That won't magically make enough housing appear on the market. Many of the major cities where jobs can be found have a chronic shortage of housing, at all levels of value.
We need to build housing like there's a WAR effort, like there's an actual battle against homelessness by building enough homes for everyone who wants to live in an area. NIMBY and 'sense of character' are the major issues that prevent this, along with the perverse incentive of existing residents to prefer the rising 'value' of their house due to artificial market scarcity.
It seems like this is true, and depressingly short term thinking on the part of governments. Social housing can be an asset for the state, and if not profitable at least less costly in the long term than current piecemeal approaches.
There are a plenty of people who want to build more housing, and they would make a lot of money doing that if it wasn't illegal. The problem is not capitalism, it's statism.
It's an infinite loop. Build more housing to suck in more jobs and people. Then you need even more housing since people from now-depleted surroundings come in. Rinse and repeat.
It's not capitalism or statism. It's lack of safeguards to prevent concentrating too many people and economy into too tiny pieces of land.
Homeless sweeps in many places in the US result in about 1 in 200 accepting help and the rest telling you to go procreate with yourself. Most by far prefer living in a place where normal rules don't apply. Loans would not be recovered - it would be a grant to allow them to continue living the way they choose.
If the state lets social housing be purchased then its stock of rentable housing diminishes until it needs to start renting out private properties, which means the taxpayer effectively paying investors' mortgages.
If instead the state invests in building a certain amount of social housing that can be maintained and used long term at affordable rent for people under a certain income, you would take inflationary pressure off the private housing market.
I'm not an economist but it seems obvious to me that paying private investors rent in order to provide short to medium term social housing is counter productive in the medium to long term, and it's something for example Ireland is doing a lot, contributing to Ireland's housing nightmare.
