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

[Former President tack50]

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. We're currently fixing up a house in San Francisco that we own, but at this point it might be worth more to us if we keep it off the market (as we've done for the past five years). If we try to rent it, we'll either end up with section 8 getting forced on us or we'll spend years trying to find trustworthy people to live there who won't immediately stiff us on rent and force us through a years-long eviction process. At least by keeping the unit empty, we'll be able to maintain it at its current market value rather than have sixteen poor people move in and immediately turn it into a dump.

Doesn't San Francisco have an "empty housing tax"? Because that seems to be one of the most common ways that left of centre parties try to combat ever rising rent prices (alongside other stuff like price controls).

Then again such "empty housing taxes" tend to be used more against banks and real state agencies than against individual household owners but still

[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"