Di Candia raves: more State to "lower" rents and destroy the market

Christian Di Candia, former mayor of Montevideo and current deputy secretary of Housing, said it bluntly in an interview with La Diaria: “The way to lower rent and the way to lower prices in the market is for the State to build housing for rent and offer it at lower prices.”

There it is, condensed in one sentence, the complete catechism of Uruguayan interventionism. There is no diagnosis of why prices are high. There is no mention of the tangled web of regulations, taxes, endless permits, rigid labor costs, or the destruction of private incentives. Just the same old recipe: more State, more public construction, and political prices. The rest of the market, according to this magical logic, “aligns” by contagion. As if prices were a number that can be decreed and not the result of millions of individual decisions.

Ludwig von Mises explained it with a clarity that still unsettles those who live off intervention. In his critique of the “middle path,” he demonstrated that isolated interventions do not stop. When the government sets a price below the market price—or when the State offers housing at subsidized prices—it creates relative scarcity. Demand skyrockets because the price no longer reflects the true scarcity of the good. Private supply retracts: who is going to invest capital, take risks, and maintain properties if the State competes with artificially low prices financed by taxes? Queues appear, informal rationing, deterioration of stock, and pressure for more controls. Each intervention creates the problem that justifies the next one. There is no stable “third way” between the market and socialism. Either prices are allowed to fulfill their signaling function—transmitting information about scarcity and preferences—or we move towards increasingly broad control.

Di Candia proposes exactly that: to turn the State into the great landlord at political prices. Where will the money come from to build and maintain these homes? From taxes. That is, from the destruction of private capital. Hans-Hermann Hoppe is even more direct and radical. The State does not produce wealth; it redistributes and consumes capital. “Public property” is not property in the strict economic sense: it lacks a residual owner who bears the losses. Without that owner, there is no rational calculation of costs or real incentives to maintain, improve, or allocate efficiently. What Hoppe calls institutionalized aggression against private property translates here into taxing those who build, maintain, and take risks to finance housing that the State itself manages with a permanent deficit, physical deterioration, and political clientelism.

International experience is a graveyard of these good intentions. Rent controls and massive public housing have repeatedly produced scarcity, degraded neighborhoods, black markets, and dependency. When restrictions were lifted—as happened in Argentina after the repeal of the rent law—the supply reacted quickly. When they are intensified, private supply retracts. It is not ideology: it is the logic of human action. No one invests long-term in a sector where the State competes with subsidized prices that it does not have to justify against a balance sheet.

The argument that “the State sets low prices and the market adjusts” is a basic conceptual error. Prices are not an arbitrary number. They are the result of the market process. Forcing them down does not increase the amount of square meters available; it simply hides the real scarcity and shifts the problem elsewhere. Meanwhile, the fiscal cost is socialized, capital productivity falls, and true private builders—the only ones capable of sustainably increasing supply—face a competitor that is not accountable for losses and can afford eternal inefficiencies.

If the goal were truly to lower rents, the agenda would be different: reduce taxes on construction and property, eliminate absurd regulatory barriers, simplify permits, genuinely respect private property, and let supply respond to demand. That is what increases the housing stock and genuinely and sustainably lowers prices. What Di Candia proposes is the opposite: more State, more distortion, more dependency, and more destruction of capital.

This is not a technical proposal or a serious housing policy. It is the same statist logic as always, dressed in social concern. Mises and Hoppe already warned precisely where this path leads. Recent history confirms it time and again. The rest is a narrative to justify more power and more spending.