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No, because governments' ability to procure it for the needy is a very separable problem. But let me play Devil's Advocate: agriculture, the foundation of the f

No, because governments' ability to procure it for the needy is a very separable problem. But let me play Devil's Advocate: agriculture, the foundation of the food supply, is one of the most commoditized markets that exist. Does this bother you too? Why not? If it's because food is generally a smaller part of income, highly responsive to market pressure to keep prices low in addition to some stabilizing subsidies from governments, why can't real estate work the same way?

madeofpalk 4y ago
Well, why can't real estate work the same way?
- TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
  The counter example to the OP's point about housing is agriculture? When we just had a story about how Bill Gates is now the US's largest land owner? When Farm AID was started to assist local farmers from corporate encroachment 40 years ago?! This whole thread points out how people who claim that the US has free markets are really deluding themselves. The FEDERAL government is heavily involved in EVERY non-trivial aspect of our PERSONAL lives, and they pick the winners and losers. It truly, truly sucks, but this trend of investment banks getting involved in buying up real estate, and driving up prices of home ownership is NOT going to go away. Owning a home will become so expensive that only corporations will be able to do so, and rent/lease it back to you. We truly are becoming a capitalistic country, and either you'll have "capital," or you won't. It's modern feudalism.
- andy_ppp 4y ago
  I'll try, because the incentives are totally different. Food will perish if hoarded and you need a constant supply of it. Housing and real estate is the opposite, it's in almost everyone's interest that land values and property go up over time, especially the people who currently own it which includes politicians and probably around 50% of people. There is also price competition in the food market, which property developer out there competes on value? They all compete on perceived quality, the square footage and where they can buy land.
Kbelicius 4y ago
> agriculture, the foundation of the food supply, is one of the most commoditized markets that exist. And one of the most regulated and subsidized markets...
- Blackstone4 4y ago
  The US housing market is regulated and subsidised…the American dream of owning a home is socialist…US mortgages are guaranteed by federal government.. this doesn’t happen in most other countries..
  - gruez 4y ago
    >the American dream of owning a home is socialist…US mortgages are guaranteed by federal government.. "socialism" =/= government intervention.
    - metadat 4y ago
      The government created the programs that gave massive tax breaks to the boomers who bought homes.
    - Blackstone4 4y ago
      Quite reductionist… Having one element of a nation state being characterised as socialist doesn’t not equate to socialism… the world is not black and white..
  - horsawlarway 4y ago
    It's not about regulation, it's about replace-ability. Food prices stay low because corn is corn, regardless of who grew it - it fills the same need. In many cases, even food that's not a direct match is still a perfectly valid replacement (ex: I need to eat 2000 calories, but it doesn't matter all too much what food is providing them). This is utterly untrue for real estate, which is about as non-fungible as you can get.
    - Blackstone4 4y ago
Spooky23 4y ago
It should. The slow erosion of diversity of food production has put the nation at risk. How much grain is watered with depleted groundwater? How much produce is dependent on the Colorado river?
voidhorse 4y ago
But that’s the problem. The housing market is becoming what the food production market would be without the pressure and government involvement. Right now the supply of those two good and their general dynamics are totally different. Landlords can effectively extract maximum profit from a property without doing anything to improve it or remain competitive thanks to zoning restrictions and other things that make increasing supply difficult. Thanks to this set up, landlords effectively wind up capturing the capital gains that arise out of public improvements (like adding a new neighborhood park) as well since it makes the area more desirable without increasing supply. In the most desirable areas you can literally do nothing as a landlord and raise rents almost perpetually. Worse once these landlords raise rents it causes negative effects downstream. Producers of other goods that rent their land need to start charging more to pay the landlords. The number of people that try to justify some kind of late pseudo-feudalist system like this is legitimately insane.
- iso1631 4y ago
  A land value tax would solve this - you want to use that acre of American Land, you pay the American People for the priviliege.
  - end_of_line 4y ago
    Ah sure. Old lady living in the house she bought 50 years ago will have to pay insanely high land tax because now it's red hot city location, what 50 years ago used to be suburbs. Very clever idea. Taxation was never a solution to any problem. It was a way to mask the problem in a very populist way. Taxation purpose was a redistribution from 'evil crooks' to poor, unlucky people. The problem with Taxation always was that the middle class was paying this because the rich ones had plenty of solutions not to pay including with moving to an another country
    - iso1631 4y ago
      > Very clever idea. Yes. yes it is. She's made millions for doing nothing useful. > the rich ones had plenty of solutions not to pay including with moving to an another country How does a rich land owner avoid paying a land tax? Or a tax on the value of his copyrights (which would be land) Yes the middle class get shafted on things like income and capital gains based taxes, that's the great thing about a land value tax, it taxes the immovable land, not the movable person.
horsawlarway 4y ago
> why can't real estate work the same way? So I'll tackle this... Food is highly responsive to market pressure because it is nearly entirely fungible. I'll throw this here for the sake of making sure we're on the same page when I say that --- Fungible: able to replace or be replaced by another identical item; mutually interchangeable. --- So food markets are sensitive to pressure because there is hardly ever anything special about the food any one entity produces. Someone charging too much for corn? Go buy identical corn, that fills exactly the same need from any one of the thousands of their competitors. "Organic" was, in large parts, an effort to make food that is less easily replaced, and is mostly marketing rather than quality or health related (seriously, go google some of the chemicals that we allow to be added to organic food). In contrast to food - Real estate is very rarely fungible. A specific plot of land has characteristics that often make it very hard to replace. Whether that's proximity to people or locations or features themselves such as soil, water, grade (slope, slant), existing structures, mineral presence ,etc. Non of those are consistent between different plots of land (there's a reason "Location, Location, Location" is a saying). So no - Personally, I don't believe that real estate will ever be able to be treated in a similar way as the food market. Desire for it is predicated too much on aspects other than mere "acres" of it that you can get. Imagine if just finding the right steak to eat was enough to make you rich for life, or if that ear of corn was where your family has been buried for centuries, or if that lima bean reduced your commute from a 2 hour drive to a 5 minute walk. I think we'd see pretty insane food prices then as well.
- ErikVandeWater 4y ago
  There are thousands of homes/apartments around where I live that are about equally attractive for me to live at. Most sold by different sellers. Housing is fungible.
  - horsawlarway 4y ago
    And I bet those apartments and homes carry roughly the same value/sqft... The claim that housing is fungible is absolute non-sense, though. If it were, we wouldn't see such drastic market variations, even within relatively close geographic markets (in some cases, literally blocks away) We also wouldn't see such an intense pressure on evaluating real estate before purchasing (because if it was fungible - it's all the same, right?). I basically don't know where to go in the conversation if you can't actually acknowledge the argument in front of you, and just say "No".
throwfh80h82 4y ago
Because you can make more food but god ain't making any more land.
- welshwelsh 4y ago
  We have plenty of land. When I moved to Manhattan, I was shocked to see how many apartment buildings that are only a couple floors tall and don't have elevators. I assumed every building in Midtown would be at least 50 floors and house thousands of people. Counting the office space, which is completely unnecessary when people can work from home, even the densest neighborhood of America's most populated city has tons of room. I would bet that we can fit 20 times more people in Manhattan if we got rid of the height limitation laws and converted all the offices to apartments. On the other hand, when we consider the average suburb there is a ridiculous surplus of land. We could fit the entire world population into Texas if we used it more efficiently.
  - throwfh80h82 4y ago
    Cramming people together more tightly does not create more land.
    - lr4444lr 4y ago
      But they flock to NYC. No one is "cramming" them there.
      - throwfh80h82 4y ago
        Not sure I follow your point. NYC is not affordable. Are you implying the New York real estate market is in a desirable state because people still want to live there despite exorbitant rents and never being able to buy a home?
  - polio 4y ago
    There are many reasons why not every building in Manhattan is 50 storeys. The most obvious one is that each neighborhood's infrastructure imposes limits on the density of the block. Other considerations are public transit, water main, and school capacity. So the effective amount of "land" today, is closer to what exists today, relative to a block of residential 50-storey skyscrapers.
killSp4m 4y ago
Markets and capitalism are a social hallucination. Biology does not care about our philosophy; it allows emotional bonds between officials and elites that are leveraged against the masses. Write on paper all the rules you want, collusion will happen. Your defense of this system that’s also screwing you is bizarre; conviction to spoken traditions versus actual analysis. Very brain dead following orders of you. Very religious missionary of you. Human biology is easily convinced it’s spoken words of power are what rule the world. I mean so it is; if you get burned by it, oh well. Remember; if this system takes your life from you, none of us have an obligation to you.
_def 4y ago
> agriculture, the foundation of the food supply, is one of the most commoditized markets that exist. Does this bother you too? Why not? It does bother me
pgcj_poster 4y ago
> agriculture, the foundation of the food supply, is one of the most commoditized markets that exist. Does this bother you too? Yes? Most people who have ever lived have always produced their own food. That most of us in the developed world have lost the ability to do so—and that access to the physical essence of our being is dependent on monetary transactions with faceless entities that value profit above human life—seems deeply alienating.

madeofpalk 4y ago

Well, why can't real estate work the same way?

TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
The counter example to the OP's point about housing is agriculture? When we just had a story about how Bill Gates is now the US's largest land owner? When Farm AID was started to assist local farmers from corporate encroachment 40 years ago?! This whole thread points out how people who claim that the US has free markets are really deluding themselves. The FEDERAL government is heavily involved in EVERY non-trivial aspect of our PERSONAL lives, and they pick the winners and losers. It truly, truly sucks, but this trend of investment banks getting involved in buying up real estate, and driving up prices of home ownership is NOT going to go away. Owning a home will become so expensive that only corporations will be able to do so, and rent/lease it back to you. We truly are becoming a capitalistic country, and either you'll have "capital," or you won't. It's modern feudalism.
andy_ppp 4y ago
I'll try, because the incentives are totally different. Food will perish if hoarded and you need a constant supply of it. Housing and real estate is the opposite, it's in almost everyone's interest that land values and property go up over time, especially the people who currently own it which includes politicians and probably around 50% of people. There is also price competition in the food market, which property developer out there competes on value? They all compete on perceived quality, the square footage and where they can buy land.

Kbelicius 4y ago

> agriculture, the foundation of the food supply, is one of the most commoditized markets that exist. And one of the most regulated and subsidized markets...

Blackstone4 4y ago
The US housing market is regulated and subsidised…the American dream of owning a home is socialist…US mortgages are guaranteed by federal government.. this doesn’t happen in most other countries..
- gruez 4y ago
  >the American dream of owning a home is socialist…US mortgages are guaranteed by federal government.. "socialism" =/= government intervention.
  - metadat 4y ago
    The government created the programs that gave massive tax breaks to the boomers who bought homes.
  - Blackstone4 4y ago
    Quite reductionist… Having one element of a nation state being characterised as socialist doesn’t not equate to socialism… the world is not black and white..
- horsawlarway 4y ago
  It's not about regulation, it's about replace-ability. Food prices stay low because corn is corn, regardless of who grew it - it fills the same need. In many cases, even food that's not a direct match is still a perfectly valid replacement (ex: I need to eat 2000 calories, but it doesn't matter all too much what food is providing them). This is utterly untrue for real estate, which is about as non-fungible as you can get.
  - Blackstone4 4y ago

Spooky23 4y ago

It should. The slow erosion of diversity of food production has put the nation at risk. How much grain is watered with depleted groundwater? How much produce is dependent on the Colorado river?

voidhorse 4y ago

But that’s the problem. The housing market is becoming what the food production market would be without the pressure and government involvement. Right now the supply of those two good and their general dynamics are totally different. Landlords can effectively extract maximum profit from a property without doing anything to improve it or remain competitive thanks to zoning restrictions and other things that make increasing supply difficult. Thanks to this set up, landlords effectively wind up capturing the capital gains that arise out of public improvements (like adding a new neighborhood park) as well since it makes the area more desirable without increasing supply. In the most desirable areas you can literally do nothing as a landlord and raise rents almost perpetually. Worse once these landlords raise rents it causes negative effects downstream. Producers of other goods that rent their land need to start charging more to pay the landlords. The number of people that try to justify some kind of late pseudo-feudalist system like this is legitimately insane.

iso1631 4y ago
A land value tax would solve this - you want to use that acre of American Land, you pay the American People for the priviliege.
- end_of_line 4y ago
  Ah sure. Old lady living in the house she bought 50 years ago will have to pay insanely high land tax because now it's red hot city location, what 50 years ago used to be suburbs. Very clever idea. Taxation was never a solution to any problem. It was a way to mask the problem in a very populist way. Taxation purpose was a redistribution from 'evil crooks' to poor, unlucky people. The problem with Taxation always was that the middle class was paying this because the rich ones had plenty of solutions not to pay including with moving to an another country
  - iso1631 4y ago
    > Very clever idea. Yes. yes it is. She's made millions for doing nothing useful. > the rich ones had plenty of solutions not to pay including with moving to an another country How does a rich land owner avoid paying a land tax? Or a tax on the value of his copyrights (which would be land) Yes the middle class get shafted on things like income and capital gains based taxes, that's the great thing about a land value tax, it taxes the immovable land, not the movable person.

horsawlarway 4y ago

> why can't real estate work the same way? So I'll tackle this... Food is highly responsive to market pressure because it is nearly entirely fungible. I'll throw this here for the sake of making sure we're on the same page when I say that --- Fungible: able to replace or be replaced by another identical item; mutually interchangeable. --- So food markets are sensitive to pressure because there is hardly ever anything special about the food any one entity produces. Someone charging too much for corn? Go buy identical corn, that fills exactly the same need from any one of the thousands of their competitors. "Organic" was, in large parts, an effort to make food that is less easily replaced, and is mostly marketing rather than quality or health related (seriously, go google some of the chemicals that we allow to be added to organic food). In contrast to food - Real estate is very rarely fungible. A specific plot of land has characteristics that often make it very hard to replace. Whether that's proximity to people or locations or features themselves such as soil, water, grade (slope, slant), existing structures, mineral presence ,etc. Non of those are consistent between different plots of land (there's a reason "Location, Location, Location" is a saying). So no - Personally, I don't believe that real estate will ever be able to be treated in a similar way as the food market. Desire for it is predicated too much on aspects other than mere "acres" of it that you can get. Imagine if just finding the right steak to eat was enough to make you rich for life, or if that ear of corn was where your family has been buried for centuries, or if that lima bean reduced your commute from a 2 hour drive to a 5 minute walk. I think we'd see pretty insane food prices then as well.

ErikVandeWater 4y ago
There are thousands of homes/apartments around where I live that are about equally attractive for me to live at. Most sold by different sellers. Housing is fungible.
- horsawlarway 4y ago
  And I bet those apartments and homes carry roughly the same value/sqft... The claim that housing is fungible is absolute non-sense, though. If it were, we wouldn't see such drastic market variations, even within relatively close geographic markets (in some cases, literally blocks away) We also wouldn't see such an intense pressure on evaluating real estate before purchasing (because if it was fungible - it's all the same, right?). I basically don't know where to go in the conversation if you can't actually acknowledge the argument in front of you, and just say "No".

throwfh80h82 4y ago

Because you can make more food but god ain't making any more land.

welshwelsh 4y ago
We have plenty of land. When I moved to Manhattan, I was shocked to see how many apartment buildings that are only a couple floors tall and don't have elevators. I assumed every building in Midtown would be at least 50 floors and house thousands of people. Counting the office space, which is completely unnecessary when people can work from home, even the densest neighborhood of America's most populated city has tons of room. I would bet that we can fit 20 times more people in Manhattan if we got rid of the height limitation laws and converted all the offices to apartments. On the other hand, when we consider the average suburb there is a ridiculous surplus of land. We could fit the entire world population into Texas if we used it more efficiently.
- throwfh80h82 4y ago
  Cramming people together more tightly does not create more land.
  - lr4444lr 4y ago
    But they flock to NYC. No one is "cramming" them there.
    - throwfh80h82 4y ago
      Not sure I follow your point. NYC is not affordable. Are you implying the New York real estate market is in a desirable state because people still want to live there despite exorbitant rents and never being able to buy a home?
- polio 4y ago
  There are many reasons why not every building in Manhattan is 50 storeys. The most obvious one is that each neighborhood's infrastructure imposes limits on the density of the block. Other considerations are public transit, water main, and school capacity. So the effective amount of "land" today, is closer to what exists today, relative to a block of residential 50-storey skyscrapers.

killSp4m 4y ago

Markets and capitalism are a social hallucination. Biology does not care about our philosophy; it allows emotional bonds between officials and elites that are leveraged against the masses. Write on paper all the rules you want, collusion will happen. Your defense of this system that’s also screwing you is bizarre; conviction to spoken traditions versus actual analysis. Very brain dead following orders of you. Very religious missionary of you. Human biology is easily convinced it’s spoken words of power are what rule the world. I mean so it is; if you get burned by it, oh well. Remember; if this system takes your life from you, none of us have an obligation to you.

_def 4y ago

> agriculture, the foundation of the food supply, is one of the most commoditized markets that exist. Does this bother you too? Why not? It does bother me

pgcj_poster 4y ago

> agriculture, the foundation of the food supply, is one of the most commoditized markets that exist. Does this bother you too? Yes? Most people who have ever lived have always produced their own food. That most of us in the developed world have lost the ability to do so—and that access to the physical essence of our being is dependent on monetary transactions with faceless entities that value profit above human life—seems deeply alienating.