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Housing Is a Labor Issue: Land owners are taking all the wage gains

hamiltonnolan.com

121–130 of 149 posts

Re: Housing Is a Labor Issue: Land owners are taking all the wage gains

#121
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

actually with kids i want to live near the school. because while i could tolerate the occasional 1-hour commute to work, having kids needing to travel that far every day to get to middle or highschool is even worse. (primary schools and kindergarten are more likely to be local, so that's less of an issue)

>having kids needing to travel that far every day to get to middle or highschool is even worse In Austria I see highschool kids having >1h commutes every day. I wouldn't like it, but culturally it seems normalized and accepted here.

because austria has a sparsely populated countryside with mountains, so while accepted i think it only affects a small number of people. i am pretty sure that not many more would want to do that.

Re: Housing Is a Labor Issue: Land owners are taking all the wage gains

#122
Government artificially restricts the supply of housing through zoning and excess regulation. This creates artificial shortages and inflates prices and rents. A more detailed analcyst: https://mises.org/wire/how-governments-outlaw-affordable-hou...

Re: Housing Is a Labor Issue: Land owners are taking all the wage gains

#123
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

many homeless people would disagree - food is more important

We're not talking about some poor African country suffering form famine. Food affordability is not as big of an issue in the west compared to the cost of housing. We have mastered agriculture, supply chain and economies of scale to have cheap mas produced food that can keep even the poor from starving(and even affording them enough calories to get fat if they wish), but we did the exact opposite for housing so we can…

the first thing you need is food. i can't understand what you are talking about here - food is not free.

Re: Housing Is a Labor Issue: Land owners are taking all the wage gains

#124
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>having kids needing to travel that far every day to get to middle or highschool is even worse In Austria I see highschool kids having >1h commutes every day. I wouldn't like it, but culturally it seems normalized and accepted here.

because austria has a sparsely populated countryside with mountains, so while accepted i think it only affects a small number of people. i am pretty sure that not many more would want to do that.

No mate, I'm not talking about pupils living in remote villages in the mountains but those living outside of big cities. They usually have a 30 minute bus/train ride to the city plus another 30 minutes is the overhead time for the trip from home to the bus/train stop and then from the destination stop to the school means about 1h in total or sometimes more is absolutely normal here for pupils to commute via public transport per journey.

Which I guess explains the country's and employer's skepticism on remote work, everyone is so used to long commuting times their whole lives, they're desensitized to it and accept it for work as being the norm as well.

Re: Housing Is a Labor Issue: Land owners are taking all the wage gains

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not talking about some poor African country suffering form famine. Food affordability is not as big of an issue in the west compared to the cost of housing. We have mastered agriculture, supply chain and economies of scale to have cheap mas produced food that can keep even the poor from starving(and even affording them enough calories to get fat if they wish), but we did the exact opposite for housing so we can…

the first thing you need is food. i can't understand what you are talking about here - food is not free.

Food is much, much cheaper than housing. If push comes to shove, you can easily survive on <$50/month. You simply cannot scale back on housing as easy as that.

Re: Housing Is a Labor Issue: Land owners are taking all the wage gains

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quantity and value of properties. Which also means a wealth tax. To be clear I'm 100% in favour of this. The current economic trickle-up system is starting to cause serious problems. Large sections of populations everywhere are increasingly shut out of the capitalist system because they do not have ANY access to capital.

But does it matter? The way housing problems were always fixed was very simple and without any kind of tax: with the government building social housing, allocated according to social principles (you pay the same, but the size of the apartment is determined by the number of kids you have). A LOT of non-luxury housing. This has nearly stopped. These buildings were famously bad. First, they tended to be unfair and viola…

Sorry I don't understand, "they divide up existing properties".

Also many Western cities have very high numbers of homes that are vacant. Seems like a tax on that behaviour would be hard to argue about?

Re: Housing Is a Labor Issue: Land owners are taking all the wage gains

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not talking about some poor African country suffering form famine. Food affordability is not as big of an issue in the west compared to the cost of housing. We have mastered agriculture, supply chain and economies of scale to have cheap mas produced food that can keep even the poor from starving(and even affording them enough calories to get fat if they wish), but we did the exact opposite for housing so we can…

the first thing you need is food. i can't understand what you are talking about here - food is not free.

Yes, food is more important for survival, but food is also much more abundant and much cheaper than housing, making it less of a concern. (in the west)

Re: Housing Is a Labor Issue: Land owners are taking all the wage gains

#128
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because austria has a sparsely populated countryside with mountains, so while accepted i think it only affects a small number of people. i am pretty sure that not many more would want to do that.

No mate, I'm not talking about pupils living in remote villages in the mountains but those living outside of big cities. They usually have a 30 minute bus/train ride to the city plus another 30 minutes is the overhead time for the trip from home to the bus/train stop and then from the destination stop to the school means about 1h in total or sometimes more is absolutely normal here for pupils to commute via public tr…

i understand that, and it would actually support my argument which implies that in less mountainous areas more people could be living away from the city.

however turns out that this is not necessarily the case: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/249029/umfrag...

surprisingly despite its mountains austria appears to be at the lower end of urbanization

Re: Housing Is a Labor Issue: Land owners are taking all the wage gains

#129
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One residential property per person"? Or the more reasonable one owned + max one let out? ( Some holiday lets are entirely legit and necessary for some local economies, but the politics of that is very complicated and site-specific.)

No, holiday lets are not legit. The world has survived most of its existence without needing holiday lets. Because it has hotels. Hotels that do not take up residential properties and pay appropriate taxes, etc. and prevent overtourism whixh has become one of the biggest issues in most tourist places. You can eliminate holiday let’s and the world will do just fine. Any legitimate loss will be minor.

Would you allow deer camps in your housing utopia?

Re: Housing Is a Labor Issue: Land owners are taking all the wage gains

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

progressive property tax which will increase with amount of owned properties.

People usually own multiple properties (outside of main home/vacation home, at least) to rent them to others. So they will just pass that cost to their renters, and make rent more expensive. Although I guess there could be some number of properties where that becomes untenable as well.

If they could simply "pass that cost to their renters" why wouldn't they just raise rents to that level now, absent any tax increase?

The point of this progressively increasing tax would be to raise the landlord's costs to the point where the market actually cannot bear a rent increase--which would disincentivize using the property as an investment.

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