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

[AltWorlder]

Are there any Georgists who post on Atlas? If not, I can try to get up to speed on the literature so I can crow on about LVT while liberal YIMBYs and leftist PHIMBYs do their thing in threads like these

[AltWorlder]

There's already co-living spaces and experiments like tiny houses and housing built from shipping containers being worked on, so it's not as if there isn't "innovation" being done anyway.

[AltWorlder]

But as usual, leftists insist on "guaranteeing" certain standards for housing, which ensures that a significant chunk of people can never afford decent accommodations.

The argument that overregulation is preventing housing construction from being expedited is potentially convincing, but California's housing shortage is definitely not driven by something as specific as leftists hemming and hawing about basic livability regulations, and more by anti-development NIMBYs. Sure, some of them may be liberal hypocrites and you may denounce them as leftists standing in the way. But as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it's not their leftism that motivates their NIMBYism.

However, a developer who wanted to build such a complex could easily hire some trustworthy tenants to clean the communal spaces in exchange for a halved rent.

You were literally just bemoaning about how hard it is to find good tenants in San Francisco.

I am much more concerned about the psychological effects of living under a freeway overpass than I am about sharing a toilet with the Armenian guy down the hall.

False dilemma, easily

[AltWorlder]

I count restrictive zoning as overregulation. And yeah, it comes from a place of NIMBYism but linking NIMBYism to conservatism is an easy way to avoid self-introspection over this problem. We know who's writing these laws in CA.

NIMBYism motivated by "screw you, got mine" isn't very progressive, regardless of the political views espoused by the person who upholds it.

I'm also not sure if there are actual laws or regulations that actually push NIMBYism. Blocking construction or rejecting plans for dense housing are actions that aren't legislative in nature. Or refusing to repeal Prop 13.

[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

[AltWorlder]

https://twitter.com/dasharez0ne/status/1244778434120822785