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

>No. Renters are paying for the value of the land and the improvements. If the rental price of the apartment is above that, they won't pay it and find another place.

Then why are investors a problem?

No she doesn't make millions. It's not her fault that now her house is 10x more valuable ( on the paper ). As long as she doesn't sell, rent somebody else she has no income. No income, no tax.

Simple as fuck logic. She bought the property, not a license there for living up to her ends.

The thing you are here presenting is a tax of not realized potential income. It's diabolical insane idea.

If we can do it for real estate, why not for cars, and any idea property?

You basically want people buy a license for living in their flats.

About basically nor useful, she earned the money, paid multiple taxes for this and she bought this from the real property dealer / construction company which hired many people for this.

Isn't this tangible contribution for society?

All because people like you flocked to her location for work what used to be peaceful, quite suburbs

> transfer taxes, plus inspection costs, appraisal costs, title insurance costs, and loan origination costs

Those other costs should be driven to a much lower floor as well. The majority could be automated, and likely are in the process of being (e.g. loan origination costs).

Essentially the only fundamental cost should be inspection: which is ultimately the buyer (and their lender) offloading systems assessment onto a third party. Who, if you read the fine print for inspectors and case law, is generally not legally liable if they miss something.

> some major issue

The solution to property maintenance seems surmountable. Require it for dense, neighbor-impacting scenarios (HOA, etc), and fund it via loans against the underlying asset (HELOC or home equity loans).

I'm sympathetic to your point, but I don't think it takes primacy over enabling individuals to own their own home.

I agree! That's why I take issue with calling X or Y human rights. It misleads the average person person into thinking that there is actually is such a thing as a human right, rather than the term just meaning "thing we really like".

With that being said, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that assertions about human rights by organizations such as the UN be internally consistent. The UN claims that human rights are universal. Human rights such as to food, shelter, medicine, etc. fail this universality. To provide them requires taking resources from others and reallocating them. Therefore, they are conditional upon the ability of a society to reallocate these resources. Therefore, they cannot be human rights, and assertions to the contrary should be identified as being politically motivated.

I want to use your question as a jumping off point to talk out some thoughts I've been having in this area.

> When was [housing as a human right] ever the case?

North and South America before the coming of the Europeans.

Let's start in the far North. Here's the classic scene from "Nanook of the North" where Nanook builds an igloo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F0G3IZA6OI It takes two hours to make an overnight shelter, and a day or two to make a semi-permanent dwelling.

In the desert people built homes using earthen bricks (adobe) or dug into the sides of cliffs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_dwellings_of_Pueblo_pe...

In between there were tipis and lodges of all kinds, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogan

The point is that in every part of the land the materials and methods to build a new home were freely available and widely known.

There were no homeless people, no economic destitution.

- - - -

Then for a long time there was the colonization phase, where anyone who wanted to could grab some land and start farming, provided they were willing to fight the Native Americans, and weren't imported as slaves.

> The Homestead Acts were several laws in the United States by which an applicant could acquire ownership of government land or the public domain, typically called a homestead. In all, more than 160 million acres (650 thousand km2; 250 thousand sq mi) of public land, or nearly 10 percent of the total area of the United States, was given away free to 1.6 million homesteaders

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Acts

There were also abundant natural resources (and here I would cite the usual: flocks of birds so thick they eclipsed the sun and turned day into night; rivers so swollen with fish you could walk across them without wetting your boots; herds of bison so vast they took more than a day to pass by; etc.)

- - - -

Eventually the frontier closed:

> Virgin farmland was increasingly hard to find after 1890—although the railroads advertised some in eastern Montana. Bicha shows that nearly 600,000 American farmers sought cheap land by moving to the Prairie frontier of the Canadian West from 1897 to 1914. However, about two-thirds of them grew disillusioned and returned to the U.S.[11][314] The Homestead Acts and proliferation of railroads are often credited as being important factors in shrinking the frontier, by efficiently bringing in settlers and required infrastructure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_frontier#End_of_the_f...

- - - -

I feel like there is still a lot of open, unused land that could be made into homesteads, but the political and economic realities have shifted.