Increasing throughput on the highways often only lets more people get to the same bottleneck in the same time. To actually alleviate that problem, the throughput of any bottlenecks would need to increase as well. Usually, that's in a highly desirable and expensive area.
Destroying much of the highly desirable and expensive area and covering it with highways and parking lots is one way to solve the problem, but is obviously a terrible idea.
i am not surprised its hardly mentioned, as it is only useful to a tiny percentage of the population of 1 region.
as a case study, it boils down to being a nice benefit of working at one of a select few large, highly successful companies.
can this service be replicated effectively anywhere else? by anyone else? even by the same company in a different region?
my initial answer to all of the above questions is no.
i think as part of an audit there would be a lot of questions regarding the gray area of auditing illegal AirBnb listings- ones where you have to pretend to be just 'visiting your friend'.
verifying that a place is abiding by certain standards and has passed AirBnb's audit but still breaking local laws would probably anger lots of neighbors.
lots of illegal listings exist, and auditing would bring that to light even more.
paying a small team of auditors would probably do a ton more damage to the business in terms of losing listings than turning a blind eye or making other attempts for users to indirectly police the issue of misleading or fraudulent listings.
People can import clothes from just about anywhere, and there is plenty of clothing for everyone (maybe not distributed evenly but enough exists)
Space and time are the constraints that drive housing prices. Building denser housing is expensive and hard, much more difficult than sourcing and importing clothing in today's world.
Localized markets can require localized policies, because applying the same rules evenly to all markets wouldn't make sense, abstaining from creating local rules can make things worse, but creating them can also create new problems.
I think rent control can be healthy as a small buffer. I think fundamentally these are 'microscopic' policy bandaids to larger macrosopic problems. Unfortunately, it takes a very powerful organization with the right incentives to solve the macroscopic problems.
While it is true that land is a finite resource which makes it a unique sort of asset, this is a separate issue than what GP raised. In fact, the point you raise goes in the opposite direction - it makes rent control far worse and more damaging!
Locking in pre-existing claims to land - through renters being allowed to stay in units as long as they wish at cheap prices, and enacting restrictive/NIMBY zoning laws - serves to constrict the housing supply. Because land is already a finite resource, any restriction on how many housing units per parcel of land end up being built is an even more harmful policy.
He might just mean "Merkle tree with digital signatures", which most people intimately familiar with block chain won't distinguish from block chain, despite the former being in general use in the software industry and the latter in general use by Ponzi schemes.
I am skeptical of how this may work out in practice.
Given rates of homeownership/rent in metropolitan areas without rent control, wouldn't this result in a significant portion of renters (younger people especially) quickly having to pay more in rent?
Thats the scenario I think about, lots of people suddenly have $12k more per year to spend, why wouldn't landlords just increase rent proportionally?
Rent control doesn't work long term [0]. If you have a healthy housing market, then normal market forces will keep rents down. That is not to say that creating a healthy housing market is easy, but it is a different problem.
At a high level, UBI is a wealth transfer from the rich to the poor [1]. One extreme is that 100% of the additional wealth received by the poor goes to rent, another extreme is that 0% does. [2]. The number will probably fall someplace in the middle, along with inflation on other assets. Regardless of what asset classes see what inflation, and what the exact amount of inflation is, the bottom tier of wealth/income people will control a bigger share of buying power, which should help them in aggregate.
Returning to the housing question, there is reason to think that UBI will improve the health of housing markets. One of the major issues in housing we are seeing is economic activity being concentrated in a few wealthy areas, driving up local housing prices. In addition to being a wealth transfer on an individual level, UBI is also a wealth transfer on a geographical level, where money goes from the few rich centers to the less rich areas. On the margins, this will cause people to move away from the high-demand areas and into the low-demand areas. I doubt this force will be strong enough to fix all of our housing markets, but I would expect it to help.
[0] Although it can work as a policy to shift market risks from the renter to the landlord; which may be worth doing.
[1] Assuming a rational funding system.
[2] Conceivably, the numbers could pass either bound, but I think that possibility falls clearly in the 'you need more specific justification; bucket.
What do you consider to be the core problem?
I think the root cause is expensive housing.
Increasing throughput on the highways often only lets more people get to the same bottleneck in the same time. To actually alleviate that problem, the throughput of any bottlenecks would need to increase as well. Usually, that's in a highly desirable and expensive area.
Destroying much of the highly desirable and expensive area and covering it with highways and parking lots is one way to solve the problem, but is obviously a terrible idea.