4 ms·

If you are happy, who am I to argue with that. Maybe you just really like your landlord. "living in it now a world in which everyone else did things like this

• thaumaturgy 15y ago
  I'm seriously amused by your last paragraph. It actually made me smile, because, despite explaining precisely why I'm doing this kind of stuff, you're still looking for the "angle", and that's the best example of why I find this attitude so difficult to communicate in an effective way to so many other people (and why I've all but given up at it). Yes, I am now living in a place with lower rent than I might be otherwise, but the rent is not lower than the total amount of money and time I have put into it; yes, the landlords might write an amazing letter of recommendation, but my experience so far has been that it's nearly impossible to wrest any kind of letter out of a landlord, no matter how good your relationship. As far as capitalism goes ... y'know, I don't dislike it, but I don't think it's an answer to everyone's needs, either. In order to work, capitalism requires that everything have a measurable, monetary value, and that most people agree on that value. Talk about the Mona Lisa to a capitalist, and the capitalist will tell you that whatever is spent on insuring and protecting the Mona Lisa is representative of its value; talk about the Mona Lisa to an art expert, and they'll use a term that is utterly foreign to a capitalist: "priceless". If people had money to spend at capitalist parks, and capitalist parks realized that they could rent space to vendors (and make some money too), then capitalist vendors would move in and compete for the same spaces, and discerning customers would visit the best vendors, and everyone would be happy! ...except, the story doesn't end there, because eventually the capitalist park realizes that it has developed more value in its space by drawing people to a park where there's great food, so they raise the fees on the vendors, and the vendors realize that they can make more money by advertising more aggressively, or, better yet, by opening up side-businesses and operating those in the same park also ... eventually, this system corrupts itself and the park is no longer a park or the people can no longer afford to go there or any of a number of outcomes. For real world examples, look no further than the article that spawned this whole thread, or the huge number of empty commercial spaces that are still asking for ridiculous rents. So, I am skeptical of capitalism's ability to be anything more than a better economic model than anything else that's currently viable. And, the house does belong to the community, in a way, because it's a part of it, and it belongs to me, in a way, because I live in it. I think when I said "value", I was thinking of something different than what you were when you read it.
  • Tichy 15y ago
    One problem I have with your model is that it leads to blaming people for being lazy and anti-social. That might sound not so bad, but in communism this blaming went so far as to put people against the wall and shoot them. They couldn't explain why their system wasn't working, so they only explanation seemed to be "sabotage" as in people not being social enough. I just feel basing a system on selfishness (win-win) is more stable.
  • Tichy 15y ago
    "In order to work, capitalism requires that everything have a measurable, monetary value, and that most people agree on that value." It is the job of the market to determine the value. Corruption of capitalist parks might be a problem, although I did not say the park has to be owned by a company - just the people living around it need to own their houses. Presumably the cafe in question here will be replaced by something even more worthwhile. Who would be willing to pay the higher rent, if they can not put it to good use?
• thaumaturgy 15y ago
  I want to finish this conversation with just one point, which I'll try to make as clearly as possible. I started this thread with a post that included the question, "Why don't more poor people clean up their neighborhoods?" I was being rhetorical, but your comments here are a fine example of one of the reasons why they don't: lack of a sense of ownership. Let's set aside for a moment all of the other factors into why poor neighborhoods tend to be run-down and crime-ridden -- lack of resources, hunger, hopelessness, crime, drugs -- and imagine a neighborhood filled with perfectly rational poor people. We'll take Bob as an example. Bob rents a house for slightly less than he can afford from a landlord that, for whatever reason, is not interested in fixing the place up and demanding a higher rent. Maybe it's because the landlord also doesn't have the funds; maybe it's because all the other places in the neighborhood are run down too, so the landlord could never realize as much value from improvements. In Bob's neighborhood, none of the houses are freshly painted, because it's in nobody's best personal interest to do it, because they don't own the places. None of the yards are weeded or landscaped, the plumbing leaks, and the wiring is hazardous. Bob commits as little of his own resources to his house, because it doesn't belong to him. Eventually, the neighborhood becomes the victim of its own disrepair, and is no longer worth investing any money in at all. Bob, being perfectly rational, simply moves into a similar situation at another neighborhood. A wealthy investor shows up, purchases the homes for the rather low amounts that they command, from landlords happy to be rid of them and getting anything at all for them, and kicks out the tenants who simply move into other neighborhoods and repeat the pattern. The investor razes the miserable houses to the ground, which is probably the right thing to do at that point, and builds whatever their market research firm tells them is most valuable there -- a shopping center, parking, condominiums. This, indeed, is a cycle that is being played out every day all over the U.S.; I've personally seen it in more places than I could easily recall. But, I question that system. I think, if Bob weren't a rational actor, if instead he moved into a community and decided to behave as though it belonged to him as much as anyone else there, and subsequently started fixing little things here and there -- and then his neighbors did the same, because they didn't want to suddenly have the worst place on the block, and so on -- then, perhaps, poor people could discover that they can afford to live in nice neighborhoods after all. G'night.
  • Tichy 15y ago