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Buy it up, and then? If there's no government-enforced zoning restriction on new buildings (which are really monopolies on land use granted to existing landlor
by churchill 3y ago
Buy it up, and then?
If there's no government-enforced zoning restriction on new buildings (which are really monopolies on land use granted to existing landlords), new buildings will flood the market once you jack up prices.
A true monopoly can only survive by using government regulation to enforce its position - if not for senseless zoning regulation (government-granted land use monopolies granted to the middle-class in return for votes), housing wouldn't be an issue in the US.
So, it's not a capitalism/free market problem, dislocations in market are caused by government meddling.
- pixl97 3y ago>If there's no government-enforced zoning restriction on new buildings (which are really monopolies on land use granted to existing landlords), If you live in binary land, yea... to bad we live in the real world where things are a lot more complicated. Lets say we lived on an island that had the water resources for 1000 residences. Cool, now we've set limits on the total number of people we can support without things falling apart or costs massively increasing. In rational world the democratic representation sets up a government and creates a set of rules zoning this. In your backwards broken shithole, the first developer with a billion dollars comes in and builds 10,000 houses and everyone is fucked. These things are very hard to balance. And you're correct, the 'average' voter which tends to correlate with homeowner will vote in their best interest of increasing home prices once they own one. When you strip that away you typically get massive developers wanting to create as many houses as possible, which may or may not work depending on the limitations of the land this occurs on.