Or... you know... just give homeless people housing?
https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/how-to-fix-homelessness-give-...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_benefits_in_the_U...
On top of this, it only applies if you lose your job due to "lay-offs". I've been laid off four times in my life, all 3 times the companies claimed they were not lay-offs and fought my claim. 2 times I was denied.
The third time I received unemployment benefits for 5 months. I received $4,000 in benefits then my former employer won an appeal, and my claim was deemed "fraud". I had to pay $8,500 back ($4,000 + $4,500 in "fraud fees").
If you are fired for "cause", "screw you, have a nice day".
8 months ago 10% of my company's engineering department (screw you, cloud passage) was fired "for cause" and replaced with cheap Belarusian contractors. This time I didn't even bother for unemployment, I didn't want to risk having to pay it back + 100% fines. I also do not get covid stimulus, and have had to sell my 401k to keep from being homeless.
America has no social net whatsoever. I do not qualify for unemployment, food stamps, or anything else even though I have been working my ass off and paying taxes for 25 years.
But, this is one of my concerns too. I equate money with time and if, as a law-abiding citizen, I work diligently for a couple of decades and pay my taxes, when circumstances change – I should be assured some sort of a safety net. Otherwise, what is the point of wasting time working to pay taxes? Is this the hard reality that we cannot rely on governments taking care of us and need to come up with more individualistic backup plans in such circumstances? Does paying all of your taxes and being a model law-abiding citizen make you a sucker?
The only thing really keeping us afloat is we fled the USA and move to my wife's town where she owns a home and there's a low cost of living. Luckily I was raised with the philosophy that if I cannot afford to buy a thing in cash, I cannot afford to buy that thing, so I have never had any debt.
Well yes, for many of the young working class - rent is eating up over 2/3rd of their paychecks.
We are being scammed by the Bourgeoisie with inherited wealth.
This explains our situation well imo:
-
"So where did our land system come from?
Weirdly enough, the land system that we have today has its origins in a problem specific to medieval kings, which is ‘how do I fund military campaigns and defence, without paying to keep a standing army?’
And it was William the Conqueror who perfected the answer. It was a piece of paper. And on that piece of paper was basically an agreement between the Crown and a noble, saying ‘if you provide men for military campaigns when I ask, in exchange I will grant you a monopoly over your own private fiefdom, where you can levy as high taxes as people can bear to pay’.
So effectively — rent is the original tax, paid via lords to the King.
In fact the word ‘feudal’ derives from the latin word feudalis — for ‘fee’. In other words, rent. So the whole system of government by which the Normans ruled over the Anglo Saxons was based on rent.
If you’re a King, there’s only really three groups of people you’re scared of: other kings, your family, and your nobles. So over time landowners managed to engineer a set of concessions, whereby increasingly taxes were levied directly on people and business, leaving them (the lords) as the owners of a monopoly right to extract privatised land tax.
So what you’re left with is a set of power relations in society: an enforced system of servitude and control. As the economist Henry George pointed out, it is essentially a diluted version of slavery.
“Ownership of land always gives ownership of people… Place one hundred people on an island from which there is no escape. Make one of them the absolute owner of the others — or the absolute owner of the soil. It will make no difference — either to owner or to the others — which one you choose. Either way, one individual will be the absolute master of the other ninety-nine.”
Fast forward a few hundred years, to post-civil-war America and that’s exactly what played out. The plantation owners could no longer own slaves, so what they said is ‘Ok, I’ll pay you, say, $2 dollars a day’ — but by the way, I own the land, and the rent is… $2 a day.’’. Which, incidentally, led to the invention of a clever invention called a ‘chattel house’ which was a kind of kit house that gave families of plantation workers the ability to relocate to try to escape exploitative landlords."
Fast forward again to today, and land is still the fundamental mechanism of racial inequity. To be blunt, all across the UK and the US, there are tenants with black and brown skin paying rent to landlords and mortgage lenders with white skin. Or commuting for hours. Or both.
I imagine all of you have seen the speech made a couple of weeks ago by a young American writer called Kimberly Jones — if you haven’t, do — it’s absolutely the most eloquent piece of public speaking I’ve seen in a long time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llci8MVh8J4). In it she uses this incredible image of getting white people to imagine what it feels like to play “four hundred rounds of Monopoly” with the game rigged against you, enforced by violence. There’s an interesting backstory here, that you may know, which is that the game of monopoly was first invented by a woman called Elizabeth Magie — and originally called ‘The Landlords Game’ and it was created so that… basically one day someone could make exactly the speech that Kimberly Jones just did.
So, broadly speaking — and I’m simplifying here — there were two positions in this power diagram. Tenant and landlord.
And over time that piece of paper became a tradable asset, as well as an inheritable one: so you can literally buy the right to extract taxes from people. And it’s amazing to me that we don’t find that more weird than we do — it’s right there hidden in plain sight in the language we use: landlord.
But such an extreme overclass/underclass diagram is politically hard to sustain. So, over time we saw the slow emergence of a middle position, which is for those who could get together just enough money to buy their own freedom from rent. Again, that’s why we have the word ‘Freehold’; it’s not free as in ‘no cost’ it’s free as in, ‘liberty’."
Source: https://medium.com/@AlastairParvin/a-new-land-contract-684c3...
+
"There are many kinds of monopoly, from utilities to pharmaceutical patents, but the greatest – the ‘mother of all monopolies’ as Churchill described it – is land. Land rents are a weird leftover of the medieval feudal system: a privatised location tax that is suffocating every Westernised economy today."
"It is worth remembering that there is no political argument —Left, Liberal or Right — that even attempts to justify economic rent-seeking on the basis of principle. You will not find one in any book. Adam Smith was against it, Karl Marx was against it, Keynes was against it, Friedman was against it. Even Ayn Rand was against it. Economic rent-seeking survives only in the dark, by obfuscation, distraction, corruption and perverse incentives. It endures only because it has not been part our political language for the last century, and in the tussle of everyday life, we are all susceptible to quietly putting our own short-term convenience ahead of our principles if we can get away with it (then justifying it to ourselves later)."
Source: https://medium.com/@AlastairParvin/progress-again-6f6213bdcd...
Landlordism is one of the oldest games. It is true that you do need quite a bit of capital in order to 'start'. This is the reason why many big corporations like Blackstone have gotten into the game. In the UK, landlordism is a common way to 'becoming a millionaire'.
After the '08 financial crash, the UK government even pledged to underwrite mortgages, making the game of starting a Monopoly-like property empire in the UK risk free for elites. Sheikh Khalifa is a big fan. [1]
> The only way it makes sense is if capital gains ratchets up the property prices significantly.
That's exactly what corporates do. It's the slow corporate fininancialization of the housing market [2].
"Between 2011 and 2017, some of the world’s largest private-equity groups and hedge funds, as well as other large investors, spent a combined $36 billion on more than 200,000 homes in ailing markets across the country. In one Atlanta zip code, they bought almost 90 percent of the 7,500 homes sold between January 2011 and June 2012; today, institutional investors own at least one in five single-family rentals in some parts of the metro area" [3]
+
"Scaling up portfolios consisting of thousands or tens of thousands of rental homes has made it possible for Wall Street firms to roll out financial instruments suited to “a rentership society”. Securitisation allows big investors to borrow against the value of the properties, to buy more properties and pay off old debt, and acts as a loan that tenants pay back with their rent checks.
Wall Street is no stranger to the housing business in America. But their involvement as landlords of single-family homes is new, and so are the financial instruments they have developed." [4]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ng-interactive/2020/oct/...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/sep/10/push-fi...
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/singl...
[4] https://theconversation.com/wall-street-landlords-are-chasin...
Ah yes, a most trustworthy source. A book written by many authors and used by monarchs to subdue their populations.
I am not saying this post is factually/historically correct.
All my SF life I’ve tried to stay in the real residential neighborhoods, the ones tourists don’t know exist. Would be nice to change it up without being rent gouged.
It all seems very similar to me. I'm sure at the start they also thought they were turning defunct office space into desirable apartments too.
> Smith is one of hundreds of residents placed at Terminus House in Harlow by councils in and around London, often many miles from everything and everybody they once knew.
I'm not familiar with the specifics of UK subsidized housing, but it sure sounds like the residents were placed in this building by government.
Councils used to be the biggest house builders in the UK.
Then the neoliberals decided that was silly and the free-market could sort it. So they banned councils from building houses in the 80s. House builds plummeted from 300k per year to 30k per year. Plus they forced the council to get rid of their affordable housing by letting people buy their council house from the council.
So now, when poor people who are guaranteed a house need one, the council have to buy a slot from the free market (and obviously need to go for cheap).
Now the UK has a housing crisis.
Yay, free market.
Basically, the opposite of what you think. The council didn't 'choose' to put people there, they were forced to by the market and disasterous neo-liberal policies.
In contrast if the policy is "Government pays the rent on the cheapest houses on the market, for homeless people" or "government has a fixed budget and must house as many homeless people as possible" then the legal minimum standard is crucial, because that's what you'll likely be giving to homeless people.
For councils to build houses and build them to a reasonable standard would, as you say, be another option.
Whether or not the free market has caused the use of private companies to provide project style social housing on the fringes of cities (short answer: of course it has) is somewhat irrelevant compared with converting city-centre commercial property into private accommodation.
>> sounds like the residents were placed in this building by government
> council didn't 'choose' to put people there
Again, your response isn't to the point being made really - no-ones really arguing against your point. Just because they didn't have any real alternative doesn't invalidate the point that they did it.
Can anyone buy some land and build whatever they want on it, like massive apartment buildings? If the answer is no, how can you claim there is a free market? I think the problem is clearly on the heavy regulations, licensing and zoning that keep companies from building.
They probably can, but The Market™ may give better ROI to (e.g.) condominiums so who'd want to do it?
With apartments you have to do things like put up with tenants and such, and who wants to do that? With condos you sell the units, create a condo corporation, and then walk away with your money once it's constructed and never think about it again.
Why build rental units for poor people when you can sell to oligarchs who want an asset to park their money in?
As with everything else in a capilistic economy: because there is profit to be made.
Same as we have very expensive top-of-the-line smartphones and very cheap but functional ones, a truly free market housing economy would provide cheap housing for the poor. The reason why we don't see that happening is because of all the regulations that increase the cost of building, making such companies inviable.
Poor people would benefit the most from truly free markets, if we care about them we should be asking for less government intervention, not more.
As someone who lives in Toronto, Canada where there's a lot of condo construction, and little-to-no purpose-built rental construction, the "capitalist economy" has decided that rentals are generally not worth it.
At least when it comes to builders: plenty of people are buying condos and renting them out instead of living in them, but apartment blocks seem to be not worth the effort.
You are right to complain about this issue, but don't blame free markets, because they are not free: government intervention prevent the necessary competition for the market to work and fulfill demand.
Which are exactly the same for condo or apartment.
The reasons are economic AFAICT:
> For a long time, the economics of constructing a rental made little sense compared to a condo. Condo builders get a significant portion of their financing directly from future unit owners, who give hefty deposits to secure their spot and therefore assume some of the risk. Rental landlords, on the other hand, need to front the majority of the equity, assuming all the risk themselves. When a condo building is complete and all the units have been sold and paid for, the developers quickly reap the returns on their investment and move on. For a rental building, the returns take many, many years longer.
* https://nationalpost.com/life/homes/is-this-rare-new-rental-...
Toronto has had vacancy rates <2% for decades, so it's not like rental demand wasn't there. In fact prices peaked just before the pandemic and are now falling because the Airbnb folks are switching to long-term rentals. The price of condos is dropping as well since plenty of people are just selling their Airbnb units and flooding the market to certain extent.
A good number of rental buildings are actually being constructed in partnership with insurance and pension funds, as they need long term cash flows and baby boomers aren't getting any younger.
The building looks and was named straight out of judge dredd.
Before anyone has a hissy, while a good sounding idea it can raise costs for remaining units and price other people completely out of the market again and greatly delay a project as each group wants its pound of flesh. So the very same reason there is a lack of housing will rear its ugly head in this case as well