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Anybody have an example of progressives advocating redistribution of something that we don't have an abundance of? I can't think of one. You might say housing,
by burkaman 5y ago
Anybody have an example of progressives advocating redistribution of something that we don't have an abundance of? I can't think of one.
You might say housing, but I don't think I've heard anyone call for the "redistribution of housing", because that doesn't really make sense. Progressives generally call for universal housing, and redistribution of wealth to achieve that goal.
- breadbreadbread 5y agoWe do have an abundance of housing. There are millions of empty homes/housing units. Housing redistribution would involve cracking down on the landlord class to release those homes from exploitative pricing and rental strategies.
- pirate787 5y agoWhat are you proposing by "cracking down"? I disagree with your sentiment but do think that it is absurd the federal government subsidizes mortgages on second homes. But I haven't heard a single proposal from the left to eliminate that welfare program for the wealthy.
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y agoProbably because once you get away from the coasts, you realize that a lot of people with second homes are not what you'd typically think of as wealthy. Around here a second home is often a cabin "Up North" or a trailer home on a few acres where you go hunting a few times a year or spend weekends. Something your average electrician or plumber can afford. Good luck to any politician that goes up against that!
- breadbreadbread 5y agoJust to be clear, Landlords and Home Owners aren't the same. I do live in a coastal city, but I think even rural/suburban areas would agree that the real estate market has made home ownership less and less achievable. I suppose that the issue I'm concerned with is more generally about the American real estate market at large, landlords/the rent cycle are just a part of that.
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- krferriter 5y agoWe don't have an abundance of housing compared to past times. In desirable-to-live areas there are severe housing shortages, largely due to NIMBY activists opposing new construction of housing in those desirable-to-live areas because they want to protect and further inflate the price of their own property by using the government to artificially constrain the supply.
- slibhb 5y agoHealthcare is another example. The general point here is: what good is a right to X during a shortage of X? As in "what good is a right to food during a famine?"
- burkaman 5y agoI understand and agree with the general point, I just don't think progressives need to be taught this lesson. Everyone understands this. Healthcare is an example of something we have a shortage of, especially during the pandemic. Are there progressives calling for redistribution of healthcare? I don't think universal healthcare implies redistribution, I think it implies more healthcare that costs less.
- nradov 5y agoUniversal healthcare wouldn't really create more supply. It would just redistribute the supply more evenly. There would likely be longer queues for many non-emergency treatments.
- noahtallen 5y agoEither you have long wait times for non-critical things with critical needs met. Or you have short wait times for non-critical things, but critical needs are not met. I think the latter is a much worse situation, and it’s the status quo. I agree that increasing supply is necessary to solve both aspects of the problem. But keeping people alive should be the most important priority of any health care system, not keeping wait-times short for non-critical procedures.
- nradov 5y agoWell how do you differentiate critical versus non-critical needs? Canada has universal healthcare but they ration care by restricting supply, which results in long wait times for certain treatments. If a patient needs a hip replacement and is in severe pain is that critical or non-critical? https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/podcast/2018/oct/truth-about-waiting-see-doctor-canada https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/podcast/2018/o...
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- jdavis703 5y agoInclusionary zoning (which I support with caveats) is literally housing redistribution. The people renting at market rate are subsidizing the people renting at below market rate. If that isn’t redistribution I don’t know what is. Especially in cities that set an IZ rate so high it drives up market rate rents to luxury levels (looks at SF).
- Ma8ee 5y agoWhy do you think that the people that rent at market rate subsidise the people that rent below market rate?
- jdavis703 5y agoDevelopers won’t build an apartment that won’t financially pencil out. Roughly speaking the developers will take whatever cost is required for IZ, and then add it to the costs of building a market rate unit. If the costs exceed the market rate, the project won’t be built because it’s unprofitable. This in turn increases the price of housing that winds up on the market (this assumes there are projects on the tipping point of penciling out vs. not). It’s essentially a tax. There’s a fair amount of research on this, here’s one paper if you’re interested in learning more: https://www.huduser.gov/portal/periodicals/cityscpe/vol23num1/ch6.pdf https://www.huduser.gov/portal/periodicals/cityscpe/vol23num...
- jahnu 5y agoAnd progressives generally do not call for a total redistribution of wealth but only a more equitable redistribution.
- aero142 5y agoI think positive rights like a right to housing(housing first homeless programs) and healthcare(people have a right to medical care) are a great example and I don't know why you are dismissing them as examples.
- burkaman 5y agoRedistribution in my understanding would mean taking away someone's housing or healthcare and giving it to someone else. I don't think I've heard anyone advocate for that. Since there are ways to achieve universal housing and healthcare without taking it away from anyone (which is what universal means), I don't think declaring them to be human rights means you support their redistribution. To be clear, I'm sure you can find some random Twitter user who thinks we should eat the rich and then give their homes to the homeless, but I'm thinking about progressive politicians and writers and people significant to the movement.
- 8note 5y agoI hear that quite frequently whenever somebody says they want to build more to reduce the housing shortage. The first step is kicking out existing residents, and the second step is buulding, and the the third step is bringing in new, richer residents.
- dylan604 5y agoAreas of LA just got rezoned from single family home to multi-family homes. You just know there will be properties purchased for the sole intent of knocking down the existing structures to build apartments/condos/etc. That seems like redistribution of housing to me.
- gmadsen 5y agoLand owners having more freedom to profitably use their land doesn't really seem like redistribution to me..
- imtringued 5y agoYes, single family zoning is an unfair redistribution from people renting apartments to home owners.
- burkaman 5y agoI guess I disagree with your definition of redistribution. That seems like increasing supply to me.
- kevingadd 5y ago"purchased" and "redistribution" are kind of contradictory. That's just the market.
- krferriter 5y agoWell, upzoning, particularly in formerly single-family home single-use residential streets near major cities like LA and SF Bay at the moment would generally result in the transfer of properties from multimillionaire NIMBY retirees and mid-aged administrators down to more working class condo/townhouse/duplex/splitlevel owners. It's a market-based solution for existing systemic inequality.
- gmadsen 5y agoI still don't follow. The NIMBY retiree would have to sell their property to presumably someone with a lot more capital than them to be able to build an apartment building. If you are referring to tenants possibly being lower socioeconomic status than the previous owner.. that isn't redistribution. If anything its the opposite, since now the property owner is probably a corporation
- brightball 5y agoRedistribution of wealth creates a redistribution of "everything" as a byproduct.
- kortilla 5y agoMoney. The calls for universal income of $1k/mo make absolutely no sense when you do the math.
- NineStarPoint 5y agoYou have a fair point, in that pure redistribution rarely causes an issue. But the general point, that you need to make sure an abundance of something exists for the government to ensure it is available to the poor, very much applies to housing. . Rent controls and requiring new developments to include affordable housing lower incentives for developers to creating more housing, which results in the general market's housing prices being even worse in another decade due to static supply with increasing demand. Progressives trying to ensure both new and old housing is distributed to the poor has just made the housing situation worse in the cities it was attempted in. The government would have been much better off just building massive housing structures itself to deal with the issue, if it wanted to take a direct hand in it (the government producing things directly being the other way an abundance agenda can be pursued). Where the quote goes wrong I think is bringing up progressives as if they're at fault for the current lack of abundance. The situation in the article is one where our attempts to create a massive economic surplus through global free trade have backfired. (Global free trade being a conservative/neoliberal plan where an abundance agenda is pursued by capitalistic methods.) This situation is a reminder that in capitalism, we optimize for profit, and optimizing for profit generally means having very little wiggle room for disruptions to a system. Making sure an abundance is available even during times of disruption is something that likely requires government intervention, not a lack of it.
- burkaman 5y agoThis is reasonable, I guess affordable housing requirements and rent control could be considered a form a redistribution, because they take an already existing supply of housing and force them to be accessible to the poor. Good point. It does sound a bit circular though - if developers are unwilling to build new housing if they're forced to make some of it affordable, why would they ever build any affordable housing at all if left alone by the government? I guess it depends on the details of the specific policy, so maybe too big a discussion for this thread.
- NineStarPoint 5y agoThe general the idea is that even if new housing isn't affordable, the existence of more housing overall lowers demand on older housing and therefore lowers prices. If you can encourage enough production of even luxury apartments, this forces the older apartments to lower rent as people capable of paying the old prices move to new locations. If enough houses are built, eventually you drive the price of the lower tiers of housing down far enough for the poor to afford (or at least the government to more easily fund access to.) Unfortunately, this is not a problem that can be solved quickly. The problem took us decades of under building new housing to get to, so it's not surprising it will take us time to get out of it either. One big caveat here is it requires people to actually live in the housing. If real estate is being bought and sat on as a speculation tool (or used as something like an air B&B instead of a rental), it won't actually meet the demand for habitation. As such, some sort of regulation is needed to ensure that housing is actually either lived in or rented out. Second issue is that, of course, NIMBYism is at least as big a threat if not more as price regulation. If things aren't allowed to be built due to local authorization either being impossible or the approval process taking ages to complete, requiring affordable housing be included is the least of your worries. Getting into the many flavors of NIMBY would indeed be too big a topic for this thread, but the overall effect on housing creation is definitely awful. Edit: As a note, there is a massive incentive for those who currently own property to not want housing to be affordable. Lack of supply drives the prices way up, and the people who have seen the worth of their housing double in the last decade don't want prices to go back down to a reasonable level. Since homeowners generally make up a sizeable portion of voters in a given area...it's not too surprising that people constantly vote in ways that make building harder, no matter how hard that makes life for the next generation.
- jakelazaroff 5y agoWe do have an abundance of housing, though. Around 17 million homes are vacant: https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?t=Vacancy&d=ACS%201-Year%20Estimates%20Detailed%20Tables&tid=ACSDT1Y2018.B25002 https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?t=Vacancy&d=ACS%201-Yea...
- closeparen 5y agoIn places no one wants to live. Settlement patterns change! It’s an urbanizing world, and there will always be some places in ascendance while others are in decline. It is perfectly natural for gluts and shortages to occur at the same time.
- jakelazaroff 5y agoLet's take NYC for example. According to census data [1], Manhattan (a place many people definitely want to live) had a 10.5% vacancy rate last year. At almost 914,000 total housing units, that's almost 96,000 vacant homes. According to the Bowery Mission [2], in the same time period there were 80,000 homeless people in NYC. So just in Manhattan, there were enough vacant homes for every homeless person in all five boroughs to get their own — with over 15,000 to spare! [1] https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/2020-population-and-housing-state-data.html https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/20... (change state to New York, click "Housing Unit Vacancy Rate" and then click Manhattan on the map) [2] https://www.bowery.org/homelessness/ https://www.bowery.org/homelessness/
- 8note 5y agoAgain, in places nobody wants to live. A janitors closet in NYC stops being a place you want to live when you have to be locked down in it
- jakelazaroff 5y agoYou may not want to, but there are objectively many, many people who do.
- closeparen 5y agoExcept where universal housing would change the character of the neighborhood or be disruptive to existing communities, which is everywhere with a housing crisis.