You said that "very little was built or maintained after 1989". The exact opposite is true - before 1989 there was a moderate amount of newly constructed incredibly dangerous and toxic buildings violating every urbanistic rule and past plans that were a major downgrade from pre-war comfort (keep in mind that these buildings were built in 1970's, 30 years after the war); and there was absolutely zero maintenance, any…
Property ownership is bad. Rent for life, dont leave inheritance to your children so they can rent for life too. All you need in life is clothing, entertainment, a bit of travel to distract you from your tiny living space, maybe a gadget or two and of course onsite work. Oh and praise from you manager to add meaning to your daily grind. Or so “they” say while “they” amass thousands of properties and massive fortunes…
> Downvote away but i strongly believe this concept is horrible.
It’s not just the acquisition of the land but also the investment in the economy that surrounds the land. All land starts out near worthless and in the middle of no where. Generations of sacrifice and investment are what turns it into a highly valuable property. That process can also reverse if the owner ceases to improve the property and invest in the community.
>All land starts out near worthless and in the middle of no where. // No. People don't raise armies to steal land that's worthless. If you're going back to pre-history then the land near a nice river that has plenty of game, isn't predated by larger animals, and has nice fruit trees is worth way more to a person than some section of desert. If right to live on land also goes with rights to exploit resources beneath t…
How much of that intrinsic value is still there once everything is paved?
It’s not just the acquisition of the land but also the investment in the economy that surrounds the land. All land starts out near worthless and in the middle of no where. Generations of sacrifice and investment are what turns it into a highly valuable property. That process can also reverse if the owner ceases to improve the property and invest in the community.
That's what Georgism is about: fully separating those two concepts. The land is valuable because of the community; the property is valuable because of its owner. So under Georgism, all land is held under common ownership, with the land's value being entirely taxed away from its occupier, allowing you to profit personally only by improving the property and supplying value to others thereby.
You could have both if dense housing was allowed to be built and people bought condos.
How? If an asset goes up in value then that means someone is paying more for it at the end of the day. Thus, it’s less affordable... If your argument is about splitting up land use by building higher, it still is true. At the end of the day, that land became more expensive and you are less able to purchase the land. Appreciating asset and affordability are opposites by definition.
You're less able to purchase the same size of land but size really isn't that interesting unless you're planning to farm it.
Most of those problems could be solved by good noise insulation which is fairly cheap to add during construction. Terraced houses are common in the UK and are the worst of all worlds: poor noise insulation from neighbours, tiny dark gardens and very low density.
> solved by good noise insulation You've obviously never met my neighbors. But noise is just one example; far more annoying when I was in an apartment was someone smoking below my balcony on a hot night when all I wanted was to open the windows. And I suppose you'll tell me that filtration systems could take care of that, which is true, but staying locked in a closed apartment is, as has been recently shown, terrible…
I don't have an answer for that - I can only say that I had the same problem in a semi-detached house in the UK with neighbours smoking weed in their garden and the smell coming up through our (quite far away) open windows.
Your stars sound good, but I don't be able to give up being able to walk everywhere.
Harsh reality is that once a city reaches certain size option for semi/detached housing becomes unrealistic to house majority of population. Just numbers game.
100%! We need to find incentives for people to move to small towns. Small town life can be absolutely wonderful and can still take place close enough to population areas.
We already have an enormous incentive - incredibly cheap housing. Mine was under 100k. But I am far, far more expensive for the public purse than when I lived in the city.
Property ownership is bad. Rent for life, dont leave inheritance to your children so they can rent for life too. All you need in life is clothing, entertainment, a bit of travel to distract you from your tiny living space, maybe a gadget or two and of course onsite work. Oh and praise from you manager to add meaning to your daily grind. Or so “they” say while “they” amass thousands of properties and massive fortunes…
Having to pay >60% of monthly salary on a mortgage for the next 25 years isn't exactly my definition of financial freedom. If the market crashes you have no freedom to move for opportunities elsewhere. Here in London, rent is <50% of mortgage payments on an equivalent property.
Around here a mortgage plus taxes is quite a bit less than rent for a comparable square footage and year of construction. Rent should be more than mortgage as you are paying your landlord's mortgage plus the overhead of renting it out. Even if your landlord has held the property for a long time, they should take out new mortgages and invest the money rather than let it sit idle. There are some markets where the demand to rent is not coupled to the demand to buy, but this highly atypical.
I mean the article agrees with you? It primarily talks about the unfairness of the current system, the NIMBY problem reducing housing stock and the issue of regulations intended to curb new building reducing the stock of houses so that only the elite and existing homeowners can afford them. The section on renting/alternatives is mainly just a discussion about alternatives to the current unfair approach and some cases…
Population is going down in the developed world. The housing supply is not. If you can't afford housing where you live, then it can only be because more people are demanding housing where you live, having left where they were previously living. The solution to the "problem of home ownership" is to stop making areas undesirable places to live. Portland springs to mind but there's San Fran. NYC, L.A. but it's not just…
>That's what the elite have been doing since Clinton gave China MFN status and even before.