So I'll tackle this...
Food is highly responsive to market pressure because it is nearly entirely fungible. I'll throw this here for the sake of making sure we're on the same page when I say that
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Fungible: able to replace or be replaced by another identical item; mutually interchangeable.
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So food markets are sensitive to pressure because there is hardly ever anything special about the food any one entity produces. Someone charging too much for corn? Go buy identical corn, that fills exactly the same need from any one of the thousands of their competitors. "Organic" was, in large parts, an effort to make food that is less easily replaced, and is mostly marketing rather than quality or health related (seriously, go google some of the chemicals that we allow to be added to organic food).
In contrast to food - Real estate is very rarely fungible. A specific plot of land has characteristics that often make it very hard to replace. Whether that's proximity to people or locations or features themselves such as soil, water, grade (slope, slant), existing structures, mineral presence ,etc. Non of those are consistent between different plots of land (there's a reason "Location, Location, Location" is a saying).
So no - Personally, I don't believe that real estate will ever be able to be treated in a similar way as the food market. Desire for it is predicated too much on aspects other than mere "acres" of it that you can get.
Imagine if just finding the right steak to eat was enough to make you rich for life, or if that ear of corn was where your family has been buried for centuries, or if that lima bean reduced your commute from a 2 hour drive to a 5 minute walk. I think we'd see pretty insane food prices then as well.
All you are saying is "imagine if food supply was more constrained" with more words. Commodification and constrained supply are orthogonal concepts -- the argument here is that increased commodification may lead to increased supply, so long as the market is allowed to act freely.
> that ear of corn was where your family has been buried for centuries,
This argument of "what if your family lived there before" in housing discussions annoys me to no end. We don't live in a feudal society where the right to a particular village is passed down through bloodlines. The fact that your family lived somewhere in the past doesn't entitle you to anything; you're not a Hapsburg monarch.
It's NOT about right - it's about demand. It's not relevant at all if it annoys you, the issue is that people can and do form sentimental attachments to the places where they live, and those attachments influence their willingness to pay (or hinder their willingness to sell).
And no - I'm not saying "imagine if the food supply was more constrained". I'm very clearly saying that food is fungible (you know - the thing I actually said...).
The housing supply is both constrained and non-fungible. The food supply can be constrained or not, but it's fungible as all get out - For the purposes of not starving, a calorie is a calorie, and where it comes from is irrelevant in a broad sense.
Sure, that's fair. I'm really reacting to arguments about gentrification, where people do talk about "rights" to stay in a particular neighborhood that apparently get passed via genetic material.
> I'm very clearly saying that food is fungible
My point is that the reason "fungibility" is important is actually because it impacts supply: there aren't just 100k houses vs 100k households, there are actually 10k houses with some desirable property (close to where most people work, sufficiently large to raise children, whatever) vs 50k households willing to pay a premium for that desirable property. Your point about fungibility doesn't change the conversation about supply and demand, it's just a partial explanation of the mismatch.
> I'm really reacting to arguments about gentrification, where people do talk about "rights" to stay in a particular neighborhood that apparently get passed via genetic material.
What is it that bothers you about this? Basically - my counter argument is: If a person has been living in an area for decades, and that area is now gentrifying, can't it be reasonably expected that person (or their family) were fundamentally a part of driving that gentrification?
It means that person was putting in their labor and money into that location for decades, and that labor and money was key for creating the conditions that are allowing for gentrification (even if the final catalyst was something else - like a company using the stable area for new expansion)
Simplifying - My counter argument is that forcing this person out is robbing them of the fruit of their labor: A nice neighborhood. They were there when it wasn't nice. They worked in making it nice. Now you kick them out because they were working with a lower income to do it (usually meaning they put in considerably more "sweat equity"). Seems pretty unfair to me.
The claim that housing is fungible is absolute non-sense, though.
If it were, we wouldn't see such drastic market variations, even within relatively close geographic markets (in some cases, literally blocks away)
We also wouldn't see such an intense pressure on evaluating real estate before purchasing (because if it was fungible - it's all the same, right?).
I basically don't know where to go in the conversation if you can't actually acknowledge the argument in front of you, and just say "No".
Right now the supply of those two good and their general dynamics are totally different. Landlords can effectively extract maximum profit from a property without doing anything to improve it or remain competitive thanks to zoning restrictions and other things that make increasing supply difficult. Thanks to this set up, landlords effectively wind up capturing the capital gains that arise out of public improvements (like adding a new neighborhood park) as well since it makes the area more desirable without increasing supply.
In the most desirable areas you can literally do nothing as a landlord and raise rents almost perpetually.
Worse once these landlords raise rents it causes negative effects downstream. Producers of other goods that rent their land need to start charging more to pay the landlords.
The number of people that try to justify some kind of late pseudo-feudalist system like this is legitimately insane.
Very clever idea.
Taxation was never a solution to any problem. It was a way to mask the problem in a very populist way. Taxation purpose was a redistribution from 'evil crooks' to poor, unlucky people.
The problem with Taxation always was that the middle class was paying this because the rich ones had plenty of solutions not to pay including with moving to an another country
Yes. yes it is. She's made millions for doing nothing useful.
> the rich ones had plenty of solutions not to pay including with moving to an another country
How does a rich land owner avoid paying a land tax? Or a tax on the value of his copyrights (which would be land)
Yes the middle class get shafted on things like income and capital gains based taxes, that's the great thing about a land value tax, it taxes the immovable land, not the movable person.
Simple as fuck logic. She bought the property, not a license there for living up to her ends.
The thing you are here presenting is a tax of not realized potential income. It's diabolical insane idea.
If we can do it for real estate, why not for cars, and any idea property?
You basically want people buy a license for living in their flats.
About basically nor useful, she earned the money, paid multiple taxes for this and she bought this from the real property dealer / construction company which hired many people for this.
Isn't this tangible contribution for society?
All because people like you flocked to her location for work what used to be peaceful, quite suburbs
For someone else to live in that house they would have to make a fortune to pay it in rent. She could choose to move somewhere cheaper and have a massive income from either selling it or renting it out, but she doesn't, she's become rich because other people are making the area valuable.
You can also do literally nothing even if you want to because of zoning. Remove all the market distortions and watch rental prices drop.
Call a contractor and see how much they charge for permitted work.
And one of the most regulated and subsidized markets...
This is utterly untrue for real estate, which is about as non-fungible as you can get.
I think the issue is that housing is intrinsically tied to real estate, and real estate (at large) likely won't become much more fungible. Land is just really complicated, and the uses for it aren't all that exchangeable.
"socialism" =/= government intervention.
Having one element of a nation state being characterised as socialist doesn’t not equate to socialism… the world is not black and white..
A governments 2 main assets are its people and its land. Ensuring that people have ownership of the land ensures the people will continue to support the government as there’s mutual interest. So subsidizing loans via guarantees isn’t socializing so much as the government investing in itself and protecting its assets.
In a free, capitalist market, private providers would price and provide mortgages. This is not happening here..
For some Americans this may be difficult to digest since there may be cognitive dissonance…how can an American ideal be characterised as socialist.
A socialist government would either ensure everyone qualifies or it wound instead build large dehumanizing concrete towers to stuff thousands of people in, block after block.
Having traveled across many countries in Europe, I have seen governments with socialist traits make rational, sensible decisions. Again, while I agree that a capitalist government is probably more effective than most communist governments, the world is not black and white.
When I moved to Manhattan, I was shocked to see how many apartment buildings that are only a couple floors tall and don't have elevators. I assumed every building in Midtown would be at least 50 floors and house thousands of people.
Counting the office space, which is completely unnecessary when people can work from home, even the densest neighborhood of America's most populated city has tons of room. I would bet that we can fit 20 times more people in Manhattan if we got rid of the height limitation laws and converted all the offices to apartments.
On the other hand, when we consider the average suburb there is a ridiculous surplus of land. We could fit the entire world population into Texas if we used it more efficiently.
How much grain is watered with depleted groundwater? How much produce is dependent on the Colorado river?
Yes? Most people who have ever lived have always produced their own food. That most of us in the developed world have lost the ability to do so—and that access to the physical essence of our being is dependent on monetary transactions with faceless entities that value profit above human life—seems deeply alienating.
It does bother me
Biology does not care about our philosophy; it allows emotional bonds between officials and elites that are leveraged against the masses.
Write on paper all the rules you want, collusion will happen.
Your defense of this system that’s also screwing you is bizarre; conviction to spoken traditions versus actual analysis. Very brain dead following orders of you. Very religious missionary of you. Human biology is easily convinced it’s spoken words of power are what rule the world.
I mean so it is; if you get burned by it, oh well. Remember; if this system takes your life from you, none of us have an obligation to you.