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

There are at least two problems with your logic: if you take all the land you can make the claim about the elasticity of supply, but not all land is created equal. Location, infrastructure, usage all factor into this. Taking the example of unimproved land. If I buy a piece of the said land near a town and don't use it for anything I just pay the tax on it and effectively lose money, right? What if the city builds infra near my land that makes it effective now to develop? Should I pay more tax now? It's still unimproved. Should I pay more tax in case of a rezoning if I could potentially build a house but I don't? See how I actually created one class of land by substracting from another!

If I can buy and afford (ie have the capital) to hold land for the long term + I can see where new developments are going to take I will be incentivized to hoard land. I can also make the case that it's undeveloped and I should pay less tax.

Now there is land that just sits there when it could be used for farming. Now we are having food and housing shortages.

Food is an excellent model for what I'd like to see around housing: extremely mature and sophisticated commodity market, government thumb on the scale of abundant and stable supply at low prices, subsidies for people whose incomes are genuinely below the cost of efficient production.

To the extent that food is a human right, it is incredibly important that we have GMOs, large-scale factory farms, global supply chain, etc. Food being a human right would make it all the worse to insist on only socially-optimal production: everything local, everything organic, everything vegan, community meetings to argue about who deserves to eat. But that's exactly what the "housing is a human right" crowd fights to preserve and entrench for housing.

You said that last time ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31224977 ) I promise I'm not fantasizing about magic elves. :) However, it's clear that Native American lifestyles were preferable to European-American lifestyles. Graeber and Wengrow in "The Dawn of Everything" quote at length a letter from Ben Franklin on the subject:

> When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them there is no persuading him ever to return, and that this is not natural merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoner young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. One instance I remember to have heard, where the person was to be brought home to possess a good Estate; but finding some care necessary to keep it together, he relinquished it to a younger brother, reserving to himself nothing but a gun and match-Coat, with which he took his way again to the Wilderness.

Anyway...

> Shelter was still a valued commodity and not guaranteed human right. Tribes fought over land, and dwellings required labor.

Sure, but there weren't homeless people. I mean a fire, flood, or enemy attack might leave people destitute, but there wasn't a perpetual destitute class, eh? Dwellings didn't require a lot of labor.

> They often had many people to a dwelling because of this specifically.

Are you sure? I am not an anthropologist (nor a Native American for that matter) but my impression is that that would have had more to do with family structure?

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Really the point I'm making isn't specific to the New World, it was common all over the world for people to build their own houses. In economic terms it wasn't very expensive to build a new dwelling.

> If you wanted to build an igloo or adobe building today, the land is cheap as are the materials. No one is interested in doing this exactly because the conditions would be considered economic destitution.

A lot of places won't let you build and live in an igloo or adobe building today.

But I'm not really advocating that. There are modern low-embodied-energy and high efficacy home designs (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship ) that would be much more comfortable for the modern sensibilities. Imagine if a modern home could be had for $10k instead of $100K ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house )?