Comment by purrcat259

Comment by purrcat259 13 hours ago

A bit OT but I live on a very land constrained island with the highest population density in Europe (see Malta).

There has been major increase in demand for housing and supply cannot be built fast enough to match. Its turned most of the island into a construction site so rampant that I made an online tracker for urban planning permits so folks can get ahead on knowing whats going on around them.

Idk if you have any wisdom but there's no creative solutionising happening, just the rich able to buy whatever property they want causing prices to rise which is pricing out the middle class, causing a whole lot of grief and downstream issues (such as plummeting fertility rate because homes are too expensive).

Is there a magic toggle we missed to unlock this creativity or am I being realistic by being skeptical that limiting important resources just leads to harsher inequality?

bigbadfeline 12 hours ago

> Is there a magic toggle we missed to unlock this creativity or am I being realistic by being skeptical that limiting important resources just leads to harsher inequality.

Creativity has been unlocked but it's not the magic kind, it's the rather mundane Robber Barron kind, where the robbers occupy the sources and hoard a bunch of goods to resell or rent at higher profits. It's true for housing, GPUs, RAM, etc. [1]

[1] Microsoft CEO says the company doesn't have enough electricity to install all the AI GPUs in its inventory - 'you may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can’t plug in'

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

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IncreasePosts 12 hours ago

Maybe Malta is just too small of a world for that magic toggle, since entrenched interests can basically just prevent the government from approving certain strategies, like building more large buildings with apartments like the Mercury Tower. But on the global stage, not even the biggest player(US) can dictate what China, India, the EU does, so if the US self-limits because of entrenched interests, that's just more juice for the squeeze for other players not aligned with the US.

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purrcat259 3 hours ago

Its definitely mostly entrenched interests that are the issue.
Funny you mention mercury tower. Thats a rich person's idea of what good housing is... which is way over the price any middle or even upper class person can afford. It isn't affordable housing, it's a parking lot for excess liquidity.
For what its worth it's the raising of property height limits that helped kick off a lot of the construction boom. One could argue the situation was better when the restrictions were bigger.

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