Concentration of wealth in the hands of few: this is actually being promoted by all administrations the US has seen in the last decades. If only 80% of the insane military budget could be used to house, feed, cloth and educate EVERY citizen...
- there is no lack of cheap housing, however it's outside of main cities
- Concentration of wealth was worse in many moments in history, but that didn't imply in unaffordable real estate (at today's levels)
- Most government regulation works to restrict the supply of housing rather than expand it, even the ones that "theoretically" help with affordability (like rent controls - which I'm not against in some cases).
Here you see people as individuals.
> and that only the wealthy have the means to achieve it.
And here you distinguish classes.
I think this is a class issue, with at the top level: the "wealthy to the extend that you do not have to work to survive" at one side, and the "rest of us" on the other side.
Concentrating wealth to the extend that you can scrape by is a joke. This is called scraping by.
I saw this quote once and had to laugh:
"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck
I had to think if it when reading your comment :)
A major part of that issue is the voting population. Only people who have already overcome the "getting housing" hurdle are permitted in the elections that shape zoning laws.
There's still some variance there: homeowners profit from high housing prices, while renters profit from low ones. But even for renters, who theoretically want zoning laws relaxed, it's often not a top issue. Given that "weaken zoning laws" is a broadly conservative position here, weak-zoning candidates are usually blocked by the general liberalism of urban areas.
(And at least where I live, technocratic Democrats who might support progressive policies and weak zoning get crushed by entrenched Democrats with more funding and union endorsements. A viable candidate would need to be technocratic only on zoning laws.)
[1] TPTB a.k.a. the 0.1%, a.k.a. the majority of the owners of the majority of private property.
[2] The people that have to work to sustain their livelihood, or are not even that fortunate (jobless, impaired, etc.).
Interesting how the article compares the US of today with the situation in the year 1900. The country as a whole has become sooooo much more wealthy in that period, but still is not able to take care of it's population's basic needs. And it seems to be getting worse.
But it's a democracy, so the 99.9% should have the power to fix this, right? Well...
"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal" -- Emma Goldman