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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?

#731

Post by dmarlow »

metadat wrote: post #182
dmarlow wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See my comment below to a similar concern. There are as many different kinds of landlords as there are people. The value the good ones bring are cared for, affordable places for people to live who prefer to not own a home. Repairing, maintaining, improving, insuring, all take a lot of costs and risks. The government does provide public land in which people can live for free. Why isn't that more popular?

Where is this free public land located in the USA?

BLM land. Anyone can camp there free for 2 week.

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

#732

Post by dmarlow »

SantalBlush wrote: post #367
dmarlow wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes considerable effort and funds to keep a house not just livable, but well kept, insured, managed, etc. If not for landlords, how else would all of that happen?

Plenty of landlords out there don't take care of these things.

Absolutely! But plenty do. How many tenants out there don't hold up their end of things?

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

#733

Post by tasuki »

birdyrooster wrote: post #306
_8j50 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right that throwing money at it isn't a solution. But corporations should not own residencial housing and no one should be allowed to sell propery at a meaningful profit if they own multiple properties. The government should excecise it's power of taxation to take the profits of an investment housing sell (as defined above: multiple property owner selling at profit) with something like a 95% tax on profit and…

No one needs more than one house period.

Would you also like to limit the size of the houses?

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

#734

Post by capitalsigma »

horsawlarway wrote: post #455
capitalsigma wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think we'd see pretty insane food prices then as well. All you are saying is "imagine if food supply was more constrained" with more words. Commodification and constrained supply are orthogonal concepts -- the argument here is that increased commodification may lead to increased supply, so long as the market is allowed to act freely. > that ear of corn was where your family has been buried for centuries, This arg…

> This argument of "what if your family lived there before" in housing discussions annoys me to no end. It's NOT about right - it's about demand . It's not relevant at all if it annoys you, the issue is that people can and do form sentimental attachments to the places where they live, and those attachments influence their willingness to pay (or hinder their willingness to sell). And no - I'm not saying "imagine if th…

> It's NOT about right - it's about demand.

Sure, that's fair. I'm really reacting to arguments about gentrification, where people do talk about "rights" to stay in a particular neighborhood that apparently get passed via genetic material.

> I'm very clearly saying that food is fungible

My point is that the reason "fungibility" is important is actually because it impacts supply: there aren't just 100k houses vs 100k households, there are actually 10k houses with some desirable property (close to where most people work, sufficiently large to raise children, whatever) vs 50k households willing to pay a premium for that desirable property. Your point about fungibility doesn't change the conversation about supply and demand, it's just a partial explanation of the mismatch.

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

#735

Post by [deleted] »

taxcoder wrote: post #594
criddell wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is required of the homeless to qualify? Often there are big strings attached like you have to be sober or at least be working towards that. They often don't want to help addicts who don't want to quit using.

Do you think it is wrong for society to have contractual requirements such as "I will help you if you are trying to help yourself"?

[deleted]

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

#736

Post by NonNefarious »

chii wrote: post #727
NonNefarious wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No; it implies that WE own it. I can complain because corporations enjoy purchasing advantages not available to individuals. Massive amounts of capital, for one thing, not to mention tax breaks and economies of scale that make it easy for them to dispense with financing and inspection contingencies. When an elderly person dies and the children who inherit his property all live out of state, they're going to dump the…

> they're going to dump the property and split the proceeds. so you do agree that it is the individual that made the decision to sell, and that it isn't because the corporation is forcing them to sell. Therefore, the character changes or selling is really just a sum of the aggregate behaviour of all of those individuals. It's like blaming the flood, when each individual rain drop is the reason for the flood in the fi…

You can float strawmen and invalid analogies all day, if that's how you get your jollies.

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

#737

Post by gtowey »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #699
gtowey wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> . But you have to make it cheap. Deregulate construction, get rid of unions, prioritize developer rights over tenant or homeowner rights. What's insane is that we never consider the obvious alternative. GOVERNMENTS HAVE TO PAY FOR THE HOUSING THEY NEED. It's true that developers will not build if they can't make a profit. So we raise money through taxes and treat housing like an investment in our future. This Ameri…

> This American notion of "free market or nothing" has left us with unlivable cities of sprawling suburban houses because that's where the profit is. But that's not what's good for our long term future. It turns out you can't laissez-faire your way to good urban planning. While I agree America needs to put in some serious work into urban planning, the current and recent past of the US urban planning is anything but l…

> : strict zoning, housing codes, permits for most major building actions, minimum parking requirements...

Yeah, a bit of hyperbole. It seems more that the mess of regulations are just patches on top of patches, sometimes with conflicting intent and not with much long term design.

And a lot of it is controlled at a extremely local level. This means we end up with paradoxes where everyone acknowledges that we need more houses, nobody wants to densify areas near themselves. It's always someone else's problem.

It's the same story with power shortages in California. We need more generation but plant after plant was denied because the locals objected to the proposal for building near them.

It's clear we need planning at the state level and override local municipalities to force development. If they complain then the response should be "you had your chance to solve it and blew it. Too late now. "

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

#738

Post by criddell »

taxcoder wrote: post #594
criddell wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is required of the homeless to qualify? Often there are big strings attached like you have to be sober or at least be working towards that. They often don't want to help addicts who don't want to quit using.

Do you think it is wrong for society to have contractual requirements such as "I will help you if you are trying to help yourself"?

Sometimes, yes.

When someone has thrown themselves off a bridge, do we send out rescuers always or only under particular circumstances?

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

#739

Post by sershe »

larsiusprime wrote: post #433
sershe wrote: post #415

There's no basic human right to have a roof over your head, for the simple reason that someone has to make the roof. Saying "I have a right to have it [without building it yourself]" is saying "I have a right to force someone to build it for me". I dunno about you, I'm uneasy about forced labor. Even beyond that, there's certainly no right to have the roof over your head wherever you want - there is simply not enough…

> I'm uneasy about forced labor. I'm with you! But what I'm not okay with is gatekeeping of the resource that REALLY makes real estate valuable -- LAND. Nobody made the land. I'm okay with paying for the labor and capital that goes into housing construction. I'm not okay with somebody extracting massive amounts of value out of the economy just because they own title to the land. If you want to look at the stats for w…

I agree with that, I am actually georgist. Of course, again, human right to land won't satisfy people calling for "housing as a human right". There's tons of cheap land everywhere, including close to cities, and in major cities. It's really "housing with amenities near where I like the weather, jobs and culture is a human right"

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

#740

Post by sershe »

polio wrote: post #581
sershe wrote: post #415

There's no basic human right to have a roof over your head, for the simple reason that someone has to make the roof. Saying "I have a right to have it [without building it yourself]" is saying "I have a right to force someone to build it for me". I dunno about you, I'm uneasy about forced labor. Even beyond that, there's certainly no right to have the roof over your head wherever you want - there is simply not enough…

This characterization of rights seems somewhat melodramatic. A government is capable of providing its citizens with rights without forcing individuals at gunpoint to provide them. The way this happens is that the government creates an organization that is dedicated to the provision of these rights, and then individuals can voluntarily join it. The government can set the wage, or produce summery marketing material, or…

Where does the government get the money? It still checks out to forced labor, once or N times removed. Not that I'm saying it's never acceptable - it's a trade-off, but we should call it as what it is, if used - a gift from others, a privilege. Not a human right. And, we should be strongly biased against it by default, not trivialize it.
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