5 ms·

When do people start protesting over all of the decent housing being gobbled up by those who are not living in these houses?

• comeonseriously 5y ago
  My guess? Sooner rather than later. I think a LOT of things are going to come to a head sooner rather than later. Even those of us who make good money should be worrying about the direction things are going.
  • simonh 5y ago
    Employment is up, wages are up, booze is cheap.
    • vosper 5y ago
      And young people, oftn the most screwed over by housing and employment conditions, still don't vote https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/upshot/youth-voting-2020-election.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/upshot/youth-voting-2020-... (probably that's part of why they're the most screwed over)
    • comeonseriously 5y ago
      Wages are up. But inflation has eaten that and more away, so in terms of real money, wages at best are flat and at worse have gone down.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• warrenm 5y ago
  Who cares who's buying it? What do you have against people buying a property and then renting it out?
  • gambiting 5y ago
    Nothing. That's not what's happening though. In a lot of places people buy houses and don't even bother renting them out. So not only buying prices are increasing, but renting prices are increasing too, because there is a group of people choking the supply for own financial gain. >>Who cares who's buying it? Well, that's certainly one way of looking at it, but another is that as a society we might want to take a step back and think what do we want out of our cities - if we collectively want affordable housing that people who live in a city can use, then allowing foreign investement funds to buy houses and then not live them is probably a bad idea.
    • seoaeu 5y ago
      This problem is vastly overstated. The real issue is that there simply aren't enough homes being built for all the people who want to live in desirable cities
    • warrenm 5y ago
      Why do you care what someone else does with THEIR property? If I want to own something and leave it "empty", that's my prerogative
      • gambiting 5y ago
        But your property rights are not absolute. We don't allow people to dump toxic waste or burn tyres on their land, even if the land, the tyres and the toxic waste is entirely theirs. YOUR prerogative ends somewhere. I know indidualism is a tantalising idea but we live in a society with rules. People collectively can decide(and frequently do decide) that the values important to a town, a city or an entire state are more important than your right to buy and leave property empty. There are many places which either forbid owning property entirely if you are a foreign national and don't actually live there, or impose a heavy tax on such purchases. Vacancy tax is a thing too. Basically if a city(and by that I mean people of the city and its representatives) don't want houses to be sitting around empty, there are laws that can be introduced to force people to either move in, rent or sell the place, or they can keep the place standing empty at a heavy financial penalty if they wish. Like I said earlier - your prerogative ends somewhere.