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.
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landlords don’t build housing
They pay for it to be built. Unless you think the workers should work for free and not receive any benefit from their labor. Does hexbear know you feel this way? 🤣
Landlords don’t pay for buildings to get built, the renters ultimately do. Landlords are just middlemen.
Landlords pay up front (directly or via a loan, which the renters presumably cannot get) and assume the risk of vacancies and repairs. If landlords ceased to exist, how do you propose new housing stock be created? Should the government be your landlord?
And then they get bailed out by the government when their risk blows up.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/landlords-were-never-meant-to-get-bailout-funds-many-got-it-anyway-11590494400
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/blog/four-reasons-landlords-should-take-advantage-federal-rental-assistance/
And they have little to no risk in the first place because the market has such high demand that they can pretty much instantly fill vacancies, and they barely do repairs if at all. And at least where I live, renters are required to have/pay for renters insurance which further drives down the landlord’s risk. And on top of all that, they have security deposits to lower their risk even further. They don’t take on any meaningful risk.
Government investment into housing development (which then turn into market rate housing/co-ops), zoning fixes, and a LVT is the solution. The builders get paid, home ownership becomes affordable, the risks are dealt with, and renters aren’t being priced gouged. It would also do wonders to help fix the homelessness crisis.
And none of it needs the government to own your home.
You can’t be serious? Let’s review.
By who…? Come on, be honest, who do you think is going to do this 🤣
That allow who to build more housing?
Is literally what the West has right now.
We have these now.
This is a fine step. Most states have property taxes now that include the land that a rental sits on.
If you can’t pay for your own housing, your choices are either for the government to pay for it, or for the private sector to pay for it. In either event the entity that owns your house, that isn’t you, is your landlord. If you can’t pay for your own housing, and you don’t want the private sector or the government to provide it for you, then you’re homeless.
It was implied, but I later edited my comment, the government should do so. We have a massive housing crisis on our hands and there needs to be a solution. The government is so bloated that there is easily already the money somewhere to divert to something actually worthwhile.
Private developers, individual citizens, the government itself, etc. Anybody and everybody with a willingness to build a house should be able to do so without dealing with the ridiculous zoning laws we have now.
We have market-rate housing and co-ops at such a low rate. We need a massive increase in quantity. The private sector won’t do this because there is no profit motive, so it largely has to be the government who is building these. But once their built it shouldn’t be the government who owns it, it should be the co-ops, market-rate housing orgs, or literally individual citizens who own the housing,
I don’t want property taxes. Those need to be removed along with all other types of taxation. The only valid type of taxation should be land value tax, and a carbon emission tax. A property tax punishes a land owner for developing their land and using it more efficiently. A land value tax on the other hand incentivizes more effective use. It’s a massive topic and a massive difference. If you want to learn more I would recommend looking into georgism.
I disagree with your definition.
Ah God, I was wondering (cheering for) when you’d make the turn to “politically only possible with a socialist government” or something along those lines, but now I see you’re one of the famed georgists. First I’ve seen in the wild!
If you want to argue that it is a valid use of the state to produce low cost housing then this is an interesting conversation. But much of the rest of your response is nonsense. For instance -
You’re going to fund all the social programs of a modern government via, essentially, no taxes? Come on. If you want the government to provide a robust social safety net, including housing, you’ll be looking at Nordics level taxation.
You can be wrong if you want to be.
You’re the one person I hope becomes homeless
Don’t waste your breath, if anything Lemmy is somehow less financially literate than reddit.
You’re describing a developer. Most landlords aren’t developers.
And yes, the government should take on the role of developing residential properties and ensuring everyone has access to them. Housing is not a commodity, it’s a basic human need.
not to mention, many big developers aren’t paying cash to construct housing. they get a loan or establish a line of credit with or brokered via investors/banks/funds. the first rule of doing anything under capitalism is to use somebody else’s money to do it, and all those loans drawing on lines of credit ultimately leads back to the central bank anyway.
it’s a massive shell game to obscure the fact that workers do all the work to create the products and services and then have to pay their shitty wages right back to access the very things they create, just so maybe 2-3 million megarich assholes can roll around in piles of money and make an income for doing literally nothing.
landlords are among the most nakedly parasitic sectors of society, and even then we still get bootlicking bozos pretending they “provide” housing or are somehow responsible for the community infrastructure that makes living in the place where the house exists desirable.
Food is also a basic human need, and markets seem to work well-enough for that. The core difference is that, while we have an extreme abundance of food to the point of waste, cities have been underbuilding housing for decades and there are far more people wanting to move to them than available housing units, so only the richest people get the housing. This puts a lot of positive pressure on housing prices
That’s because it is easy to compete to sell food. Housing doesn’t work that way.
It’s not just cities, but I otherwise agree.
Agreed, but there’s a lot that could be done to make it much much easier. For nearly a century, housing policy has been explicitly designed to make housing a productive asset for investment, which is a goal that’s fundamentally opposed to housing being affordable.
Oh the risk! Well sure that entitles them to take money from people who actually work. Go find a landlord and
wait till you understand what ‘tax’ is
Oh, so you just want the state to be your landlord? Enjoy your cinderblock gulag.
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You can rent from someone else. That’s actually easier than moving cities, states, or countries.
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If you want to argue that the government should develop low cost housing, that’s an interesting discussion. In general, “supply” regardless of how it’s created, is the answer to high housing prices. I do fear that you’ll be dissatisfied with the quality of that government housing.
hmmmm
hmmm
Socialism is… When you own your own home??
spoiler
Yes, Socialism has home ownership.
The only thing that is state affiliated more than in Capitalism is the mean of production (businesses) being owned by the state. Everything else is still owned by individuals.
You are thinking of Communism.
Western countries already provide resources for our less fortunate friends and neighbors. But we don’t use the police power of the state to force those resources on people that don’t want them. We also don’t round them up and force them to fight for our Moscovi overlords that are just a itsy-bitsy more equal than the rest of us. Hmmmm
In the west all of your children have the freedom to grow up as homeless crack heads living in tent cities, how inspiring.
😂🤣😂
Median US Household Income - $70,784
Median Moscovi Household Income -$27,634
Well shit, little Yuri, looks like a good deal for us.
Nice whataboutism you tankie! Centrist liberal tankie!!!
Lol. Lmao even
It’s true. That’s why our homelessness incidence are less than 10% of yours. Maybe that’s why you’re trying to drive yours down by conscripting your homeless and forcing them into “former glory” wars?
Hahahahahahahhahaha
You aren’t a real person, ‘opinion’ discarded
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As someone who has been homeless, I would MUCH rather live my entire life in a “cinderblock gulag” then spend even a second homeless. So, yes, if we ever were to get such buildings provided to us from the government, I would greatly enjoy them.
If you own property the state is already your landlord.
Well, then tell the government to come clean my gutter.
sis, I would love living in a small apartment complex where everything is either five minutes away or easily accessed by public transportation
I would love being in an environment that promotes a collective spirit where people spend more time outside than inside
I would love having housing be 4% AT MOST of my monthly paycheck
but we gotta have idiots with trillions because they deserve to hang us out to dry, is that it?
of course they do. we actually understand that production doesn’t require middle men. we’re communists, fool.
No they usually don’t pay for anything to be built. Even if they did, they just pay for it with other peoples labor (their renters)
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Because you don’t seem to be connecting the points together. Lead a horse to water but can’t force it to drink kinda situation.
Landlords didn’t do anything but have capital. Workers built the damn thing.
That’s the water I was talking about.
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smh at the products of the American school system
you’re replying to someone who said landlords are unnecessary middlemen in the construction of housing. your mocking analogy is “people buying things with credit cards”. do you not see how funny a self-own that is?
the landlords are the credit cards in your analogy. people bought things before credit cards existed. people built housing before landlords existed. landlords are as necessary to the building of housing as credit cards are to the buying of toilet paper.
tho I wouldn’t be surprised if you thought Buttcoin was necessary for cleaning your shitty ass.
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Housing can get built without the professional middlemen involved, believe it or not.
Right? I think it’s weird. If nobody pays the house, they just don’t build more house, I guess.
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People, collectively.
Ideally all the shitheads obsessed with “owning” get removed from the equation
But they’re free to do that right now and it doesn’t happen. Not on the scale we require. Asking people to donate their time to build houses just isn’t a scalable solution in modern society.
You misspelled capitalist
This is a very sudden jump from “housing shouldn’t be so expensive”, which essentially everyone agrees with, to “we should abolish private property”, which you’ll find is a significantly less popular proposal.
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Communism brought Russia from a feudal industrial backwater to putting the first people in space in the span like 20-30 years, and they crushed the Nazi war machine in the process.
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Literally every other western country had some sort of nonaggression pact with the Nazis in that time period, Stalin wanted to send a million men to Czechoslovakia to stop Hitler there but the allies said no.
Communist governance is responsible for dramatically increasing living standards of people across the world. A clever trick that capitalists like to do is pretend that all the work done by the CPC in the last few decades has actually been done by capitalism!
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A pact that was a necessity when all the Allies rebuffed the USSR, but also a pact that documents show the USSR never even intended to honour from day one.
The USSR entered Poland after it was clear the Polish army was collapsing. The alternative was to let the Nazis occupy the whole thing. Britain and France went to war with Germany to preserve Polish independence. If they thought the USSR was just as bad as the Nazis, why didn’t they also declare war on the Soviets in 1939?
More like the Soviet Union liberated Polish-occupied Belarus and Ukraine after Poland stole Belarusian and Ukrainian land during the early 1920s. Or are you one of those Polish ultranationalists seething that Lviv is a Ukrainian city instead of a Polish one?
My grandmother would be dead or germanified and we would probably be speaking german if not for the Soviet Union.
They saved Poland dumbass.
With an 89% home ownership rate? Yeah, damn, it would really suck for 9/10 people to live in a home that they own.
Almost all the top countries on that list are socialist or were socialist until the 90s. It’s almost as if socialism actually results in homes being treated as basic needs for people instead of commodities for landlords to make money off of.
NPC talk. Youre just spouting lines
I used to be a bourgeois land owner, but then I took an arrow to the knee.
Did you see that poor person? Filthy creatures.
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got something wrong with pronouns?
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Lol are you gonna call me “woke” next
:PIGPOOPBALLS: :gulag:
Transphobes gtfo
what’s wrong with you
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Heres one of the largest housing developments in new york: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-op_City,_Bronx
Let’s start with pretty much the entirety of millenials and gen z that would love to own a home.
I mean, then there’s the homeless.
Not landlords, because we’re imagining a different society than the single model in your aphantasia afflicted head, believe it or not
The people living in them usually.
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.
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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.
You’re really going to have to define your metrics for “tend to do really poorly over time”.
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.
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).
Hmm yes, when I want a house built I call up a landlord, this is very logical behavior
70% of housing stock in the UK was built by the government in the 1970s
The same crews who do now 🤨
I never saw a landlord or developer do any work to prepare an area or build anything on any of the jobsites I was on.
And who paid those crews?
The renters, ultimately. Landlords are just middle men who need to be cut out of the equation through a land tax system and massive investments in housing development, zoning fixes, and market rate housing/co-ops.
The only “job” landlords have is owning, which isn’t a job and adds nothing. They are a burden and inefficiency of the economy, and a burden on people.
I actually agree with a lot of those proposals, but property ownership still comes with a level of long-term required investment that many people simply do not want and cannot afford. You could vaporize every landlord in New York City today, and the housing would still be incredibly valuable and far more expensive than most people could afford. I live here myself, and while I do hope to own some day, that’s simply not financially feasible for me right now. People like me need to rent, and thus we need to rent from somebody. I only moved here a year ago, and I’m quite happy to have not had to combine all the hassle of moving with the added pressure of purchasing an asset that will tie up my net worth for a good few decades.
I can see some merit to systems like China or Singapore where land is leased directly from the government rather than private landlords (and arguably, given the existence of land and property taxes, it’s a nominal distinction really), but still, you’ve got the existence of an intermediate owner that performs maintenance and searches for tenants, with the bonus and curse that that intermediate has no profit motive to actually perform that work.
That’s largely due to the lack of supply of housing. And that’s why I think the government should be absolutely spamming housing units. Even if we kept landlords, they’d have no leverage to keep rents sky high.
And I think that your choice for that somebody should be better than some rich fuck who owns half the city’s housing (mildly exaggerating).
The person who does that work doesn’t need to be the owner though.
You know, so long as we can agree that lack of supply is the core issue, the rest of all that is really just details haha. I’m not hugely confident of public housing’s track record in the US (though there’s obviously a lot that went into that), but whether it’s new public housing or just loosening zoning and allowing the market to actually meet demand, I don’t really care so long as there are units.
It’s one of the core issues. I think there is a lot more baked into this, but if this is one of the things we can agree on then so be it.
While I do think public housing is a part of the solution, and has a lot of mistakes to learn from, I think co-ops should be the main workhorse/end goal for government built housing.
I say, all of the above. Any possible way to increase the supply is a good thing.
There is value in someone figuring out all the finance mess so that when someone wants a place to live it exists. I.know how to build a house (I was in construction in my younger days). I don’t want to spent 200 days of my life building a house, I just want a place to live.
That’s the job of a manager, which isn’t what a landlord generally does. And even on the rare times when a landlord actually does do some financial management, it takes up a minority of the time.
I would like to do so at some point, and I don’t blame you for not wanting to do so. But housing needs to be affordable and it isn’t.
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Generally speaking, construction workers were found to be better at building houses than landlords.
And do the construction workers build housing for free? Or do they deserve to be paid?
Who even said they don’t deserve to be paid? Also, construction workers are typically paid by the construction company or contractor.
Landlords should not exist
I’m not even sure why I’d respond to someone as intellectually dishonest as you. But if you want to live in a shelter, your shelter has to be paid for. If you can’t pay for the full construction costs yourself then you have to get a loan and the bank gets paid. If you can’t get a loan, then you have to pay someone that can get a loan and that person gets paid. This isn’t a hard concept.
If you’d like to argue that the state should provide a minimum shelter for every individual, then that’s a interesting conversation that we can have. But a simple “landlords shouldn’t exist” is an unbelievably ignorant position held only by children and morons. Because even if a “the state provides shelter” scenario it’s the state that is your landlord.
no, because housing is a human right, and the fact that you want to live in a society where someone has commodified your right to survive to this degree, is as pathetic as it is terrifying.
If you don’t think that housing has to be paid for, via any number of reasonable means, then you’re explicitly arguing that you deserve the labor of others. That’s called stealing. And slavery.
If you want to have a reasonable conversation, tell us how you think the workers that produce the materials and build the housing should be paid. The only pathetic thing is when people refuse to answer this question.
Why did you choose to resort to false equivalence? You sounded like you had a point worth discussing until you pulled out this trick.
Regardless of housing being a human right, the space used has to exist, materials have to be used to make or upkeep the structure, and it has to be prevented from decaying to the point it can no longer be habitable.
Building and upkeeping these spaces requires expenditure of resources (building materials, time, work effort). Where is that supposed to come from? Whatever source for these resources exists has to get them from somewhere, and if you don’t expect to have to help upkeep their ability to provide these resources over time, someone else would have to.
There’s no way to magic these resources out of thin air. Even without the grim specter of Capitalism, the wood and nails have to come from somewhere, and someone has to put it together. Someone has to keep it from falling apart.
Any further discussion boils down to: Do you accept the responsibility of contributing your fair share, or do you expect someone else to subsidize your fair share in some way to make up for what you can’t or won’t contribute?
I’m not making any judgement one way or the other, just saying that there is no social/political system in which you can make something out of nothing. Some people are going to over simplify that, but it’s a valid question. Where are these things supposed to come from when someone can’t provide it for themselves? Who should be made responsible?
I don’t have the answers, but calling the expectation that others provide it for you “stealing or slavery” isn’t an absolutely absurd leap.
And who’s paying the construction company or contractor?
Like, if you want to advocate for the abolition of private property ownership, that’s fine, and it’s a model that has actually worked halfway decently in some countries (though the lifetime leases aren’t necessarily that functionally different than ownership). But just own up to what you’re actually proposing and state that you think the government should own all property.
and who do you think composes the government?
elected represenatives.
https://eyeonhousing.org/2023/02/age-of-housing-stock-by-state-4/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20latest%20data,an%20important%20remodeling%20market%20indicator.
The vast majority of the US’s housing stock has been paid off. Every time a residential property changes hands, the bank gets to re-collect all of their fees for…what, exactly? Making money available? They only do that because they’re underwritten by the federal government, subsidized by taxes.
So why don’t we just give direct loans to people, and subsidize those who need it directly instead of funneling the money through dozens of greedy hands taking percentages off the top?
Or in other words, the government becomes the landlord. If you’re not allowed to transfer ownership to someone else, you don’t own it.
The construction workers got paid within a short time of the house being built. The developer got most of the money, and the bank continues to collect on the property for decades. The value of most of the US’s housing stock was paid for years ago, and now we are all just paying for financial shell games to enrich the already rich.
Never mind how ridiculous your question is to begin with (what do landlords, the useless money syphoning middlepeople, have to do with building???), but the reality is that there are already enough empty properties to house all of the homeless people in most countries you check (US, UK, Canada for starters), not only once, but several times over.
It isn’t lack of housing that causes homelessness, it’s capitalism and the selfish greed it encourages.
That statistic regarding available housing ignores a lot of things. Where do the resources come from to keep this available housing in livable conditions? What is considered the minimum livable condition for these spaces? Who is responsible for keeping these spaces livable? What guarantee is there that any of this available housing is within reasonable travel distance of other necessities (not even speaking of employment, there’s urban food deserts to consider)?
At some point there is a required expenditure of resources, even if enough physical homes exist.