"Eat The Landlords" - housing reform partisans target Brooklyn Housing Court overnight

[RINO Tom]

The work of trashy idiots.

[Stand With Israel. Crush Hamas]

Leftists destroyed this country's housing market with habitability warranties, zoning laws, rent control, and high taxes. Now they're acting as though the free market caused the housing shortage that came about as a direct result of their inept mismanagement.

I find your first paragraph to be unsympathetic, but I agree with you here. Rent control and overzealous zoning laws are to blame for where we are.

NIMBY-ism is a bipartisan belief, unfortunately. And YIMBY-ism is a suicidal political stance to take.

We need massive reform now.

BUILD MORE HOUSING.

Yep, this is an easily solvable problem through aggressive growth. We're choosing not to have enough homes.

As a concession to the left, rent control in a portion of these apartments will likely need to be instituted. But building more is the only way out of a housing crisis, and the current anti-landlord fixation of the authoritarian left is going to result in fewer homes, not more.

I did not know the Authoritarian left was so broad to include social democrats and anarchists.

Lie down with dogs, etc, etc.

[GoTfan]

Leftists destroyed this country's housing market with habitability warranties, zoning laws, rent control, and high taxes. Now they're acting as though the free market caused the housing shortage that came about as a direct result of their inept mismanagement.

I find your first paragraph to be unsympathetic, but I agree with you here. Rent control and overzealous zoning laws are to blame for where we are.

NIMBY-ism is a bipartisan belief, unfortunately. And YIMBY-ism is a suicidal political stance to take.

We need massive reform now.

BUILD MORE HOUSING.

Yep, this is an easily solvable problem through aggressive growth. We're choosing not to have enough homes.

As a concession to the left, rent control in a portion of these apartments will likely need to be instituted. But building more is the only way out of a housing crisis, and the current anti-landlord fixation of the authoritarian left is going to result in fewer homes, not more.

I did not know the Authoritarian left was so broad to include social democrats and anarchists.

That is the mind of people with money. Anyone who dares try to suggest new ideas is suddenly a Stalinist, conveniently forgetting that people turn to extreme ideologies when they are being left behind.

[John Dule]

That is the mind of people with money. Anyone who dares try to suggest new ideas is suddenly a Stalinist, conveniently forgetting that people turn to extreme ideologies when they are being left behind.

If lefties would come up with some new ideas, I'd be happy to hear them. Things like "housing is a human right" and "eat the landlords," however, are neither new nor ideas.

[Former President tack50]

Dule, what you are proposing already exists and is a relatively common thing for young people to do, particularly college students and single 20-something year olds in general.

It is called "renting a room". If you want to rent a room, nobody is really stopping you.

So I fail to see what benefit would Dule's proposed housing model provide. It is indeed dystopian and not suitable to raise a family at all (it is only barely suitable for young college students!)

And yes, most people on the left do want to solve homelessness. But solving homelessness also implies providing said homeless people with decent, humane accomodation.

Ironically most people here could probably get behind loosening housing codes and allowing many more high rise appartment buildings (around 4-12 stories high)

[Former President tack50]

This prevents new and innovative building designs from being tested (say, with shared communal cooking areas or bathrooms)

no what prevents these from being tested is that literally no one would ever want to live in a house without a toilet or kitchen: those things are terrible enough in university accommodation or large house shares as it is: just imagining how much worse it'd be with 20 people sharing a kitchen and no clear idea who would be responsible for actually cleaning it.

Its the sort of pie-in-the-sky concept that idiots that haven't actually lived in the real world propose without actually talking to the people that need housing.

Nonsense, Comrade Dule is onto a fantastic idea. Who could forget the extraordinary success of communal apartments in the Soviet Union?

Ironically, the USSR was actually good at solving housing shortages in a wat. Change all of SF and NYC into good old commieblocks and you solve housing right there.

Although you then need to consider how the transport infrastructure would deal with having so much more people but that is a separate question and I imagine much of the US is nowhere near "peak density"

[AltWorlder]

If lefties would come up with some new ideas, I'd be happy to hear them. Things like "housing is a human right" and "eat the landlords," however, are neither new nor ideas.

There's a sense in which all taxes are antagonistic to free enterprise … and yet we need taxes. We have to recognize that we must not hope for a Utopia that is unattainable. I would like to see a great deal less government activity than we have now, but I do not believe that we can have a situation in which we don't need government at all. We do need to provide for certain essential government functions — the national defense function, the police function, preserving law and order, maintaining a judiciary. So the question is, which are the least bad taxes? In my opinion the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land, the Henry George argument of many, many years ago.

- Milton Friedman

[SevenEleven]

That is the mind of people with money. Anyone who dares try to suggest new ideas is suddenly a Stalinist, conveniently forgetting that people turn to extreme ideologies when they are being left behind.

If lefties would come up with some new ideas, I'd be happy to hear them. Things like "housing is a human right" and "eat the landlords," however, are neither new nor ideas.

What is your argument against housing being a human right? I'm curious.

[GP270watch]

 Texas is no lefty haven, has more relaxed development laws and has for years had terrible affordable and low income housing stock.

Texas Has ‘Significant Shortages’ Of Low-Income Rentals, Study Finds

 A lot of the arguments in this thread make no sense and are just political philosophy as projection.

 In Singapore 80% of people live in governemnt housing that is highly regulated and for the most parts get's good marks even by outside observers.

 Public housing in Singapore

 It's funny how embracing "new ideas" never includes embracing things that have been proven to actually work.

 Or an approach to end homelessness such as Finland's "Housing First" as another example.

[Devout Centrist]

That is the mind of people with money. Anyone who dares try to suggest new ideas is suddenly a Stalinist, conveniently forgetting that people turn to extreme ideologies when they are being left behind.

If lefties would come up with some new ideas, I'd be happy to hear them. Things like "housing is a human right" and "eat the landlords," however, are neither new nor ideas.

I would prefer to invest public money into well integrated public housing. We should seek to create public housing for people of many different social backgrounds, not just the poor or working class.

Ideally, you’d construct townhouses and apartment complexes with residents consisting of working class families, young people, aspiring middle class families, and the elderly. Applicants would be offered different rents based on ability to pay. This would provide affordable housing for the poor and accommodations for young adults in the community. This also prevents poverty from being centralized in one neighborhood.

I am not very knowledgeable on housing policy, but this idea seems promising.

[John Dule]

I would prefer to invest public money into well integrated public housing. We should seek to create public housing for people of many different social backgrounds, not just the poor or working class.

Ideally, you’d construct townhouses and apartment complexes with residents consisting of working class families, young people, aspiring middle class families, and the elderly. Applicants would be offered different rents based on ability to pay. This would provide affordable housing for the poor and accommodations for young adults in the community. This also prevents poverty from being centralized in one neighborhood.

I am not very knowledgeable on housing policy, but this idea seems promising.

That is the mind of people with money. Anyone who dares try to suggest new ideas is suddenly a Stalinist, conveniently forgetting that people turn to extreme ideologies when they are being left behind.

If lefties would come up with some new ideas, I'd be happy to hear them. Things like "housing is a human right" and "eat the landlords," however, are neither new nor ideas.

What is your argument against housing being a human right? I'm curious.

I will respond to these two posts simultaneously. Firstly, the statement "Housing is a human right" is far too vague to be considered a practical policy proposal. However, let's assume that it means that everyone in this country should have the option to live in free government housing if they want to. The problem is that housing is a scarce resource, and if we establish that everyone has the right to lay claim to an equal portion of this scarce resource, the existing shortages will only be exacerbated.

For example, let's say we have a state that has 40,000 genuinely homeless people. These people are living in gutters and under freeways, and they need roofs over their heads. We declare that "housing is a human right" and that the government must provide housing for these people, either by building new units or purchasing old ones from landlords (perhaps using good ol' eminent domain to grease the wheels!). Here we run into our first snag: not all of these units are equal. Some are located adjacent to excellent views, nice parks, economic centers, and public transportation hubs. Others are in run-down, polluted cesspools. Geographically speaking, it is impossible to build truly "equal" housing for all 40,000 people. But without the market to assign value to these difficult-to-quantify intangible assets, we have to rely on the judgement of, say, a panel of government bureaucrats to determine who "deserves" to live where. Perhaps the neediest of the needy deserve the better housing? Of course, this incentivizes people to present their situations in the worst possible way to the decision-making bureaucrats. Perhaps to engender themselves to the panel's sympathy, they will purposely take on massive credit card debt, develop drug addictions, or have extra children. This sounds absurd, but remember, Devout Centrist said he wanted a system wherein housing was allocated based on ability to pay. It stands to reason that in order to get a guarantee of nicer housing, people would logically attempt to make their ability to pay completely nonexistent, thus proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are in dire need of housing.

But let's say we've now housed those 40,000 homeless people. Problem solved, right? Not even close. We've declared that housing is a human right, free of charge, which means that every deadbeat dad and slacker college student in the country now wants to get out of their rental agreements and get one of these sweet new "free housing" deals. A surge of applications for housing follows. Obviously the state government can't build new units fast enough to meet this surge in demand, so in order to honor their pledge to the public, they'll have to buy even more units for these new applicants. After all, if you genuinely believe that housing is a human right, then nobody should be paying rent at all... right? Logically speaking, a government that makes this guarantee must provide housing to anyone that asks for it, which is simply an untenable solution that creates far more problems than it solves.

Now, Devout Centrist seems to imply that these government-built, government-owned units will still charge rent, which I think is.... absolutely precious. The idea of the government being your landlord-- effectively the landlord for the entire state-- is practically feudal. In a system of private property ownership, you're at least able to shop around for good deals and weigh the pros and cons. With a "housing guarantee" however, you're probably stuck with whatever unit the bureaucratic panel assigns you. Applying for a housing change would probably require wading through a sizable amount of red tape, and even then it's a crap shoot whether or not you get the location/type of unit you actually want. And if DC's system comes into being, and people are actually forced to pay rent on their government housing (which, as far as I can tell, negates the whole "housing is a human right" mantra automatically-- what other "human rights" are you charged a fee for?), then tenants will still be incentivized to maintain a bad economic situation for themselves because their rent is based on their "ability to pay," a nebulous concept that is ultimately wholly arbitrary without the presence of a price system to establish concrete relationships in value.

Of course, you might say "Hang on a minute, John. Nobody wants to live in government housing. People will still be incentivized to work their way out of these state-controlled slums." Hmm... will they? The "townhouses and apartments" DC is describing sound pretty nice. Of course, you could let them deteriorate, or build them crappily, or not include certain essential features like kitchens and bathrooms-- all of these approaches would provide powerful incentives for people to move out. But then of course, you violate the all-important "habitability" thresholds put in place by lefty pearl-clutchers who want to make sure that everyone has a "right" to an electric stove, a 42-inch TV, a two-car garage, and a condo in downtown San Francisco. If the quality of these government units is anywhere close to that of the rental properties on the market, even middle-income people will feel a powerful incentive to take advantage of their newly-declared "human right."

This isn't even mentioning what will happen to the landlords. As more and more tenants move to government-guaranteed units, property owners will see their checks disappear and their assets depreciate in value. The blindly vindictive crypto-Maoist coalition of the progressive left will surely see this as a massive success-- despite the fact that many landlords are simply middle-income elderly people who purchased property to rent so that they could pass some assets to their children. But now that rents are plummeting, those investments will be worth next to nothing, and the growing government housing bureaucracy will purchase those depreciating units for pennies on the dollar. Generations of accumulated familial wealth (aka the backbone of the middle class) will evaporate as the market responds to the sudden shortage of demand for housing. Families will lose hundreds of thousands of dollars. Elderly people will go bankrupt. And as financial problems compound for the middle class, you'll see even more applicants trying to get their hands on a government-owned unit (a commodity that, at this point, will surely be in short supply).

Of course, so long as the public is united in a common misery, the activist left will be happy. This is because progressive policies are just as much about enacting vengeance as they are about helping people. A senior citizen losing their life's savings in a housing market crash is ok, because old people are lame. Ok boomer! Lol! No one cares about your stories about the Dust Bowl; you were born in the 1920s and so you're probably a racist, rich old white person anyway. Now the capitalist oppressor class will be forced into squalor along with the rest of us! Rather than work to improve my own situation, I'd prefer to drag everyone else in the world down to my level. Only then can I feel comfortable telling myself that the fault lies in "the system," not in me.

[DaWN]

The main reason there's a housing crisis in London at the moment is because whenever there is some land to build on, the developers almost always build luxury houses for Saudi princes and Russian oil tycoons, because the free market determines that as the much better investment. This leads to the absurdity of the skyline of a part of London as deprived as Elephant and Castle being dominated by 'luxury housing.'

[Starry Eyed Jagaloon]

The main reason there's a housing crisis in London at the moment is because whenever there is some land to build on, the developers almost always build luxury houses for Saudi princes and Russian oil tycoons, because the free market determines that as the much better investment. This leads to the absurdity of the skyline of a part of London as deprived as Elephant and Castle being dominated by 'luxury housing.'

The key thing to understand about this is that housing demand for luxury units doesn't disappear if they aren't built. If developers can't meet this demand, it will just become fashionable to move to Islington and fix up a rowhouse, which will push the people already there people to Essex, which will push the people already there to... You can't completely mitigate the problem by government action unless you fundamentally curtail property rights and market economics and the consequences of that would be much, much worse than what we have right now.

The solution, then, is to allow private developers to saturate the luxury market so then they'll move to the next highest market and the next and the next. The reason only these top tier units are being built is because the government has essentially implemented a cap on buildable housing, so only the most profitable projects are going forward. It's like if the government said you could only build 5,000 cars a year. The only cars that would be manufactured would be $80,000 luxury vehicles because that's where the highest profitability is. However, there is a limited market for that and because no such cap exists, the overwhelming majority of new cars retail for under $30,000 which is still somewhat profitable and the whole system works pretty well.

The takeaway, then, is that London is massively underbuilt and needs to allow much more development everywhere. And it isn't like you don't have room. Inner London has a density of about 29,000 people per square mile. Manhattan is at 70,000 people per square mile.

[Devout Centrist]

My goodness, where do I start?

Now, Devout Centrist seems to imply that these government-built, government-owned units will still charge rent, which I think is.... absolutely precious.

Tenants in public housing are still charged rent, albeit rent proportional to a percentage of the median income in the area.

The idea of the government being your landlord-- effectively the landlord for the entire state-- is practically feudal.

This is patently absurd and I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to say here. Most public housing in the United States is administered by local and state housing authorities, with additional funding provided by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. These authorities are usually municipal corporations with oversight organized by the city.

There is nothing even halfway feudal about this situation, unless you want to define any system that charges rent as feudalism. In which case, I have some bad news...

In a system of private property ownership, you're at least able to shop around for good deals and weigh the pros and cons.

Why can’t public housing coexist with private homeownership? Never did I suggest that we abolish the private market for rental properties. Unless you’re saying private property should be the only way to go. In which case, there’s no incentive for developers to build properties for the poor and working class.

With a "housing guarantee" however, you're probably stuck with whatever unit the bureaucratic panel assigns you. Applying for a housing change would probably require wading through a sizable amount of red tape, and even then it's a crap shoot whether or not you get the location/type of unit you actually want.

Mm, not quite. Our current system is needs based. Meaning that, you qualify for public housing if your income is below a certain threshold. This creates housing developments that are occupied by mostly poor people and working class families, concentrating poverty and crystalizing resistance to public housing.

By eliminating the needs based requirement and by constructing more public housing units, you are providing more options to working families, young people, and a variety of other renters. This is not assigning a person to a unit and forcing them to live there. You are giving them the option to live in affordable public housing or private rental properties.

And if DC's system comes into being, and people are actually forced to pay rent on their government housing (which, as far as I can tell, negates the whole "housing is a human right" mantra automatically-- what other "human rights" are you charged a fee for?),

Housing projects charge rent. Section 8 properties charge rent. Public housing in this country is subsidized, yes, but it is not free. Now, granted, there are housing vouchers but those are used to pay for private rental properties.

then tenants will still be incentivized to maintain a bad economic situation for themselves because their rent is based on their "ability to pay," a nebulous concept that is ultimately wholly arbitrary without the presence of a price system to establish concrete relationships in value.

If ‘ability to pay’ is defined as a proportion of a person’s income, where’s the disincentive to work? Say, for the sake of argument, you have a tenant who makes $1500 a month. Let’s say rent is capped at a third of their income for this particular property. They would pay $500 in rent per month.

Now let’s say you have a tenant who makes $3000 a month. Under this system, the maximum rent paid would be $1000 per month. Proportionally the same, but they have $2000 in remaining income after paying rent. There’s no incentive to ‘remain poor’ here.

Secondly, I provided a brief outline of an idea. As I said, I am not an expert on housing policy or benefit cliffs or whatever else. However, I think this is a worthy area for further research.

Of course, you might say "Hang on a minute, John. Nobody wants to live in government housing. People will still be incentivized to work their way out of these state-controlled slums."

What are you on about?? I just said public housing should be integrated into the local community. Not exclusively built in one neighborhood and left to rot!

The "townhouses and apartments" DC is describing sound pretty nice. Of course, you could let them deteriorate, or build them crappily, or not include certain essential features like kitchens and bathrooms-- all of these approaches would provide powerful incentives for people to move out.

Let me get this straight. You are suggesting that the government should seek to build public housing as poorly as possible so that the poor will have ‘incentive’ to move to better accommodations? Am I understanding this correctly?

But then of course, you violate the all-important "habitability" thresholds put in place by lefty pearl-clutchers who want to make sure that everyone has a "right" to an electric stove,

Averroes already broke down the issues with your boarding house idea, but surely providing electric stoves won’t bankrupt public and private housing developers.

a 42-inch TV, a two-car garage, and a condo in downtown San Francisco.

These are not, in fact, habitability requirements in downtown San Francisco.

If the quality of these government units is anywhere close to that of the rental properties on the market, even middle-income people will feel a powerful incentive to take advantage of their newly-declared "human right."

This is not a problem if you charge rent as a proportion of a person’s income. Although I should point out that middle income people in public housing is a net positive, as it reduces economic segregation and creates more competition in the broader rental market.

This isn't even mentioning what will happen to the landlords. As more and more tenants move to government-guaranteed units, property owners will see their checks disappear and their assets depreciate in value.

Again, these people still have to pay rent in public housing. Nowhere did I advocate for government guaranteed, free housing.

More competition will result in lower rents, yes, but isn’t that a net positive? The vast majority of people do not own rental properties.

The blindly vindictive crypto-Maoist coalition of the progressive left will surely see this as a massive success-- despite the fact that many landlords are simply middle-income elderly people who purchased property to rent so that they could pass some assets to their children.

Your own insecurities about college students aren’t my problem! This has quite literally nothing to do with my post.

But now that rents are plummeting, those investments will be worth next to nothing, and the growing government housing bureaucracy will purchase those depreciating units for pennies on the dollar.

This is quite an apocalyptic scenario. The amount of government investment in public housing needed to bankrupt the private rental market would be gargantuan.

Generations of accumulated familial wealth (aka the backbone of the middle class) will evaporate as the market responds to the sudden shortage of demand for housing. Families will lose hundreds of thousands of dollars. Elderly people will go bankrupt.

Most middle class families do not own or operate rental properties. It’s quite a small proportion of the total middle class.

And as financial problems compound for the middle class, you'll see even more applicants trying to get their hands on a government-owned unit (a commodity that, at this point, will surely be in short supply).

Since rental properties are in short supply, wouldn’t this lead to higher rents?  Which would, in turn, increase rental income for property owners?

Of course, so long as the public is united in a common misery, the activist left will be happy. This is because progressive policies are just as much about enacting vengeance as they are about helping people. A senior citizen losing their life's savings in a housing market crash is ok, because old people are lame. Ok boomer! Lol! No one cares about your stories about the Dust Bowl; you were born in the 1920s and so you're probably a racist, rich old white person anyway. Now the capitalist oppressor class will be forced into squalor along with the rest of us!.

More gratuitous, self serving nonsense. I don’t think I need to dignify this with a response.

Rather than work to improve my own situation, I'd prefer to drag everyone else in the world down to my level. Only then can I feel comfortable telling myself that the fault lies in "the system," not in me

Well if your boarding house idea ever gets off the ground, we may all be dragged down to your level soon enough!

[John Dule]

You're talking about a boarding house. Maybe you need to describe it that way to sell it to certain people. Maybe you need to describe it that way to sell it to yourself. I don't have a problem with it, because I know that life is getting worse for many people in rich countries and that a large share of them will be forced to settle for materially worse lives than their parents enjoyed.

Boarding houses operate on much more temporary timescales than what I'm talking about, put a greater emphasis on communal activities (such as meals), often provide meals for tenants, and often involve the owner living on-site. What I am talking about is closer to a dormitory, though the comparison is still not fully accurate.

A boarding house is in fact better than a freeway underpass. A boarding house full of people who know how to behave is probably better than a large apartment in most American public housing developments. But let's not pretend that middle class Americans actually want to live in that way, or that the lack of affordable housing in proximity to the most remunerative jobs is anything but a political choice regarding both housing and jobs. And I mean real housing,  not favelas comprised of  "tiny houses" and hipster-fied van homes or the neo-Victorian squalor of paying $2000 per month for a roomy bunk with high-speed internet.

Lol, I'm not saying this is anyone's ideal domicile. But then again, the way the American poor lives right now is probably not ideal either. Most people don't like trailer parks, public housing, or living on the streets. They do it because it is their best option out of a bunch of terrible ones.

"The state isn't protecting my claim to unearned capital and I can't see my share of the family's return, boohoo!  "

Wow. How about you define "unearned capital" for the rest of us, so we can better understand how much of our property we'd be allowed to keep in your world of perfect economic justice? You know, most social mobility is predicated on the ability of families to accrue wealth over more than one generation. But I suppose that in the interest of "fairness" we should set the inheritance tax at 100%, right? That way everyone will be equally consigned to lives of mediocre means.

[SevenEleven]

Wow. How about you define "unearned capital" for the rest of us,

Lol. I'm renting my house out to a friend right now while house-sitting long-term for family and I'm basically getting paid above cost to pay for something. Capital extraction may be gained, but it certainly isn't "earned". You're not providing necessary labor or a vital service, you're manipulating a situation where you have power and the other has less power.

Note: throwing out a strawman about the estate tax does not assist your argument.

[John Dule]

My goodness, where do I start?

Now, Devout Centrist seems to imply that these government-built, government-owned units will still charge rent, which I think is.... absolutely precious.

Tenants in public housing are still charged rent, albeit rent proportional to a percentage of the median income in the area.

So just to be clear, you support this? And that means that housing isn't a human right, yes?

In a system of private property ownership, you're at least able to shop around for good deals and weigh the pros and cons.

Why can’t public housing coexist with private homeownership? Never did I suggest that we abolish the private market for rental properties. Unless you’re saying private property should be the only way to go. In which case, there’s no incentive for developers to build properties for the poor and working class.

This is like saying "there's no incentive for car manufacturers to build cars that poor and working class people can buy." It just isn't true. So long as there is a reasonable amount of market demand for a product (housing) to be offered at a certain price, that demand will be met-- unless the government mucks up the system.

With a "housing guarantee" however, you're probably stuck with whatever unit the bureaucratic panel assigns you. Applying for a housing change would probably require wading through a sizable amount of red tape, and even then it's a crap shoot whether or not you get the location/type of unit you actually want.

Mm, not quite. Our current system is needs based. Meaning that, you qualify for public housing if your income is below a certain threshold. This creates housing developments that are occupied by mostly poor people and working class families, concentrating poverty and crystalizing resistance to public housing.

By eliminating the needs based requirement and by constructing more public housing units, you are providing more options to working families, young people, and a variety of other renters. This is not assigning a person to a unit and forcing them to live there. You are giving them the option to live in affordable public housing or private rental properties.

How, then, are the units allocated?

And if DC's system comes into being, and people are actually forced to pay rent on their government housing (which, as far as I can tell, negates the whole "housing is a human right" mantra automatically-- what other "human rights" are you charged a fee for?),

Housing projects charge rent. Section 8 properties charge rent. Public housing in this country is subsidized, yes, but it is not free. Now, granted, there are housing vouchers but those are used to pay for private rental properties.

Again, this defeats the concept of housing as a human right. You are not charged a fee for exercising your right to free speech, or for your right to vote. How is this "right" different from those others, in your mind?

The "townhouses and apartments" DC is describing sound pretty nice. Of course, you could let them deteriorate, or build them crappily, or not include certain essential features like kitchens and bathrooms-- all of these approaches would provide powerful incentives for people to move out.

Let me get this straight. You are suggesting that the government should seek to build public housing as poorly as possible so that the poor will have ‘incentive’ to move to better accommodations? Am I understanding this correctly?

I don't have time to explain the basics of rhetorical arguments to you; just respond to what I said without deliberately misinterpreting it.

But then of course, you violate the all-important "habitability" thresholds put in place by lefty pearl-clutchers who want to make sure that everyone has a "right" to an electric stove,

Averroes already broke down the issues with your boarding house idea, but surely providing electric stoves won’t bankrupt public and private housing developers.

a 42-inch TV, a two-car garage, and a condo in downtown San Francisco.

These are not, in fact, habitability requirements in downtown San Francisco.

See above.

If the quality of these government units is anywhere close to that of the rental properties on the market, even middle-income people will feel a powerful incentive to take advantage of their newly-declared "human right."

This is not a problem if you charge rent as a proportion of a person’s income. Although I should point out that middle income people in public housing is a net positive, as it reduces economic segregation and creates more competition in the broader rental market.

I still cannot wrap my head around why you're promoting this idea, then. If you're going to make housing a human right, you can't charge rent. If you're going to charge rent anyway, then why not just allow the market to provide this housing by scrapping the zoning regulations and HOAs that are preventing these kinds of units from being built? You are using the government to solve a problem that the government caused in the first place. It's unbelievably wasteful and pointless.

But now that rents are plummeting, those investments will be worth next to nothing, and the growing government housing bureaucracy will purchase those depreciating units for pennies on the dollar.

This is quite an apocalyptic scenario. The amount of government investment in public housing needed to bankrupt the private rental market would be gargantuan.

You're going to need that level of government investment when you declare that housing is a human right!

(I'm not going to respond to the other parts of your post because I would end up repeating myself.)

[John Dule]

Wow. How about you define "unearned capital" for the rest of us,

Lol. I'm renting my house out to a friend right now while house-sitting long-term for family and I'm basically getting paid above cost to pay for something. Capital extraction may be gained, but it certainly isn't "earned". You're not providing necessary labor or a vital service, you're manipulating a situation where you have power and the other has less power.

Note: throwing out a strawman about the estate tax does not assist your argument.

Lol, I suppose housing isn't a "vital service" now? And exercising your legal right to property is not "manipulating the system." You might as well say that people who exercise their right over a legal copyright are "manipulating the less powerful," or that someone who builds a house and then sells it has "taken advantage of their property rights to extort others." Ownership isn't theft.

My point about the estate tax followed logically from the complaints made in his post about "unearned" capital.

[Beet]

I don't want to sound flip, but the solution is simple: build more affordable housing, and bulldoze any special interests that get in the way. And the easiest way to do this is for the Party leadership of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which has outsized influence in urban areas, to make a determined effort to do so.

In the meantime, I am completely in favor of nonviolent squatting.

[SevenEleven]

Wow. How about you define "unearned capital" for the rest of us,

Lol. I'm renting my house out to a friend right now while house-sitting long-term for family and I'm basically getting paid above cost to pay for something. Capital extraction may be gained, but it certainly isn't "earned". You're not providing necessary labor or a vital service, you're manipulating a situation where you have power and the other has less power.

Note: throwing out a strawman about the estate tax does not assist your argument.

Lol, I suppose housing isn't a "vital service" now? And exercising your legal right to property is not "manipulating the system." You might as well say that people who exercise their right over a legal copyright are "manipulating the less powerful," or that someone who builds a house and then sells it has "taken advantage of their property rights to extort others." Ownership isn't theft.

My point about the estate tax followed logically from the complaints made in his post about "unearned" capital.

You aren't doing anything to "provide housing". A developer or a homebuilder actually engages on the labor and service level, therefore "earning" their capital. I understand the desire to morally justify something that benefits you at the expense of others, but crowing about how ungrateful the serfs are ain't it, man. You're using your wealth to purchase something you don't need in hopes of extracting more wealth from people who do have that need. It may not be legal theft, but I think you can do better than promoting predatory capitalism at the expense of more meritocratic variants. In fact, as a rather intelligent Berkeley man, I'd venture that you would benefit even more from a more meritocratic society than an extractory variant.

Your estate tax strawman has nothing to do with logic. People have the right to share their earnings how they please; whether it's passed along to offspring, used to generously tip above the market cost of an item, or given to schools or charity to help out others. Focus on one thing at a time and you'll get a healthier debate.

[lfromnj]

Wow. How about you define "unearned capital" for the rest of us,

Lol. I'm renting my house out to a friend right now while house-sitting long-term for family and I'm basically getting paid above cost to pay for something. Capital extraction may be gained, but it certainly isn't "earned". You're not providing necessary labor or a vital service, you're manipulating a situation where you have power and the other has less power.

Note: throwing out a strawman about the estate tax does not assist your argument.

Lol, I suppose housing isn't a "vital service" now? And exercising your legal right to property is not "manipulating the system." You might as well say that people who exercise their right over a legal copyright are "manipulating the less powerful," or that someone who builds a house and then sells it has "taken advantage of their property rights to extort others." Ownership isn't theft.

My point about the estate tax followed logically from the complaints made in his post about "unearned" capital.

You aren't doing anything to "provide housing". A developer or a homebuilder actually engages on the labor and service level, therefore "earning" their capital. I understand the desire to morally justify something that benefits you at the expense of others, but crowing about how ungrateful the serfs are ain't it, man. You're using your wealth to purchase something you don't need in hopes of extracting more wealth from people who do have that need. It may not be legal theft, but I think you can do better than promoting predatory capitalism at the expense of more meritocratic variants. In fact, as a rather intelligent Berkeley man, I'd venture that you would benefit even more from a more meritocratic society than an extractory variant.

Your estate tax strawman has nothing to do with logic. People have the right to share their earnings how they please; whether it's passed along to offspring, used to generously tip above the market cost of an item, or given to schools or charity to help out others. Focus on one thing at a time and you'll get a healthier debate.

And the homeowner did their own labor/job to earn money to buy the house. The only part that one could describe as unearned or without labor is the empty land plot which obviously never had any labor being required to create as land has always been there.

[John Dule]

I don't want to sound flip, but the solution is simple: build more affordable housing, and bulldoze any special interests that get in the way.

This is my goal as well.

And the easiest way to do this is for the Party leadership of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which has outsized influence in urban areas, to make a determined effort to do so.

However, this is not the easiest way of accomplishing it. The easiest way to do this would be to strip away laws that give HOAs power, end rent control, scrap zoning laws that restrict building height in certain neighborhoods, and quintuple the amount of new building construction allowed every year in the cities. This is an extremely simple solution that requires little government effort, and it will yield excellent results for everyone.

In the meantime, I am completely in favor of nonviolent squatting.

This is like saying "I want everyone to have water, and until they do, people should be allowed to steal it." Sounds good, doesn't work. Eventually no suppliers will even try to provide water, because they know that it's considered acceptable to steal it and the state has made it clear that they won't intervene. Without any incentive to make the product available, supply will (no pun intended) dry up.

[SevenEleven]

Wow. How about you define "unearned capital" for the rest of us,

Lol. I'm renting my house out to a friend right now while house-sitting long-term for family and I'm basically getting paid above cost to pay for something. Capital extraction may be gained, but it certainly isn't "earned". You're not providing necessary labor or a vital service, you're manipulating a situation where you have power and the other has less power.

Note: throwing out a strawman about the estate tax does not assist your argument.

Lol, I suppose housing isn't a "vital service" now? And exercising your legal right to property is not "manipulating the system." You might as well say that people who exercise their right over a legal copyright are "manipulating the less powerful," or that someone who builds a house and then sells it has "taken advantage of their property rights to extort others." Ownership isn't theft.

My point about the estate tax followed logically from the complaints made in his post about "unearned" capital.

You aren't doing anything to "provide housing". A developer or a homebuilder actually engages on the labor and service level, therefore "earning" their capital. I understand the desire to morally justify something that benefits you at the expense of others, but crowing about how ungrateful the serfs are ain't it, man. You're using your wealth to purchase something you don't need in hopes of extracting more wealth from people who do have that need. It may not be legal theft, but I think you can do better than promoting predatory capitalism at the expense of more meritocratic variants. In fact, as a rather intelligent Berkeley man, I'd venture that you would benefit even more from a more meritocratic society than an extractory variant.

Your estate tax strawman has nothing to do with logic. People have the right to share their earnings how they please; whether it's passed along to offspring, used to generously tip above the market cost of an item, or given to schools or charity to help out others. Focus on one thing at a time and you'll get a healthier debate.

And the homeowner did their own labor/job to earn money to buy the house. The only part that one could describe as unearned or without labor is the empty land plot.

And? Owning your personal home is a good thing. Owning someone else's home is not labor and it's not a service. It's a disservice because it prices people out of being able to afford to own their home. Food, water and shelter are understood to be basic human needs. If you think billionaires should be able to buy up the entire food supply and sell it for double the market value while people are starving to death in the streets, I don't know what to say.

Your earned wealth should purchase you a nicer home in a better location, you get to eat higher quality foods, perhaps prepared by adept chefs. You don't just get to take it all and say "pay me more or starve". I shudder to think about how violent your ideal society would be.

[John Dule]

Wow. How about you define "unearned capital" for the rest of us,

Lol. I'm renting my house out to a friend right now while house-sitting long-term for family and I'm basically getting paid above cost to pay for something. Capital extraction may be gained, but it certainly isn't "earned". You're not providing necessary labor or a vital service, you're manipulating a situation where you have power and the other has less power.

Note: throwing out a strawman about the estate tax does not assist your argument.

Lol, I suppose housing isn't a "vital service" now? And exercising your legal right to property is not "manipulating the system." You might as well say that people who exercise their right over a legal copyright are "manipulating the less powerful," or that someone who builds a house and then sells it has "taken advantage of their property rights to extort others." Ownership isn't theft.

My point about the estate tax followed logically from the complaints made in his post about "unearned" capital.

You aren't doing anything to "provide housing". A developer or a homebuilder actually engages on the labor and service level, therefore "earning" their capital. I understand the desire to morally justify something that benefits you at the expense of others, but crowing about how ungrateful the serfs are ain't it, man. You're using your wealth to purchase something you don't need in hopes of extracting more wealth from people who do have that need. It may not be legal theft, but I think you can do better than promoting predatory capitalism at the expense of more meritocratic variants. In fact, as a rather intelligent Berkeley man, I'd venture that you would benefit even more from a more meritocratic society than an extractory variant.

What you have described in the bold portion is, quite literally, the definition of investment. It is what farmers do when they plant more crops than they actually need, in the hopes that they will be able to sell the surplus. It is what venture capitalists do when they purchase commodities that they hope will appreciate in value. It is what companies do when they purchase intellectual property rights from other parties, and then use that copyright to produce products that are protected by property laws. It is the cornerstone of human innovation, capitalism, and economic progress.

You can demean it all you like, but don't think for a second that I feel the need to "justify" this beautiful aspect of human ingenuity. It requires no justification.

[John Dule]

If you think billionaires should be able to buy up the entire food supply and sell it for double the market value while people are starving to death in the streets, I don't know what to say.

Note: throwing out a strawman [...] does not assist your argument.