>Housing prices are rising sharply

Housing prices are rising sharply everywhere because we literally cannot keep up with demand. What do you want the government to do about that? Forcibly seize land and force people to build houses on it? Or would you rather we sterilize half the population to prevent demand growth?

Home prices generally go up over time, if for no other reason than inflation goes up over time, and there's absolutely no way to stop that short of extremely unpleasant solutions.

>So just do nothing then? That's your solution?

No, it's not. I've outlined several solutions throughout this thread. Some are temporary stop-gaps. Others are actual solutions. But the only long-term solution is to build more housing (probably outside the city) and increase wages. That's it. It's not magic, and it's the only thing that'll really work. Supplement that with subsidization for people incapable of working, and you're done. BUT that might mean that you live in Poughkeepsie and have an hour and 45 minute commute into the city. Which, frankly, you can already do.

>Do you know how much we spent on the Iraq war alone?

Yeah. About two trillion dollars direct by the federal government. What I don't understand is how you think federal spending has any bearing on state and city spending.

But even assuming that this comparison made sense, let's say you wanted to build some apartments in NYC. We'll assume that the average zoning district in NYC is R6, and we use the smallest possible minimum lot size as a proxy for average apartment land cost. So that's 1,700 square feet, of which at least 40% has to be open space, leaving us with a building of 1020 square feet. That allows you to build about 1.5 units of housing per zoning regulations at a land cost of about $78,000 per unit.

NYC is (conservatively) short 1,000,000 units. That's about $8 billion JUST in land cost. Even if we upzone like crazy, and can cut that in half, we're talking $4 billion in current land cost. And if the city actually tried to do this, the land cost would go up significantly due to supply and demand pressure.

The actual building is going to cost about $350 per square foot. At 1.5 units per 1020 square feet, we're talking about an extra $240,000 per unit. So now we're at $316,000 in costs per unit, or 1/3rd of a trillion dollars, and that's being extremely conservative. Even if you assume the federal government pays for all or part of it, that solves one small problem in one small corner of the country while doing nothing to address everywhere else. And if you take this model and sissy it throughout the US, that $300 billion turns into $30 trillion easy, which is about double the annual US federal budget.

Plus, your plan requires us to forcibly kick people out of their family homes to make room for other people, which is a truly shitty thing to do.

One possible way around this is a combination of the Austrian system with the Athenian antiparochi system: the city partners with developers to go to low-density homeowners and say "you give us your land to develop, we build multifamily housing on it, in return you get a couple of units in the new building to do with what you want, some of the units are market rate, and half are subsidized housing, and we'll also upzone the property to make sure the developer has enough profit motive to handle the building." Combine that with a gradual upzoning of neighborhoods from the center out and within a decade or two, we might get to a point where supply meets demand.

In the meantime, we should continue fighting for a living wage. And, if you want cheap rent, you may just have to live outside the city, because unfortunately there are not enough units for everyone that wants one, and the only fair way of dividing resources when demand exceeds supply is to price some people out. Because no matter how good it may feel, hysterics on Reddit don't actually stove anything.