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New US homeownership measure puts people first

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Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#331

Post by mrguyorama »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #50
GodelNumbering wrote: post #33

There was a youtube video sometime ago that argued about how life has vastly improved in every single aspect (with numbers about how 'stuff' has gotten universally more affordable), only housing has gotten more expensive relative to income and how that proves we have a better quality of life because of that. It got me thinking that maybe the home ownership, or having a place you can call yours, disproportionately aff…

Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives. It's undeniably a little cool that luxuries got cheap, but it's severely un-cool that necessities got expensive. I'm glad to see a focus on pushing statistics to do a better job of reflecting that, but yeah, this is all downstream of structural incentives so fixes are only going to happen through legislative ch…

Industrialized agriculture drove the cost of food from 50% of a normal person's income hundreds of years ago to like 5% now.

The problem is that after a few centuries of relatively good times, structures have been built up so that the owners of assets can claw back all that income again. They are using housing as the sink for all that wealth, because land can't be industrialized.

They want us to be peasants again.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#332

Post by HDThoreaun »

marcusverus wrote: post #320
HDThoreaun wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Immigration is keeping wages down for jobs natives dont want. I dont see the issue. > Wouldn't business owners pay more for labor if there wasn't a stead supply of under the table illegal immigrants doing it for less? Maybe, or maybe they just employ less people and less things get built.

There's no such thing as "jobs natives don't want", only "wages natives don't want". > Maybe, or maybe they just employ less people and less things get built. The foreign born population residing in the US fell from ~15% to ~5% from 1920-1970. It was one of the most prosperous and productive periods in human history.

US was prosperous post war because the industrial capacity of the rest of the world was destroyed. Comparing that time period to any other doesnt make sense.

We can only employ natives if we want, we just have to accept that prices of things that are currently run on immigrant labor will go up, and a lot less of it will be produced. Personally I am unwilling to make that tradeoff but obviously you dont have to agree. US labor market suffers seriously from baumol's cost disease, only solution to that is immigration with the understanding that immigrants will take unwanted jobs in exchange for a better life for their kids.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#333

Post by jltsiren »

ch4s3 wrote: post #317
jltsiren wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are basing your claims on Against the Grain, Scott focuses on early centralized states, which emerged thousands of years after agriculture and towns. Such states were by definition exceptional. Most of them were in regions, where rainfall alone was insufficient, and agriculture dependend on irrigation. Such a dependence on centralized infrastructure favored state formation, but it also made the communities fra…

I don’t think there’s a good basis for your claim. The earliest agricultural cultures all practiced flood retreat agriculture in alluvial plains. If you look at the Americas you also only see intensive agriculture in coercive top down city states or small empires. Outside of that you see opportunistic plantings and forest agronomy mixed with foraging and hunting. Or in coastal regions you see marginal planting supple…

> Why would anyone choose subsistence grain agriculture when literally anything else was available.

There was nothing else available. If you were born in an agricultural settlement, that was probably the only lifestyle you knew. Even if you knew other ways to sustain yourself, all land was already taken. Settled regions were too densely populated, and the lands beyond them were claimed by indigenous peoples. If you wanted to migrate there, the best option was to go in sufficient numbers and start a new defensible settlement.

Middle-Eastern farmers started migrating into Europe ~9k years ago, and they reached the British Isles and Scandinavia ~6k years ago. The population that reached the British Isles was ~80% Middle-Eastern and 20% Indigenous European by ancestry.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#334

Post by all2 »

pandaman wrote: post #310
all2 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying taxes are bad. I'm saying specifically that taxing property itself is bad. If someone 'owns' a thing, why would they pay rent to some landlord (the state)? I acknowledge that I'm indulging in equivocation by saying 'assessing taxes from property is essentially paying rent to the state'. I assert that the equivocation is valid because the outcomes of not paying rent and not paying property taxes is the…

This depends on what you mean by "own". We have property rights, which are colloquially referenced as "ownership" but, by definition, these are rights and don't exist outside the state, which enforces them. So yes, your rights are given to you by the state and you don't really have any without the state enforcing them. If you could naively own your property then you could just tell the tax collectors to fuck off, wha…

> So yes, your rights are given to you by the state and you don't really have any without the state enforcing them.

This ignores the Constitution and the acknowledgement of 'inalienable rights'.

   We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, [...]
In essence, the government of the United States derives its power from the governed, and otherwise wields no true power. The Constitution of this nation is written specifically limiting powers of the government, and not enumerating the rights of the people.

> If you could naively own your property then you could just tell the tax collectors to fuck off, what are they going to do with your property if it had been truly yours?

Yes. This is where the second and fourth amendments to the constitution are important. True sovereignty (not in the sense of that 'sovereign citizen' nonsense) comes with martial ability; that is, the right to take another life. Sovereignty is necessarily paired with 'power', as without it, there isn't any true ability to protect one's rights.

---

All that said, I'm appealing to an ideal when I say 'property tax is theft'.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#335

Post by pandaman »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #169
repeekad wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does being in a city “naturally” mean less home ownership? More demand and higher prices yes, but you also should be earning more and dense housing projects should be trivial to justify. It’s legislation all the way down, politicians protect the interests of the wealthy who want to rent seek regardless of location. Look at how mamdani got a common sense luxury home tax in NYC, before that ultra wealthy owned mult…

One thing soviet commies did right was housing builds. Build factory for city blocks, then just pop them up, constantly, keeping the line busy. It should really be city that is building the new housing (even if in the end it gets subcontracted, at least the top level have vested interest in keeping the quality and cost in check). Maybe even offer some rent-to-own programs where part of rent gets put into savings that…

>One thing soviet commies did right was housing builds

And yet, the housing was a much bigger problem in the USSR than what amounts to "housing crisis" in the USA. One of the big points of the CPSU platform was to provide non-shared living accommodations to each family by the year 2000 (the USSR collapsed before that but the Party admitted they are not meeting the demand already in 1989). In rich cities most of these pre-made buildings had been already scraped.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#336

Post by pandaman »

all2 wrote: post #334
pandaman wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This depends on what you mean by "own". We have property rights, which are colloquially referenced as "ownership" but, by definition, these are rights and don't exist outside the state, which enforces them. So yes, your rights are given to you by the state and you don't really have any without the state enforcing them. If you could naively own your property then you could just tell the tax collectors to fuck off, wha…

> So yes, your rights are given to you by the state and you don't really have any without the state enforcing them. This ignores the Constitution and the acknowledgement of 'inalienable rights'. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure…

I imagine you wanted to say "ignores the Declaration of Independence", which you quoted? Sure, if you believe that this declaration endowed you with the unalienable property rights then just go ahead and don't pay the property tax, what is going to happen if your property rights are truly unalienable, right?

Also, how theft would be even possible if property rights had been unalienable? If someone stole from you and you retained your property rights you could just keep enjoying your property and exclude the thief from your property as the right entitles you.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#337

Post by em-bee »

bombcar wrote: post #321
vablings wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that housing should not be an investment but due to rising labor and materials costs and also more restrictive code, they are now an investment.

Housing should be an investment; you should be encouraged to invest in where you live and improve both your property and the area around you. It should not be a good investment - it should, over time, boil down to below inflation once you take maintenance and taxes into consideration.

housing should be an investment the same way that planting trees is an investment. it should not be a financial tool to make you money by selling it.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#338

Post by em-bee »

jmyeet wrote: post #275
ecshafer wrote: post #192

Housing can not be a viable asset class, or it will continue to rise in prices. Step 1 is Land Value Taxes. Step 2 is remove/greatly reduce zoning, allow construction and streamline the process. If you allow density, building up, and incentivize it, then it will be built. Developers spend tens of thousands of dollars in permits and interest payments before they can put a shovel in the ground. Being a landlord isn't r…

We shouldn't allow people to hoard housing and land. That’s the core problem here. It should be super expensive to own more than one property. I refer people to the Housing Theory of Everything [1]. I disagree with the Ultra-YIMBYs who believe in removing all zoning and regulation. If you do that, you get Houston. Because that's what Houston is. What we need is to prioritize living over investment returns in housing.…

There should be social housing in every ZIP code

exactly. it has been shown elsewhere that one problem that makes it difficult for people to escape poverty is that everyone around them is poor too. as long as you live there there is an invisible ceiling in how much you can improve your life as an individual/family. people who were able to move to a better neighborhood found it much easier to improve. mixed housing avoids that poor neighborhood trap.

the same btw, is true for the integration of immigrants.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#339

Post by readthenotes1 »

Even worse is the number. When you count, how many people actually own their own home, and don't have a mortgage on it and thus are paying rent in the form of interest and possibly mortgage insurance.

I am of course excluding property tax from the ownership- if you fail to pay property tax, you'll find out you really owns your property?.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#340

Post by bluGill »

carlosjobim wrote: post #328
bluGill wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game animals were rarely that in abundance. It happened after plagues but then populations rebounded and life was a constant struggle.

You've been told that life was a constant struggle, you weren't there. Many would say that life today is a constant struggle. But we have abundant evidence in art, architecture, inventions, and every fruit of human creativity, showing that people weren't in a constant struggle. Especially, we have evidence in literature from the past, giving a more nuanced picture than that of constant struggle for everyone everywher…

Literature only happened in agricultural societies and mostly by the elites. While it gives us a picture historians have to work really hard to read between the lines to figure out what life was really like for most people. If you were the elite in any time your life is much better than typical.

Many would say life is a constant struggle. However few have any clue what others experience is like. Even the filthy rich consider life a struggle.

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