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Vacant != abandoned. Right from the article you linked, 2nd parg: "But this doesn’t mean millions of abandoned and dilapidated homes are withering away in the
by arbuge 4y ago
Vacant != abandoned.
Right from the article you linked, 2nd parg:
"But this doesn’t mean millions of abandoned and dilapidated homes are withering away in the suburbs. Vacant homes can be unoccupied for many reasons beyond being uninhabitable. For example, a house can be vacant because it’s still on the market to be sold or rented or it’s a vacation home not currently in use."
- DoctorNick 4y agoYes, we know. They should be expropriated.
- Asdrubalini 4y agoYou are confusing USA with USSR.
- jsnk 4y agoHow do you think this should be done?
- bredren 4y agoStrong financial incentives to not possess unoccupied homes. i.e. second homes are heavily taxed, out of state second homes are even more heavily taxed. Homes under management for long term housing or resale kept in unoccupied states longer than reasonably expected incur penalties. Homes kept unoccupied due to being priced out of reasonable band may do so for limited duration--every loophole has to be addressed with financial incentives. This includes reducing the business potential of domestic and foreign private equity groups picking up homes at depressed rates like what blackstone did. Residential property rental and transactions related to residential property must be way less lucrative.
- tedunangst 4y agoSo if my wife moves to Boston to advance her career, we get taxed like crazy? By who? But if we get divorced, it's all good? Or will it be fraud for us to keep dating after the divorce?
- junofan 4y ago> Residential property rental and transactions related to residential property must be way less lucrative. The problem is growing; why take a demand-side approach? Especially one so prone to making lawyers and government officials rich? You’re just trading like-for-like as demand grows over time. FWIW, I’m in favor of nationalizing zoning laws as Japan has done to fix supply.
- jsnk 4y agoSo this will discourage demand for housing, which will lead to discouraging the developers to build new properties. So you will cause rise in housing prices, rent and cause housing shortage eventually. Also, this doesn't seem to answer my question. How should expropriation be done exactly?
- tedunangst 4y agoSo if I move for work and can't sell the old house before my start date, I just lose it? What a system.
- maerF0x0 4y agono, you put in an application with the local governments for a like model transfer and wait in the queue like a good boy/girl/<pronoun> . /s
- delecti 4y agoDo you think all of the millions of owned but unoccupied houses are just "whoops it took me a couple extra weeks to sell"? It's ludicrous to suggest it's a significant fraction of the total, or that the suggestion is to require the immediate forfeit of any house when the owner moved out.
- tedunangst 4y agoWell, let's see the text of the proposed law and then I'll tell you whether it's ludicrous or not.
- ohCh6zos 4y agoPeople moving where the source house is still in the process of selling should have their house seized? I think that ends in everyone owning endless mortgages.
- slt2021 4y agopay market rate for the house and do whatever you want with it
- kelseyfrog 4y agoThere are approx 5.7M vacation homes in the US. There are also approx 550,000 homeless people in the US. A system which allows such misallocation is fundamentally broken. If this is what effecient resource allocation looks like, then I want something else.
- californical 4y agoOne can argue that those homes wouldn’t have existed in the first place without wealthy people to commission them for vacation homes. After all, homes aren’t just built for no reason, but because someone is willing to buy it
- kelseyfrog 4y agoHow does that argument lead to more unhoused people having homes?
- marcinzm 4y agoHow does having fewer homes in total lead to more unhoused people having homes? In these comments you seem more concerned about lowering the number of vacant homes than lowering the number of homeless people. I feel that's the wrong approach.
- junofan 4y agoThe argument is that vacation homes wouldn’t exist without vacationers, not that demand for vacation homes would lead to homeless people owning houses.
- deepsun 4y agoBroken compared to what? Homelessness is an ancient problem, noone was able to solve that yet. We need to look and take lessons from systems that at least somewhat helped the problem. Of course, adjusting for the US situation, which might be just different. Compared, to, say Eastern Europe, I feel like US can just afford having so many homeless (e.g. free food and medicine for homeless in California). In many other countries homeless would not be able to survive, so in some weird sense we can call it a luxury, not a problem.
- trebbble 4y agoThe works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. - Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, chapter 25
- wahern 4y agoSome scholars argue that the famines in Africa toward the end of the 20th century were more than anything else a result of the collapse of economically sustainable local agriculture resulting from rapid industrialization and cheap imported grains. Food became so cheap that farms couldn't produce enough income as going concerns; people quit farming en masse. Populations in countries with little local agriculture remaining became exceptionally vulnerable and susceptible to price and distribution shocks, such as from monetary or military conflict stressors. Many other countries have historically avoided famine in part because their political systems depended upon and heavily favored local agricultural interests--not the laborers, but specifically the financial security and opportunities of the agricultural land-owning classes. And when and where they didn't, e.g., Ireland in the late 19th century or China in the mid-20th century, things played out in predictable fashion. Such emphasis doesn't create an optimal state of affairs for maximizing overall wealth and economic equality, but it's one way, however primitive, to buffer volatility and minimize the chances of catastrophic food failure; and helps explain why such seemingly unfair socio-political favoritism, often with seemingly perverse side effects, persists today, let alone in the 1930s.
- antisthenes 4y agoYou have to realize that these are baby steps for our civilization. Only since the 1920s and commercial fertilizer use has food become abundant to such a degree, and logistics so sophisticated that we could fathom supplying excess food to multiple entire countries. It is doubtful that the people who conceived plans for providing such aid foresaw all the consequences of their actions, because there was simply no historical precedent for such a scale of intervention. Food was scarce. Countries usually didn't have enough of it. It only seemed like the best way to alleviate that was to just _give people food_. As it turns out, maybe that wasn't the best way, but it was lieky a lesson that needed to be learned the hard way.
- bitwize 4y agoIf vacation homes are lying around unused while homeless people huddle in the streets, it means not enough expropriation from the rich is going on.
- marcinzm 4y agoI'm not sure if the homeless of NYC would like to be shipped to a house in the mountains of Vermont without food, support, food or anything else. I mean NYC would be happy I guess until they found their way back.
- Rackedup 4y ago> Vacant != abandoned. Do you mean that we don't have enough vacant homes?
- arbuge 4y agoNo, I didn't make any statement to that effect.