4 ms·
By incentivizing people renovating, then living in, the rundown house they bought, instead of seeing that option as equally valuable as just selling/renting the
by petsfed 2y ago
By incentivizing people renovating, then living in, the rundown house they bought, instead of seeing that option as equally valuable as just selling/renting the house? Its one thing to produce more housing, its another to somehow magically produce more housing in such a way that does not devalue the other resources. Step 1 is to disincentivize speculative/rent-seeking home purchases.
Its been said a couple times in sibling comments, but the problem comes down to the fact that people are buying houses as investments, and not as houses.
In most of Europe, the US and Canada, the cost of home ownership grossly exceeds the median income, to the extent that lending is almost always necessary. Thus owning a second home is always the realm of the wealthy, even if they are still ultimately laborers. Buying that second home is often the first step from the labor class to the capitol-holding class.
Its frustrating that the housing crisis is often described in terms of Marxist dialectic, but the crisis often feels lab-grown to illustrate the flaws of (literal) rent-seeking behavior by the capitol-holding class.
- danlugo92 2y agoWork hard and get your own.
- petsfed 2y agoThat's how the labor class does it. My point is that investment purchasers are steadily pushing residential purchasers out of the market. What happens when its simply impossible to accrue via labor, in a single lifetime, enough wealth to buy that first home?
- burnished 2y agoHard like the people that got it cheap? Or hard like the people that inherited such things? I guess you can fuck off to the sticks, but I'm not sure that works as a defense for a society that has made an element of participation contingent on absurd expense or debt. Does 'work hard' feel good when the thing you purchase with your labor is expensive in order to service the desires of the wealthy? I'm not going to say our current setup is indentured servitude or serfdom, it clearly isn't and social mobility and changing your station are possible and even commonplace. I will say that our current system has resulted in a large class of people whose productive excess is routinely paid to a small group for the benefit of being allowed access to a residence (they don't provide other services or benefits, they don't actually labor to produce the house as a finished good).