In the cities with massive housing shortages I'm aware of, everyone -- NIMBY and YIMBY alike -- would seize the non-primary houses of the rich (or at least tax the shit out of them) if they could.

The problem with this, of course, is that it involves picking an economic fight against rich people, the people who win economic fights.

Anyway. A lot of zoning policy is set by people who claim to be middle-class but own fabulously valuable property. They could become rich at any moment they choose because they are lucky enough to live in a home that has become worth about $3 million due to the housing shortage. It's in their interest, of course, to stay where they are and keep the housing shortage going until their house is worth $4 million.

If we had a land value tax, maybe people would prefer to have a sensible rate of development that kept their home price stable. But accidentally-wealthy homeowners are a huge voting demographic, on top of the fact that blatantly rich people have a lot of political influence. So the land value tax is politically infeasible.

>Why is it that the middle class who only have their single single-family house are the selfish ones?

This thread is largely an assault on the middle class in SF who happen to have been around when it was affordable to buy there by a swarm of very well salaried (but still priced out) techies who've by and large ruined SF with their presence as it is.

Like most Americans, the target isn't the rich because the techies in question see themselves as being those people someday.

Those hypothetical home seizures would not be on a large enough scale to make a difference. Empty houses owned by rich people are not a large-scale phenomenon.

Middle-class people, on the other hand, are not facing their single-family house being taken away; just some of its benefits being reduced and its value possibly dropping.

>why don't we just seize the non-primary houses of the wealthy to house the poor?

For starters, that would violate the 5th amendment.

Well of course it would, I'm talking about philosophically.

Why should everything be balanced on the backs of the working and middle class if we're talking about architecting a more functional society.

You can believe that "densification" will be applied in-equally as well. Just as it happened to poor or working class folks who were gentrified out of the homes they had inherited, it will move up the 'class' gradient until only the wealthiest own everything.

At some point the practicality of life in a civil society has to trump insane ideologies committed only to protecting 'property rights' of a small minority.

If you own a standalone single family home in Berkeley, you’re not middle class.

If we can write the rules so that we never have to see people with less money than us, we can feel middle class.

I’m all for confiscating the wealth of the rich. But even I have to admit that this is one problem that it won’t solve. The issue at play here is land— raw acreage— and the density thereof. While the rich may own big houses it doesn’t even come close to the total acreage of all the single-family housing in an area.

> I’m all for confiscating the wealth of the rich.

Why?