901–910 of 930 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
> Interesting, so you do support housing the homeless, just as long as you get to take away their freedom. Please review the HN guidelines before posting further - this is not acceptable here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Interesting, so you do support housing the homeless, just as long as you get to take away their freedom. Please review the HN guidelines before posting further - this is not acceptable here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If posting in favor of imprisoning the homeless is acceptable to you, but pointing out how awful that is, isn't, then I'm just not that interested in what's acceptable to you.
You know very well that the problem isn't your opinion but the way that you're expressing it, and your incredibly hostile treatment of other users.
HN is a platform for thoughtful discussion of interesting ideas and topics, not advocacy and emotional outbursts. Your kind of behavior isn't wanted here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is very simple. Theft is when you take something from someone without voluntary agreement. renters and landlords enter voluntary agreement. If a landlord has a job or not seems irrelevant. They didn't steal anything from anyone. Everything they have, they obtained through mutually consensual exchange. Wrong. The vast majority of people don't voluntarily agree to rent, they are coerced. "Pay rent or be homeless"…
>Really, though, I'm less interested in defining landlordism=theft. We shouldn't need to prove it fits your arbitrary definition of theft to say it's wrong: if you don't get that causing homelessness for personal gain is wrong, your moral compass is pretty fundamentally broken. I think landlords prevent more homelessness than they create. Homes dont magically pop into existence. They are built for sale. I think peopl…
Yes, builders build them. Landlords don't create homes. Landlords take them out of the market so that they can't be bought by people seeking to buy them and live in them.
> You seem to be freely conflating homelessness with regular people paying rent.
You seem to be freely conflating removing a house from the free market with providing one.
> No landlords means nobody gets housing that cant afford to own
Landlords mean that the vast majority of people cannot afford to own, and increasingly nobody can afford to rent either.
> Homelessness is a social and legal choice to make cheap housing illegal, or not provide social housing for those that do not work. This is orthognal to landlords. Someone with a vacation home or airBNB isnt the bottleneck keeping junkie bob from having a shelter.
1. Many homeless cannot work. Perhaps they could have worked when they became homeless, but being homeless quickly makes one unemployable.
2. The social/legal choice to make cheap housing illegal is driven by people trying to keep up the values of their vacation homes and airBNBs.
3. If you were homeless you'd have very good reasons to be a junkie too. The scorn you have for people less fortunate than yourself is horrifying.
> I think pinning it on landlords is childish.
I think not pinning it on landlords is willfully ignorant of basic economics in favor of an ideology that likely benefits you.
> You can help junkie bob and choose not to, because you dont want them in your house, or to pay for their shelter.
1. I don't own a home I don't live in, and the home is really not large enough for more than one person. Claiming that someone doesn't care about the homeless because they don't let homeless people live in their home is an intentionally ridiculous bar to set.
2. As for paying for their shelter, the amount of money I donate to housing-related charities varies based on how much I make (I have to live too) but I've donated around $1k so far to housing-related charities. I'm not making a lot of money right now, or it would be more. I also donate my time at a homeless shelter (mostly cleaning and moving stuff, I'm not there enough to do more involved tasks).
3. All this is beside the point that this is a childish ad hominem argument you're making. Not everyone is in a position to help the homeless--many are on the verge of homelessness themselves. Claiming we have to be actively helping the homeless to have an opinion is absurd. Is there any issue you care about, and do make any sacrifice as extreme as letting someone live in your house for that issue? Or do you just not care about anyone but yourself?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Law abiding citizens are the suckers it seems everywhere. True! When laws are made that benefit a few and harm everyone else, you'd be a sucker to follow them. > It's easy to be nobel and generous when you are not the one being taken advantage of. It's easy to abide by the law when you are the one the law benefits. > Regardless of who benefits from Lawlessness, it always ends up destroying the society Maybe it's no…
This is like toddler logic. “If I can’t have anything nice neither should anyone else.” The energy spent colluding with organized crime to squat is probably better spent trying to get laws passed that support new housing construction if the problem is to be solved.
Toddler logic is pretending you don't understand what I'm saying.
And to be clear: I own a home, and I'm not squatting. It's just I have a sense of basic empathy too.
> The energy spent colluding with organized crime to squat is probably better spent trying to get laws passed that support new housing construction if the problem is to be solved.
"Energy spent trying to not be homeless would be better spent... being homeless!"
Let me be abundantly clear: this is a political conversation for you, it's a survival need for them. Demanding that people remain homeless while they fight for justice by rules that are made by people like you who clearly neither understand nor care about homeless people is absurd.
I mean let's be serious, when do you think this will be solved? This problem has been going on for decades, and we cannot even get people like you to agree that the solution to homelessness is homes. People like you don't have solutions and you oppose every solution that would actually solve the problem. And people like you make the rules. So you can't be surprised when the people you're screwing over don't care about your rules.
I mean, supporting new housing construction is great, but how are you going to prevent investment capital from just snapping up all the new inventory and continuing to jack up the rent? Houses are sitting empty now, because it's profitable for them to be sitting empty. This isn't going to stop until we end landlords. But let me guess--you oppose that, too?
So yeah--we should implement a real solution to homelessness. But given we aren't going to any time soon, you can't be too surprised when people don't follow the your rules just because you make the same broken promise that if they just do things the right way solutions will surely come.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great. I am glad to hear this. You forgot about people who live there all year round. You know, the ones who work, maintain services, offer food, have children who will keep everything working. Spain shouldn't be a big hotel, it is also the country of people who live all year round.
Astonishing entitlement man. I was born in a dark country with shitty weather, bad air. Now when I made enough money to change it I want to spend a few months a year in the sun. People who live there are amazingly lucky to be born where the weather is good. Most of those desirable areas would be 3rd world country level if it wasn't for tourism as people there were unable to develop any kind of functioning economy and…
There is plenty of industry and jobs in the north.
If the south keep relying on tourism they will keep this misery going.
I don't care if you are born here. I only care if you work and contribute here. Tourism is killing people.
Look at Barcelona. Before the Olympics it was a amazing place to live. Now it's rotten and prostituted to expats, tourists and poor people who go there to work in inhuman jobs paying unpayable rents.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Considering how many desokupa services exist I'd say it's a real problem. None of what you said sounds like a problem. What is the problem? It sounds like a policy to ensure dwellings, which are obviously a scarce resource in those areas have actual people living in them. That is kind of their point. Of course it would be beneficial to have a better legal framework to ensure housing security and building maintenance…
The underlying problem is that it violates the owner's property rights. Whether they rent or or leave unoccupied their property, even if it's scarce, is their business. And not letting the owner manage their property as they see fit causes all sorts of wider problems. I'm assuming from reading your other comments you're not going to be sympathetic to this argument so let me give you two anecdotal incidents. The first…
I also think the right to have a home should prevail over the right to make money renting houses.
I also think goving credits to everybody in 2000 fucked up Spain. Everybody +40 in my family owns 2 or 3 houses. Nobody less than 40 owns one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not how businesses work. Nobody spends millions building a house so that they can leave it vacant once it's finished.
Except they do. That is the problem. See for example: https://m.murciatoday.com/almost_half_a_million_vacant_new_b... https://www.investigate-europe.eu/en/posts/the-empty-house-a... It isn't a particularly Spanish problem either: following article about the American version of it https://www.cbsnews.com/news/empty-office-buildings-doom-loo...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or the owners of those 100k units that are just left to rot can accept that their "investment" can't (and shouldn't) make them money faster than inflation, and lower the asking price . The scenario you describe only exists because the number of "investors" buying up properties to flip and turn a profit vastly outnumbers the number people looking to buy their personal residence, and have the skills and disposition to…
I think we are conflating Private Equity, small-time house-fixer-flippers, and vacation homes. I think we agree that the PE crowd can rot in hell — they're buying properties to standardize, corner the market, and charge extractive artificially-inflated 'market' rents. They won't be idle long, and I don't think squatting is the fix for that. I'm quite sure that the PE companies are the primary driver here, not small-t…
But its worth understanding why it happens, and a major factor is that home costs, to buy or rent, are out of control, which lowers the perceived ethical barrier to doing so.
There will always be that weird self-interested-self-described-"anarchist" who has convinced themselves that "property is oppression" because they don't want to pay for stuff. I'm not proposing anything to address that guy. I'm saying we should do what we can to prevent people from agreeing with that guy in the first place.
And one of the ways to dissuade people from agreeing with the professional squatter is by discouraging the PE-driven fix-and-flip (which is distinct from the small-time fix-and-flip, but only early in the development of that business. Eventually, you're successful enough that it makes more sense to buy cheap, in cash and without financing, hire others to fix at your leisure, and rent. That's the transition from labor-class to capital-holding class).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If posting in favor of imprisoning the homeless is acceptable to you, but pointing out how awful that is, isn't, then I'm just not that interested in what's acceptable to you.
> If posting in favor of imprisoning the homeless is acceptable to you, but pointing out how awful that is, isn't You know very well that the problem isn't your opinion but the way that you're expressing it, and your incredibly hostile treatment of other users. HN is a platform for thoughtful discussion of interesting ideas and topics, not advocacy and emotional outbursts. Your kind of behavior isn't wanted here.