>Wojtek:
>"Actually, in the area of housing, market is probably the best known
>distribution mechanism. There are really no other acceptable alternatives.
>What would you rather have instead of markets - Inheritance? Personal
>connections? Voting? Bureaucratic fiat? All of these strike me as breeding
>grounds for nepotism, favoritism, or discrimination."
>
>Well, in the UK we have bureaucratic fiat, breeding nepotism,
>favouritism and discrimination. The planning laws are designed to
>arrest new developments, hemming in cities behind so-called green
>belts, to prevent the plebs from invading the countryside. On top of
>that we had the Urban Taskforce and their injunction to 'build up,
>not out'.
>
>The outcome was the lowest level of housing starts since 1945.
>Whether the market would have corrected these imbalances is a bit of
>an academic point, because there is no free market in land in the UK.
Same here, hasn't been a free market in land in Australia ever. In 1835 some Tasmanians sailed across Bass Strait and negotiated to buy land from the local Aborigines, see (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Phillip_Association ) but the government vetoed the idea almost immediately. (The inference that the native Australians actually owned their land was anathema.)
There's been a market in land of course, but hardly a free market. After WW2 the policy for decades was to keep the price of residential land and housing low, to subsidise home ownership. Governments subsidised wide scale cheap public rental housing. They had no faith in markets at all, the markets having bred slums. This policy made private landlordism relatively unprofitable. It kept the profiteers out to some degree and succeeded in stimulating home ownership by the working class.
Nowadays, government policy has gone to the other extreme. Governments practically worship markets. So they pour billions of dollars into subsidising private landlords through negative gearing. Of course that's no more a "free" market than the 19th century colonial policy.
So I'm not sure what a free market in housing would look like exactly, except of course that no market operates profitably without a minimum degree of shortage. So obviously one necessary condition for a free market in housing would be for some people to be homeless.
No acceptable alternative? Well if that's acceptable to you, then it isn't to me.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas