3 Comments

I suppose you’re right that something is better than nothing. The government prefers the HAFF because it appears as an asset and not a liability, but would also owning the homes they built appear as an asset as well? The amount of assets the government owns as a % of GDP is low since so many assets were privatised. I guess at the end of the day the HAFF is at least some sort of return to government intervention in the housing market (at least in terms of people who can’t afford homes). We have too few homes and China appears to have too many!

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I was just saying to someone that, if only homes were tradeable, both the Chinese crisis and the homelessness problem everywhere else would be solved overnight.

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Absolutely agree the government should be building physical assets not accounting assets.

Rather than funding developers or propping up unsustainably high rents, the government should be building and managing a large stock of housing that sets the quality and cost standard for the market

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