4 ms·

OK, I’ll bite: why should you care about what other people own?

tmnvix 3y ago
I think most people would be a bit put out if a significant portion of the radio spectrum was owned by people that were not utilising it (or only using it to send their Christmas messages).
- cycrutchfield 3y ago
  But in this case most housing is being utilized, either owner-occupied or rented.
alistairSH 3y ago
If a house in a popular area sits dormant, that's one less unit available to house the general public. Reductio ad absurdum... if rich Chinese businesspeople buy every home in Vancouver (strictly to park money, not live or rent), nobody who works in Vancouver can live there and everybody has to commute from the suburbs. Edit - at an indivual level, you're right, who cares. At a policy level, ensuring reasonable housing for the general public is a good thing.
- cycrutchfield 3y ago
  If people want to buy houses and not live in them, more power to them as long as they pay their property taxes. Housing is not a finite resource, more can simply be built as long as there is demand for it. At a policy level, we sure are spending a lot of time worrying about the fraction of a percent of houses that are not being rented and not nearly enough time worrying about why not enough new housing is being built to meet demand.
causi 3y ago
Land is a finite resource that nobody created. Would you be offended if someone claimed to own a cubic kilometer of the sky and declared nobody else could use it without paying him?
- cycrutchfield 3y ago
  Land is a finite resource, but buildings can be built up vertically. Unless your town looks like manhattan, land is not scarce for new housing.
  - defrost 3y ago
    Just for the record, building vertically is also a finite solution, just as building sprawl is horizontally constrained, so to is vertical ( and subterranian ) expansion. Manhattan only exists due to Manhattan schist, exceptional bedrock due to old volcanic flow. Many locations have poor subsoil for tall buildings, even with the best foundations there are other limits to building height. There's a lot of potential space, sure, but not infinite space - it's finite on planet and bottlenecked by transport and terraforming off planet.

I think most people would be a bit put out if a significant portion of the radio spectrum was owned by people that were not utilising it (or only using it to send their Christmas messages).

cycrutchfield 3y ago
But in this case most housing is being utilized, either owner-occupied or rented.

alistairSH 3y ago

If a house in a popular area sits dormant, that's one less unit available to house the general public. Reductio ad absurdum... if rich Chinese businesspeople buy every home in Vancouver (strictly to park money, not live or rent), nobody who works in Vancouver can live there and everybody has to commute from the suburbs. Edit - at an indivual level, you're right, who cares. At a policy level, ensuring reasonable housing for the general public is a good thing.

cycrutchfield 3y ago
If people want to buy houses and not live in them, more power to them as long as they pay their property taxes. Housing is not a finite resource, more can simply be built as long as there is demand for it. At a policy level, we sure are spending a lot of time worrying about the fraction of a percent of houses that are not being rented and not nearly enough time worrying about why not enough new housing is being built to meet demand.

causi 3y ago

Land is a finite resource that nobody created. Would you be offended if someone claimed to own a cubic kilometer of the sky and declared nobody else could use it without paying him?

cycrutchfield 3y ago
Land is a finite resource, but buildings can be built up vertically. Unless your town looks like manhattan, land is not scarce for new housing.
- defrost 3y ago
  Just for the record, building vertically is also a finite solution, just as building sprawl is horizontally constrained, so to is vertical ( and subterranian ) expansion. Manhattan only exists due to Manhattan schist, exceptional bedrock due to old volcanic flow. Many locations have poor subsoil for tall buildings, even with the best foundations there are other limits to building height. There's a lot of potential space, sure, but not infinite space - it's finite on planet and bottlenecked by transport and terraforming off planet.