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I don't think that renting housing at a market rate, and letting those who can't afford it become subhuman, is a sensible model for an economy. It works for th

I don't think that renting housing at a market rate, and letting those who can't afford it become subhuman, is a sensible model for an economy. It works for the mobile wealthy, sure. I'll effectively never have to worry about paying for the rent unless I decided to move to like, Manhattan, and probably a ton of HN readers won't either. It works way better I think to give people a small plot of land, build them a basic house, and let them crack on with it. It's much better for someone to end up with a home in a state of disrepair and have to figure that out, than have a literal lord turf them out. Give a man a fish vs. teach them how to, that sort of thing. An apartment could also work though the legal structure is a bit more difficult. To put it another way - people who have literally zero capital are capital-F fucked. You can only ever apply a series of band-aids to that sort of situation, you can't actually fix it. The poorest people I've seen in council housing or in more rural areas have a hell of a lot more dignity than someone bouncing from apartment to apartment in an expensive city despite potentially being in "poverty" statistically. In brief - renting is financialization, if you don't have enough Money Points, you go and die. Simple, right?

randomdata 7y ago
> I don't think that renting housing at a market rate, and letting those who can't afford it become subhuman, is a sensible model for an economy. I disagree. The entire urbanization movement took place because housing became less and less affordable in rural areas, where the vast majority of the population was living. That push into urban areas, and everything that went along with executing that growth, brought us the best economic times we've ever seen. Housing became less and less affordable in rural areas because the people weren't needed there anymore. If we had provided some model to allow people to stay where they really wanted to, which, for most people, is close to friends and family, despite the lack of need for them the economy would have cratered. We are entering a similar time for dense urban areas, where there are more people than there is need for them to be there. The best thing for the economy is to have them leave to where they are now needed in 2019. However, we can agree that, generally speaking, people don't like to move. They prefer to stay close to friends and family. That is the issue upon us, balancing the needs of the economy and the needs of the humanities.
- maxerickson 7y ago
  Didn't rural living become relatively less attractive more than it became unaffordable? Like, people weren't driven off by land prices, they just went to work in cities because the income was much more attractive.
  - esotericn 7y ago
    The term "unaffordable" I think is too general here. The parent post seemingly defines it based on mortgages and income multipliers. It assumes this model of people having to trade labour for their housing, in money, incrementally per week/month/whatever, rather than having absolute (ish) dominion over a bit of land and then trading their labour for objects to put on that land (e.g. maintenance of the property). In that sense, if a home in a rural area costs $5000, it might "unaffordable" if there are no jobs nearby and we assume the person starts with zero capital. I would expect the model for most _actually_ rural living (aside from people buying holiday homes or whatever) would be that the property is owned outright. Affordability concerns then come from things like being able to run a car, health insurance, etc.
  - randomdata 7y ago
    Sure. We may talk like it is a binary issue, affordable or unaffordable, for simplicity, but reality is a spectrum. There are people who can easily afford to live somewhere, there are also people who can afford to live there but are on the cusp of it being unaffordable, and there are those who truly cannot afford it. Colloquially we may refer to those who are only the cusp of unaffordable as being among those who are actually in an unaffordable situation. Nevertheless, no matter how you want to categorize things, it remains that some simply could not afford to live in rural areas. Along with the urbanization movement came the growth of farms. If you have a parcel of land that an actual farmer wants to grow his farming business with, how are you going to compete if all you have a lowly job in town with no particular need for that land beyond wanting to live there? He wants and needs it a lot more than you do. It's not a whole lot different today. A single plot of farmland will sell for well over a million dollars these days. Unless you have significant wealth behind your name, how would you ever begin to afford that, unless you actually have plans to farm it and can roll the cost as a cost of doing business? To simply buy the property to live on? Not going to happen.
bb101 7y ago
The BBC had an interesting article this week exploring these very ideas in the context of the island of Barbuda. Why I don't want to own the land my business is built on: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-49210150 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-49210150

randomdata 7y ago

> I don't think that renting housing at a market rate, and letting those who can't afford it become subhuman, is a sensible model for an economy. I disagree. The entire urbanization movement took place because housing became less and less affordable in rural areas, where the vast majority of the population was living. That push into urban areas, and everything that went along with executing that growth, brought us the best economic times we've ever seen. Housing became less and less affordable in rural areas because the people weren't needed there anymore. If we had provided some model to allow people to stay where they really wanted to, which, for most people, is close to friends and family, despite the lack of need for them the economy would have cratered. We are entering a similar time for dense urban areas, where there are more people than there is need for them to be there. The best thing for the economy is to have them leave to where they are now needed in 2019. However, we can agree that, generally speaking, people don't like to move. They prefer to stay close to friends and family. That is the issue upon us, balancing the needs of the economy and the needs of the humanities.

maxerickson 7y ago
Didn't rural living become relatively less attractive more than it became unaffordable? Like, people weren't driven off by land prices, they just went to work in cities because the income was much more attractive.
- esotericn 7y ago
  The term "unaffordable" I think is too general here. The parent post seemingly defines it based on mortgages and income multipliers. It assumes this model of people having to trade labour for their housing, in money, incrementally per week/month/whatever, rather than having absolute (ish) dominion over a bit of land and then trading their labour for objects to put on that land (e.g. maintenance of the property). In that sense, if a home in a rural area costs $5000, it might "unaffordable" if there are no jobs nearby and we assume the person starts with zero capital. I would expect the model for most _actually_ rural living (aside from people buying holiday homes or whatever) would be that the property is owned outright. Affordability concerns then come from things like being able to run a car, health insurance, etc.
- randomdata 7y ago
  Sure. We may talk like it is a binary issue, affordable or unaffordable, for simplicity, but reality is a spectrum. There are people who can easily afford to live somewhere, there are also people who can afford to live there but are on the cusp of it being unaffordable, and there are those who truly cannot afford it. Colloquially we may refer to those who are only the cusp of unaffordable as being among those who are actually in an unaffordable situation. Nevertheless, no matter how you want to categorize things, it remains that some simply could not afford to live in rural areas. Along with the urbanization movement came the growth of farms. If you have a parcel of land that an actual farmer wants to grow his farming business with, how are you going to compete if all you have a lowly job in town with no particular need for that land beyond wanting to live there? He wants and needs it a lot more than you do. It's not a whole lot different today. A single plot of farmland will sell for well over a million dollars these days. Unless you have significant wealth behind your name, how would you ever begin to afford that, unless you actually have plans to farm it and can roll the cost as a cost of doing business? To simply buy the property to live on? Not going to happen.

bb101 7y ago

The BBC had an interesting article this week exploring these very ideas in the context of the island of Barbuda. Why I don't want to own the land my business is built on: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-49210150 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-49210150