of social housing in Austria that can be formed as a private company or as a housing cooperative.[61] [...]

When the Carshare de-co-op-ized (demutualized?) I started to wonder if non-profits and co-ops are really at "thermodynamic parity" with speculative share capital corporations. Can people take part in profit if they choose, and not if not, and, all other things being equal, experience equal economic effects? It's almost, kinda, true in a few contexts, like Credit Unions. 

Let's say the wind changes and we do build a New Vienna of public and co-op housing: there's always the risk of sliding back downhill to liquidity under some future reactionary administration, obliging all of us to become speculators again as we pretty much are right now. Legal protections for owner-occupancy and tenancy are lightweight measures of social self-control, we see how fragile they are today watching "trial balloons" go up.

Tax tinkering, or heavy-handed policy, or ginning up "incentives", or even UBI, won't root out the dysfunctions of incomplete structural expressions of values. UBI and housing first are probably our best emergency interventions, but I think our finance system is objectively, value-neutrally, lossy.

creative's point is taken: the media doesn't call renters "losers". It's more insidious than that: it sorts us by our speculation status (rather than naming us all "residents"), and farms adrenaline off of the precarious position of non-owners.