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Ask HN: Anyone else feels the commoditization of real estate is unethical?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feels the commoditization of real estate is unethical?

#21

People have been landlords throughout history and renters can only rent if they can pay. Plenty of other generations didn’t have an ability to have their own place so the current people who can’t aren’t special. Each individual’s ethics are not always aligned so there is no one rule to fit all.

Got it, let’s change nothing about the status quo since it’s normal

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feels the commoditization of real estate is unethical?

#22
post #5

I definitely do. It's something that turns a basic necessity into a speculative asset, with a price distorted by the money poured into it. Airbnb is also a deeply harmful influence on housing prices. Imagine if we did the same thing with, say, water: privatized it and then "democratized" ownership of it. It's easy to get retail investors to buy things at inflated, speculative prices, so the price of water would go up…

> Imagine if we did the same thing with, say, water: privatized it and then "democratized" ownership of it.

Lol we did that in England!

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feels the commoditization of real estate is unethical?

#23
IMHO the land belongs to all of us, like the air, and the water. ie '(wo)man is born free' rather than 'born to pay rent to a private owner until such time as they can buy a freehold and pass on the condition'.

That doesn't mean you can't have exclusive use of some part of it, how else would we encourage people to take care of the land and develop it. But you should continuously pay everyone else for it's exclusive use. Inherited, and corporate (basically immortal) land outright ownership is immoral IMHO.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feels the commoditization of real estate is unethical?

#24
Well when you say "human right" and a government insists that home ownership is something they will focus on as a human right in their program, to a finance person what you are really saying is "this asset has a free put option attached to it". And having a backstop like that is a very sought after feature for speculators. It isn't the only area where speculators take advantage of it( for example energy generation is another area with a built in backstop), but it is the biggest one.

What would be your proposed solution to this problem, as in how would you remake the real estate market in the US? And perhaps more importantly, how coherent is your solution with the US as it is today?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feels the commoditization of real estate is unethical?

#26

People have been landlords throughout history and renters can only rent if they can pay. Plenty of other generations didn’t have an ability to have their own place so the current people who can’t aren’t special. Each individual’s ethics are not always aligned so there is no one rule to fit all.

Throughout history, people have smashed each other's brains for a place to live. Let's go back to that! /s

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feels the commoditization of real estate is unethical?

#27

"Men did not make the earth. It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds" — Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice , 1797

This is of course why Smith argued for a tax on the undeveloped value of the land. Sadly not easy to work out, but much harder to avoid and much fairer in the sense that the undeveloped value of your land is that part which benefits most from the services provided by the state.

People consume state services. Not land.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feels the commoditization of real estate is unethical?

#28

People have been landlords throughout history and renters can only rent if they can pay. Plenty of other generations didn’t have an ability to have their own place so the current people who can’t aren’t special. Each individual’s ethics are not always aligned so there is no one rule to fit all.

There is nothing inherently wrong with landlords and rent. Anyone that says otherwise is a tankie. Landlords provide a valuable service. But there cannot be perpetual growth in rents like there is in say the growth of a startup. It’s the corporatization of landlords that is wreaking havoc by forcing them to maximize shareholder wealth. A simple solution is to bar corporations from charging rent for residential property. Limit landlords to only LLC’s. No incorporation and under no circumstances should they be publicly traded.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feels the commoditization of real estate is unethical?

#29
I think there is a big problem with housing affordability in many countries. It’s also a promising investment because, as Mark Twain says, “Buy land, they’re not making it any more.” This makes land unlike other commodities (you can just make more iPhones or whatever.) The situation leads to some movements which see land as inherently a public good, such as Georgism, on which there is a good Wikipedia article.

I think it would also be nice if there were some kind of scheme whereby property tax is low for a first home, but increases when you own more than one.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feels the commoditization of real estate is unethical?

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a human right to you then? I think of human rights as those things required by all humans to live and be healthy, but you must have your own definition.

Probably a case of negative rights versus positive rights https://alabamapolicy.org/research/understanding-the-differe...

That’s just the latest justification for the lack of critical thinking around what actually constitutes a right. Those “negative vs positive” rights people don’t seem to have any problem with the “right to an attorney, if you cannot afford one then one will be provided for you”. It’s always been an incredibly disingenuous argument.
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