cross-posted from: https://lemmy.crimedad.work/post/12162
Why? Because apparently they need some more incentive to keep units occupied. Also, even though a property might be vacant, there’s still imputed rental income there. Its owner is just receiving it in the form of enjoying the unit for himself instead of receiving an actual rent check from a tenant. That imputed rent ought to be taxed like any other income.
Landlords do not build houses, they just rent them out. Housing, shelter call it whatever you like is human right and essential need, so it should not be a part of speculations for profits. Now you can see overpriced real estate because of investors who buy it and never live there. All this “helpers” who rent out their apartments bring more harm than benefit for society (they at least contribute to a price growth in real estate). Buildings could be constructed by government owned organizations in order to provide society with housing, no need in speculators to solve problems.
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Yup. Basically. Although it is worth noting that the type of government we currently have, beholden to capital, is not trustworthy. Their priorities first and foremost are to serving corporate interests, which is probably why you trust them so little. Any power or public capital they are entrusted with gets pumped into private companies whose sole purpose is to make as much profit as possible for as little expenditure.
Any government brave enough to outlaw private landlords is going to have much more socially oriented priorities and will be much more inclined to serve the public good rather than the almighty market.
Is this government controlled by the bourgeois or the proletariat class? If I can’t afford to buy a home (and even then, unless I’m rich enough to buy with cash I’m going to be beholden to the bank I get the loan from) I’m going to have to rent from the bourgeois class no matter what under capitalism, I just get a choice in which member of the bourgeois I get to rent from, they’re gonna be taking my money regardless. If the working class is in control of the state I actually get a say in who’s running the housing authority in my city, I can vote and advocate for housing policies I like, potentially I can make housing totally free, or at least cheap as dirt, cuz it’s not being run as part of the profit motive anymore, which is good for me as a renter. Or I can promote policies where the state build housing for people to own, Cuba for example has one of the highest home ownership rates in the world because the government funds the construction of very cheap housing that people basically “rent to own”.
depends on problem you are going to solve, if you want to provide people with affordable housing, then challenge your beliefs in almighty market.
While he’s doing that, perhaps you could challenge your belief in the efficacy of big government. Countries which prevent markets from operating efficiently tend to do really poorly over time. The more authoritarian, the worse they perform.
I think the solution lies somewhere between government and markets.
hehe considering market propaganda in education, on every media it is hard for me to not challenge my “belief” on a daily basis.
unfortunately in your comment you repeating neoliberal propaganda, please check guardian article on “free market zone libertarian experiment” tldr it led to low wage sweatshops and workers repression (and spoiler even this libertarian experiment relied on governmental support)
I argued that the solution is both, not one or the other. You provided me an example of an extreme in the other direction. I also think libertarianism and anarchy does not work. Please re-read my comment.
In general it means less government control over the markets. And less means libertarian concept (see article again). If you mean something in between , there is need in very detailed scale to find difference between current regulated markets, non regulated markets (libertarian nonsense) and balance that you want.
You’re really going to have to define your metrics for “tend to do really poorly over time”.
I get the point about anarchy (power vacuum arguments apply across implementations), but libertarianism is such a huge category that I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Libertarianism isn’t an economic system, there are socialist and capitalist extremes. It’s also not a government structure, it houses both anarchists and bigger government ideas.
It’s a philosophy that values the principles of individual liberty and non-aggression first and foremost, and everything else is discussed on those terms (I.e. how can we solve the problem with more liberty). There are different views about property rights, validity of certain types of taxes, etc, so you usually can’t generalize unless you believe we need authoritarianism or something.
If you could be more specific, we could probably have a constructive conversation.
If we, the workers, are the ones running that government monopoly and not an oligopoly of landlords and other speculators then yes, that would be more fair. It’s also a vastly more efficient way to guarantee that everyone is housed, as history shows
ok, so you want a society where people, yourself included (though I have a feeling you like to pretend otherwise), can end up homeless and destitute because… They don’t have enough of this imaginary thing some people made up so they could centralise their power and commodify the existence of the rest of us for profit, so they deserve to be left for dead, and that is something you agree with…
In other words - you’re oblivious scum
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Food is also an essential need, but it absolutely has a massive profit-driven market around it that generally works. I’d argue that there are specific flaws in the housing market that can and should be addressed, not that the very concept of having a housing market is inherently flawed.
Food also enjoys massive amounts of competition amongst what type of food to eat. Housing doesn’t.
At least here in the states unprepared food isn’t taxed either.
Should more be done to get food to the needy? Absolutely. Should we allow unfettered accumulation of private property (every domicile beyond your residence) at the behest of personal property (your residence)? I don’t think so.
Let people own more than one home; after everyone has one.
Otherwise it’s just cruelty as a feature of society, not a flaw. And I in good conscience can’t get behind that
You’re actually on to something here. There is far far far more food produced than we could ever consume; so much that a massive amount is literally thrown away. Whereas with housing, we’ve been grossly underbuilding for decades now. If, in a year, you have 25,000 people who want to move to your city, but you’ve only added 2000 units of housing, then the inevitable result is that the richest 2000 people get the housing, and the owners of that housing can charge extremely high prices. Given this, why the hell is it literally illegal in most of the land in our cities to build anything other than a detached single family home that might house four or five people, as opposed to a duplex or small apartment building that could house two or three times as many?
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t tweak around with the allocation incentives, but there’s simply no where to policy your way around the fact that our urban areas have far too little housing for the amount of people who want to live there.
for sure, there are many essential needs beyond housing and food. I cannot agree that it works well with food either, starving still exist even in “developed” countries. It looks you are trying to a patch something that really flawed. Unfortunately it is not a way. We should move away from profit oriented society and away from human exploitation.
You’d just swap profit for influence instead. Look at the USSR, they had issues feeding their population, yet the people in power largely got whatever they wanted.
See the famous trip Boris Yeltsin took to a Texas grocery store. At least in those days, capitalism handily beat communism in providing a variety of foods to the average person.
So the profit motive certainly has some benefits. It also has downsides, such as unequal Income distribution. But then, existing examples of communism/socialism also have similar problems.
So I think the discussion about economic system misses the mark. We can regulate capitalism to provide many of the benefits we want, so the discussion should be on what we actually want and what changes we need to make to get there. For housing, we could solve the problems we see in a number of ways, each with downsides, such as:
And so on. Switching the economic model comes with huge costs and I’m not convinced it’s actually better than fixing what we have.
I cannot accept your argument since variety of brands for similar product in the store doesn’t mean society can feed itself. It is wrong angle to see on the object. Since there is various of factors which could easily destroy such logic from quality of food to affordability (simple a lot of product in store, but people cannot buy it). Much better metric is satisfying the need, in our case in food. So in our case we should look at calories consumption and nutritional value. Look at cia document where conclusion is “American and Soviet citizens eat about the same amount of food each day but the Soviet diet may be more nutritious”.
The conclusion is that Americans ate too much, meaning there’s more food available than necessary, whereas Soviet citizens ate a better amount, but it consisted largely of less expensive foods like potatoes. Americans ate a lot more fish and meat (21% vs 8%), which is likely a marker for prosperity differences between average citizens. The difference was pretty small (~250 calories according to that document), so I’m not exactly sure what your point is.
In the USSR, we have a few examples of famine, such as Holodomor, and the US stepped in during the famines in the 1920s. Between those two periods, we see millions of deaths, somewhere between 5-10 million.
On the flipside, during the Great Depression in the US, few people starved and life expectancy likely rose. During this period, the US went through the Dust Bowl crisis, which doesn’t seem to have resulted in starvation (though it did result in displacement).
So from what I can tell, the US had much more consistent food availability throughout even the worst of crises, whereas the Soviet system seemed to struggle. Granted, starvation wasn’t really a thing after 1947, so the USSR seems to have at least met minimum expectations for food production. This is a decent Reddit thread on it, and the result is essentially that farmers don’t like collectivization much at all, and sometimes that resulted in huge problems like food shortages, and the USSR often resorted to imports when production wasn’t enough:
So basically, the USSR was dependent on food production in the west because its own production was often lacking. So not only did the US have more than enough food production for its own population, but it also had enough to help out the USSR (e.g. this massive grain deal).
Come now, that’s far less entertaining than tribalistic shitfling on the Internet, and isn’t that the real objective here?
Joking aside, a big solution that should absolutely be on that list is abolition of single-family zoning and a general reduction in the amount of red tape involved in building more housing. There are, and I am not kidding, multiple examples of middle-density housing being blocked because some local NIMBYs tried to have a laundromat protected as a historical landmark. In California, endless demands for environmental reviews can be weaponized such that the legal fees and wasted time make the financials for new housing fall through. And that’s even assuming you can find land that isn’t exclusively zoned for single-family homes. San Francisco has one of the worst housing markets in the country, and despite that, on 38% of its land, it is illegal to build housing that isn’t single family homes. At the end of the day, if you have a million people looking for housing and only a third as many units available, you can either build more, or you can accept that only the richest third of them will get housing. One of those options is much more enticing if you’re claiming to care about the poor.
I disagree, we should just make it less attractive. This can happen in a few ways:
And so on. The benefits here are varied, such as:
But as you noted, the above gets blocked by NIMBYs. But it is possible, as we can see in the Netherlands, which has largely reduced its vehicular traffic and improved the residential density. It wasn’t always that way, but they made a big push for it and people now don’t want to go back.
I totally agree that those are all good things, but I still see no real reason why the government has any business telling a homeowner who wants to split the building into a duplex that it’s illegal, because reasons.
The political cost of actually abolishing SF zoning is definitely high though, and proposals to make SF homes less attractive are definitely more politically palatable.
Yup, it’s really dumb. SF should have virtually no SFH-exclusive zoning since they’re very much space constrained, they should have a lot more mixed zoning (i.e. shops at ground level, housing above).