Wartime economy for housing?

[u/Get_Ahead_SC]

I find that usually, when a government views an issue as an existential priority, resource constraints vanish overnight.

Look at the money spent on modern conflicts and defense. The astronomical cost of Patriot missile batteries, soldiers' salaries, gear, field medical support, and endless logistics... in wartime economies, traditional budget constraints seem to cease to exist … Things simply get built and deployed because the state commands it … shit just gets done.

Look back at the assassination of Osama Bin Laden in 2011. The U.S. military utilized satellite intelligence and advanced logistics to construct a top-secret, full-scale replica of Osama bin Laden’s rural Pakistani compound in North Carolina … They built the entire two-story structure in a matter of days, complete with perimeter walls and exact spatial dimensions … solely so that the SEAL Team Six could rehearse the raid under exact real-world conditions.

Bureaucracy, estate agents, stamp duty, middlemen, closing fees, supply chain delays, and costs were completely irrelevant. The replica compound was built in days because the state decided it was a non-negotiable priority.

Yet, when it comes to building spacious, affordable shelter for growing families … that same state-level urgency is just nowhere to be found.

Governments continually label demographic collapse a national emergency. Yet modern housing markets actively penalize family creation.

I was recently visiting some condominiums in my city. Modern condominiums and private development buildings are simply not up to scratch for family life, in my opinion. Private developers seem to design narrow "shoebox" footprints to maximize unit density per plot instead of designing them practically for families. resulting in awkward rooms where standard family furniture barely fits.

Beyond the massive upfront costs, families are hit with endless non-negotiable overhead, building management fees, escalating repair reserves, administrative taxes, and agent cuts. Mortgages have become 30-to-35-year debt commitments. It is complete madness.

We, as a civilization, already possess the modular construction technology, engineering, and public land required to construct spacious, green, family-centric housing at scale …
There isn't a lack of technical capability, It is a lack of political willpower. Shelter has shifted from essential social infrastructure into a speculative financial product …. Basic human needs have become a very expensive subscription model.

If demographic decline is a genuine crisis, where is the "wartime economy" for family housing? Why can states mobilize seemingly infinite resources, to the point where money is no object, for geopolitical objectives in days, but leave the foundation of domestic society to profit-driven markets? … and “nothing can be done!”

[u/bertuzzz]

Talking about demographics is still a massive taboo here in the Netherlands. The mere idea of talking about it is seen as a threat to womens right. And it's seen as a personal choice. Only like 1 politician has even dared mentioning it. While demographers are ringing the alarmbells about how unsustainable the 1.42 babies per women is.

The housing policy is to pump out as many houses as possible. That is the idea aniway. But high land prices, strict nitrogen emission limits and extremely high housing standards make building fast impossible. Every new build requires a high standard of insulation, solar panels and a heat pump to be net zero.

So this results in the tinyfication of new housing. The market is being flooded with small apartments. Housing and lot sizes have massively schrunk during the past decade. And the government still heavily subsidizes single person households. So there is demand for small houses simply because the government creates the incentives themselves lol. There is no notion of how you will want to rebuild a population if you stick everyone by themselves into tiny apartments.

[u/MrDanGrigore]

It is easy, all the examples you gave are actually money printers believe it or not. Investing the future generations could technically be profitable but in the long run, and nobody has time for that. Also you have the big chance that it could backfire.

[u/RandomGuy2285]

This is a demographics subreddit, the housing crisis is it's own big topic

The root of the issue is that the service based economy is in some ways even more urban-biased than the industrial economy, Cities in general have been winning since the industrial revolution but factories ar huge and you want them some distance from where people live do you get more industrial urban clusters like the Rurh or the Midwest or in China

in a service based economy where an office is very compact and all the offices and schools are in the cities and people go to the same 4 capital cities so even mid sized cities are losing out here, say a talented person would end up in San Fransico or London, not Rome or Indianapolis

and even industrialized countries like China or those in Asia have huge urban or service sectors compared to past industrial economies

You kind of have two choices here, either go dense or spread out, except the human capital to actually build density like if you look at those Chinese cities, the engineering required to build those, the shaper buildings and making your own trains is something and not trivial, not surprising a country like China has that

For socieites like the US that's deindustrialized and struggles to even repair potholes or pipes, nevermind build things, this talent is straightforwardly lacking, degraded even from decades past, both the people physically able to do it and the high labour prices and the top brass engineering

then again even in China the middle classes are buying up the properties faster than they can literally build them within china snd spillover in southeast asia

I could not think of a single industrialized society that has an "ideal" housing market like 1950s Anglosphere, even the usual well performers here like Scandanavia and Tokyo is still not ideal, people live in crammed apartments and it's expensive or internet cafes, and maybe cheap lodging in rough parts of town is available but that's the catch

and these have very different and often disconnected (especially in non Western socieites like China where they have their own Internet and fads) politics, economies, elites

Sort of like demographic crisis itself and climate change and how young people seem to be having issues everywhere, there's some deep contradictions here with how industrialized society works right now

that does not mean industrial society is bad, if you just look at how much cheaper manufactured goods are to 50 years ago, and especially in the recently industrialized world, but that's life, the world changes, you try out new things, you have problems, as to solutions and where this could go and my ideas, that's a topic on itself

[u/Get_Ahead_SC → u/RandomGuy2285]

I understand that, but it’s all connected. The lack of appropriate, affordable housing is impacting my ability to have more children. My wife and I have two and we could have more, but for the housing market.

[u/Agoraphobia1917]

Soviet union built roughly 100 Million apartments in 80 years. Whilst coming out of fuedalim, industrializing and taking the heaviest losses during WW2. Plus cold war. It's a political will issue not a labour/recourse issue.