But with your help we can change that, just donate your alcoholic uncle's glass bottles and a couple of bucks to us and we can bring the number of vacant houses down real quick.
i don’t get it but happy for u :)
Molotov cocktails make the housing investment market crash! :)
It’s by design
I have a few suggestions to alleviate this.
Bear in mind that I find it OK, or even desirable, for people to invest, and have some properties to rent to support them in their later years.
1- build public housing, with a rent equivalent to something like 40% of minimum wage. Building should done in random areas, to prevent ghettos from appearing.
2- tax the fuck out of vacant houses.
3- tax house ownership, by individuals or corps, progressively, to discourage accumulation and speculation.
Have 1 house? 0%, 2->10%, 5->15%, and so on, so that having more than let's say, 10 units stops making sense.
3- tax productive empty land (developpable, housing/comercial/agri) like empty homes, to make speculation and accumulation non attractive.
Thare are many more, I'm sure but these protect private property, investment, would lower prices, make housing accesible, while normalizing the sector.
This is democratic socialism. Allow capitalism, but keeping extremes in check, while providing a safety net.
This is democratic socialism. Allow capitalism, but keeping extremes in check, while providing a safety net.
I see americans saying this fairly often, but what you describe is social democracy, not democratic socialism
Whole point of capitalism is breaking the game to get ahead. The meta is too advanced, and we no longer get good stuff out of it as a side effect; that waste has been largely eliminated.
Any solution will not last, unless the beast is slain, and the more we try the more we kludge up the engine. It's not worth running anymore, if it ever was.
Wasn't really ever worth it. There has been calculable dehumanization, exploitation, and genocides all in the name of profit and efficiency. The quality of life going up for some of us in some parts (which is largely because of unions anyways) should not excuse the harm that capitalism has done and continues to do.
As you say, the incentives in the system are not towards a prosperous and stable society, but towards maximizing how much you can squeeze out of people.
So in my opinion it was never worth it is essentially what I'm saying.
People are getting toxic at you so as OP i just want to send love for your radical [compared to the status quo] acknowledgment that vacant homes should be taxed.
Other people are being mean sickos for a percentage you mentioned, and though I share their perspectives, it still stands true that NO ONE in our current government would be caught dead saying such a radical anti-1% thing as far as I know. Keep fighting for human rights and don’t let the internet trolls push you backwards. ❤️
[There is time in the future for you to learn and perhaps become even more radical <like me lol ✨> but no shame for advocating for basic tier one human rights oriented policies.]
your radical acknowledgment that vacant homes should be taxed.
imagine thinking thats radical 🤣
how about housing as a human right? How about abolishing the class system where you have those that own and those who work? Any system which allows for "passive" income is by the definition of the phrase unjust.
radical compared to the status quo, thanks for allowing me to clarify
not starving kids in gaza is radical compared to the status quo, the status quo is not an acceptable benchmark.
Part of the problem is there is no market incentive for speculators and landlords to lower the costs of their units. They use software to set pricing with goes right up to the line of "collaboration" but doesn't quite cross it.
I like the idea of a tax or fine for empty housing that is porportional to the highest advertised lease price of the unit. Let's say 10% for starters, so if an apartment wants to jack the prices up on their "luxury" units to 2k a month, they pay $200 every month that unit is unfilled. 100% of that fine goes to subsidizing housing for low income renters. Now we have an incentive for housing prices to go down, but still have the ability for them to go up to meet actual market demands, and we provide more money for lower income renters to afford that housing in the first place. It also gives us another "lever" to pull to manage the housing market. Increasing or decreasing that tax/fine rate to manage real estate bubbles.
Is that more houses that are unoccupied in the long-term or just unoccupied in general?
You'd also need to forcibly move the homeless population away from areas that have lots of homeless but no homes, to places with lots of homes but relatively few homeless. That means depopulating Los Angeles of homeless and instead moving them to... Maine, or Vermont, or Alaska, where there are lots of homes but nobody living in them.
Empty houses are relatively spread out pretty evenly. As in there are always more empty houses than homeless people.
There's an average of 38 empty houses per homeless person in the US. California has the lowest ratio and it is still 6 empty houses per homeless person.
Mississippi has the highest ratio with 205 empty houses per homeless person.
Again, is it empty because it's just sitting there, fully habitable and just accruing value, or is it empty because it's under renovation, or in-between purchases so someone up the chain is buying and the house is sitting vacant while it's being sold, but not for long enough for anyone else to be living there? Or currently sitting in legal limbo where a large number of people inherit a house and can't all agree to sell it? I don't know about the US but I know Malta has that problem where there needs to be consensus among all members of the estate before a property can be sold, so it sits empty, potentially for years.
When I worked in a rural county housing came in 3 forms: retirees who fully owned, rental tenants with absentee landlords (usually the children of deceases retirees), and then vacant homes.
Many were vacant for varieties of reasons. Some because they were vacation homes. Others because they were in some stage of the market (repair, and renovation). Others were empty nest situations and the owners lived abroad or out of state all winter/summer. (A lot of RV snowbirds) But then most prime real estate (lakefront properties) were just occupied a few weeks at a time by a rotating group of extended family and friends.
What was becoming a problem at the time (within the last decade) were the latter category becoming airBnBs and private equity investments because of their inherent value.
And those drive up the costs everywhere else, making everyone and everything clamp down because you can only take advantage of investment bubbles by leveraging debt, which is not a strategy people in need of housing csn make.
Which perpetuates the feedback loop.
There are a surpluss of houses in the us, because private equity is hoarding it. The total number of vacant houses has gone up every year since 2009.
Clearly there isnt a population explosion making the housing supply tight and overall empty houses that becoming occupied are being replaced with the now empty house they just moved out of.
And the empty house to homeless person ratio has been trending up for nearly 2 decades.
Why are people in those places? Would those reasons change if they were offered a home by someone fucking credible? Where do they prefer to live? Have you bothered to fucking ask? Im actually in los angeles, have skme good will with some clusters of unhoused people, please let me kniw if you want somebody to do that.
Maybe don't jump straight to coercion cruelty and 'depopulation'.
Like, offer the fucking houses. See who takes em,who doesn't. Ask why, then work on that and keep the offer up. Zero fucking 'forcible' 'depopulation' fucking required. Does liberalism just mean a coercion kink? Because if they don't actually stand for anything else-please explain; my parents were liberals, so id very much not like to think about the implications of being correct here.
Like, fuck, when i want children to eat better, my first thought isn't 'cut off their hands so it's harder for them to get junk food, zip tie them to a board, and put a tube down their throats. Shock them if they struggle.' Call me fucking crazy, but I try to fry up some broccoli or make an appealing salad or some shit before I reach for the machete and feeding tube.
You can’t just say this and not say the staggering numbers
There are about 15 million empty homes in America and about 750,000 homeless people on any given night. It would be trivial to end homelessness without building a single new home. The next time someone is like “oh we need to build more housing” you look in their stupid fucking face and laugh because as long as housing is an investment commodity you can build all the housing in the world and it won’t matter
In practice, your plan would just result in abandoned dead towns in rural Kansas being turned into fenceless concentration camps for the formerly homeless.
there are plenty of houses and land just kept empty for the speculative value in almost every city
The GOP is working hard to fix this ... by greatly increasing the number of homeless people.
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