Homeowners, irrespective of age, tend to vote more. This is in part enabled by material comforts. But there may be other layers of causation. The first two are problematic per se (though I'm uncertain of the effect size). But the last is simply fundamental to democracy--if someone can vote but can't care to, they're not going to have their interests represented.
This is ofc a rhetorical question as you can see the answers play out very clearly in nearly every conservative party in the world (and much more subtle and convoluted in the parties left of them).
Voting against their interests: nothing. That said, I've often found folks deemed to be voting against their interests to be doing nothing of the sort.
Those who don't care are, for me, also fine. They're self selecting out of having a voice. If they want to have one in the future, they can engage. The tragedy is those who want to engage but can't. Due to registration requirements, ersatz poll taxes, difficulty of getting to and from poll sites or keeping tabs on the election calendar.
(Apathy is unlikely to be solved with reforms versus education. I've never met an apathetic voter who cast a blank ballot in protest. If they show up, they tend to find something to vote on.)
I hear about this every now and then, but is it an issue in any real number? Maybe the problem of the "difficulty of getting to and from poll sites", which I can see arising due to the nature of this country being large, spread out, and automobile-centric.
Even Georgia, which was recently under fire for so-called voter restriction laws, hands out voter ID cards for free or a non-driver state ID card for under $40 that lasts nearly a decade. I can only imagine that anyone who is unable to obtain one of those has much bigger problems than voting every few years.
For example, at one point a proposal was floated to force changes in Texas polling center distribution, but only in counties with over a million people, which was pretty nakedly partisan. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/23/texas-voting-polling...
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/06/01/harris-county-electi...
It's not just distance and cost, but time. Someone working 3 jobs simply doesn't have time to stand in line for hours.
> Someone working 3 jobs
According to the BLS[0], less than 5% of working-aged people hold more than one job, and presumably a fraction of that have three jobs. Surely society shouldn't optimize for a small minority of the population.
> doesn't have time to stand in line for hours
Data on this isn't great, but one source I found[1] puts a cursory total average across all states in 2020 at around 15 minutes, with the worst average wait time being Indiana at 42.1 minutes. It's confirmed by a 2020 academic paper[2] which puts the nationwide median at 14 minutes.
I can imagine that there are outliers who have to wait unpleasantly long, and that same paper referenced above indicates that people may have unequal voting wait times based on where they live. Ideally voting should be easy for all those eligible to vote.
[0]: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat36.htm
[1]: https://www.lgbtmap.org/img/maps/citations-polling-place-lin...
Having a permanent, of sorts, attachment to a location incentivizes people to vote to protect their interests in that location.
Even the so-called "left leaning" party are landlords.
We are run by the landed gentry. They'll continue looking out for their own. Houses are the safest asset as they're practically 100% Government backed.
> soulless suburbs where there's literally nothing
This is a bit of a reductionist take on those younger people's part. You can have just as much fun at the TGI Friday's at your local strip mall as you can at the hippest restaurant no one else has ever heard of in Brooklyn. It's just a matter of who you spend that time with, and how you perceive that time, in the Stoic tradition.
It's not just about restaurants. I'm not going to be able to go to concerts or events. There will be no specialized stores. Even in the example you gave, many of these chains are absolutely terrible now. Going to a local place means better food. It's not all pretense.
As the saying goes: It's hard to have fun with dogshit in your mouth.
Cities are fun, but people fail to realize that rural places are also pretty great. You just need to make your own fun, but you actually have the room (and money) to do so. I can go out in my yard and do archery, target shooting, etc. I live surrounded by woods and can go for a walk or just sit in there whenever I want...mosquitoes permitting. My house has room for any new hobby I want.
I will say that suburbs are probably the worst of both worlds, but I suppose you're closer to those concerts and better restaurants if you want.
hit the nail on the head right there.
Also you have more people and diversity. If you hate your neighbor there's plenty of others. In a smaller society, if you don't get along with ~3-5 people your fucked.
All I'm saying is that most people that act like rural areas have "nothing to do" probably don't do all that much regularly anyways - and there are simply different things to do. We live 5 minutes from a state park with great hiking and have two public beaches within 5 minutes as well.
To answer your first question: a lot. There's people that are very different from you, that really don't do well without these interactions. They expect to go out 1-3 times a week or at least monthly. Small area community events can be awkward if you aren't from town, don't know everyone, who all grew up together.
Yeah, you're buddy might come over now and then for target practice. However this is very different from social events city dwellers rely on.
Don't get me wrong - if I were still single I'd probably move to a city, if only for the dating prospects. Once you have a family though and limited free time the pros and cons change a bit.
The idea that if you live in a suburb you can no longer go to concerts or events or "specialized stores" whatever that means, is just ridiculous.
I coined the phrase, and am now not so sure myself. It doesn't really need to be that special, either. If you live in a small area you'll have eg. 1-5 stores.
There will be a big box supermarket, a local one, and maybe some other wildcard option. Then there will be a couple local stores (hardware, outdoors, etc.). However, if you want anything specific or just don't like the shop, you have to go to a different city.
I don't know if you've lived in a small town, but this would include things like electronic. With no Best Buy or Circuit City, you were stuck with Walmart, or a local shop for almost twice the price.
There’s numerous spaces I’ve been in where English is rarely spoken and it gives me the opportunity to maintain my language skills.
Do you think I could have that in generic suburbia?
It's funny because I've always thought of LA as a conglomeration of suburbia, but perhaps you're referring to "generic suburbia" as one that's composed primarily of typical white Americans? Then naturally by definition you're not going to have the same kind of access to whichever cultural group that is missing from that town. But I disagree that those kinds of places are entirely devoid of "soul", as the GP put it. It'd be like criticizing Los Angeles (plurality Hispanic, approximately 0% Danish[0]), for not having Danish festivals and grocery stores, or Jackson, MS (roughly 80% black and less than half a percent Asian[1]) for not having enough authentic Asian restaurants.
Sure, there's an argument to be made that you can find representation of anything in a big enough city, and that holds in places like NYC or LA. But that's a truism.
[0]: https://www.statimetric.com/us-ethnicity/Danish
[1]: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/jacksoncitymiss...
But that’s kind of beside the point. What I’m pushing back on is the notion that you can live anywhere in the US and it’s just as good as anywhere else so you might as well live wherever it’s cheapest.
It’s not about suburbs per se since Orange County is as suburban as it gets and also checks some of the boxes I mentioned (although I’d argue not as many as LA). It is also extremely expensive.
I don’t care for the “soul” argument since it’s vague. I just specified something that is personally important to me and justifies living in an very high COL city.
There is something fundamentally different about the cultural life in cities. The suburbs are actually "soulless" in comparison.
https://www.iwritewordsgood.com/apl/patterns/apl010.htm
Worth pointing out that every Stoic I can think of was an upper-class city-dweller. Epicurus—Athens. Marcus Aurelius—Rome. Zeno of Citium—Athens again, but perhaps apocryphal. Seneca, Cicero, Epictetus—Rome again [0].
[0] I'm reminded now that Epictetus was not particularly wealthy, and did live an ascetic lifestyle. Perhaps the exception that makes the rule.
Have you actually eaten at a TGIFridays? The food is awful. I suppose if the actual meal is completely secondary to your enjoyment of the experience, you might be right, but for me, eating out is as much for the food as the company.
I'm one of those younger people. The main difference here is, "the hip" restaurant in Brooklyn will have vastly different food than a hip restaurant in SF. Can't say that about TGIFs
Most places in the US are either affordable and boring or the other way around.
One difference with "younger" kids now is they're getting married later...but once you have kids the suburbs look completely different and it's been that way for as long as there have been suburbs.
Netherlands has the happiest kids in the world, where in Amsterdam a lot of kids would be growing up in an apartment. The flip side is, they get their freedom where they can go to places without needing their parents to drive them everywhere.
Furthermore, people also prefer the suburbs for raising a family because that’s where all the nice schools are built. For better or worse, inner city schools are avoided like the plague for parents with the means to buy a house in the suburbs.
My parents moved to the city when they had kids. Specifically to enable a better life for us. More access to friends, better schools, more independence, better extracurriculars, more family time because no commute, etc. It was pretty great.
Living in the city also made college affordable because we could just live at home and walk to school.
Unless you are talking about literal toddler, it is nit that awesome.
Nobody wants to rent a shoebox apartment in NYC for the rest of their life. But if you're not rich your only choices are to rent the shoebox or to leave NYC, and people choose which one matters more to them.
You should read about Vienna, which is a relatively large city that’s bucking the trend.
And forget wages, sticking around in small cities is often career suicide. As a young person, you can’t be blamed for wanting McKinsey in NYC on your resume instead of Acme Hardware Store in random town, Idaho.
It’s a gravity well of incentives towards absolute property gluttony and creating an overheated housing market and massive social inequality.
I remember about 10 years ago, "the idea" was that retirees would, as their health starts to decline, do equity-release in their homes to pay for their care needs (on the basis that the NHS would start to means-test care based on the value of all assets, including housing, so that if an OAP has £1m locked-up in their house and they probably have less than 5-6 years to live it's only fair that they liquidate some of that wealth instead of expecting the NHS to pay for everything - while those who don't own their own houses, would still benefit from free NHS care).
I left the UK just-over 10 years ago (but I still visit my parents a few times a year and do the WFH-thing-but-abroad) so I'm not as clued-in on subtler points of public policy, but I'm curious if that's still the case? ...or if the Tories reversed that decision in the 8 years they've held power? (after-all, it would be anathema to Daily Mail readers, who give me the impression that they fully expect to enjoy their house-prices even after they're dead).
That may not be fair, but when most voters are property owners you're not going to get a different outcome.
This is an interesting topic because it highlights how the political and economic culture is broken and incapable of effective national strategy. I don't think housing, health, industrial policy, education, or anything else can be fixed without a complete overhaul of the UK's political parties, media, and systems.
Also, not enough kids, and of those, not enough who wanted to go into medicine.
It seems like baby booms have a way of making things seem artificially good for a while, and then there’s a hangover.
Right but manufacturing technology better and more efficient, we produce far more "per worker" now
It's not as simple as "give up some of their personal wealth to pay more for an NHS they've already paid into". If you have 20K in your bank account and no property, you have to pay for your care. If you own 2 flats worth 1M each and have 10K in your bank account, you pay nothing. The so-called "dementia tax" would have make this situation fairer. Besides, they wouldn't have to release equity while alive, but the cost of care would be paid by the heirs upon selling or inheriting their parent's property.
Imagine a scenario where you have 20K in your bank account. You child inherits only 10K, because you had to pay for your care. Now imagine you have 2 flats and 10K in your bank account. Your child gets the whole lot. Does this look fair?
Theresa May, that, as far as I'm concerned, should be sent to the Hague for architecting the hostile environment for foreigners, had only one non-demented idea in her entire political career: making social care fairer, and that's what killed her premiership. I can't think of a more emblematic example of what is going on in the UK.
No, but because we should end means testing completely. I thought NHS meant you didn't have to do all the things we have to do here in the US.
A few years ago, I had to do an annual wellness exam so I could keep my health insurance "discount" at work. There was some miscommunication within the three parties: 1. Doctor's office 2. Lab 3. Insurance and I had to act like a mediator between them. I thought that was bad enough but NHS sounds worse now.
This is why I plan to finance my own retirement and consider a minimum social security pension a happy bonus.
Edit: in before anyone asks for evidence of favouring conservative outcomes: Boris Johnson had a landslide 80 seat majority with only 43.6% of the popular vote. PR would mean more coalition governments, but those would largely be left leaning Labour/Lib/SNP even when the conservatives have higher than historically average vote shares.
It's also about rapidly declining population and people not willing to work. The result of welfare state.
If you incentivize people to develop themselves, acquire skills and knowledge, work and make kids, then they will be able to afford housing, medical care and pensions.
So the marginal tax rate becomes very low if you have three kids. Even incentivizes one parent to work less.
Were people not willing to work in the 1940s?
There is the ever increasing problem of more people drawing down state pensions, using the NHS and social care, than there are young tax payers to support them.
I don’t know if this was sarcasm, but this is the sort of absurd nonsense spouted by conservatives who’ve already gotten “theirs”.
Home prices that are astronomically high relative to average wages means that most people can’t afford to buy a home no matter what they do (other than becoming millionaires).
Sounds like democracy?
> Sounds like democracy?
Young people might get their first chance to vote at age 23 - assuming they paid for the right kind of ID, or navigated an impenetrable web of underpaid bureaucrats to get the mythical free ID. And if they manage to get off work on election day. Meanwhile the elderly are reliably on the register (because they're not being forced to move around, because again they own a home) and encouraged to vote even if they're expected to die before the results take effect.
Which is democracy. It is fair in that sense, although surely it will not feel that way at all times.
(Not advocating for this, just an interesting thing to think about)
As it comes to housing though, I remain convinced that the issue is not as political as many make it out to be. See my other comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36486626
Meaning, even if the young seize more political power, there isn't going to be a law they can pass that says "cut rent in half".
uhh what? we're talking about britain here. I don't know what kind of yank(?) political dysfunction you're alluding to, but nobody has any trouble voting because of a lack of ID here. you don't need one to vote. you notify the electoral roll when you move into a house or flat, then a few weeks before election day you get a bit of paper in the post, you can bring it to the polling station to prove you live there.
During the recent elections in England about 14,000 people were denied a vote due to lack of ID.
The press has, as usual, not been entirely honest about this. In particular, there was a talking point about how only one non-passport and non-driving license form of ID that young people are likely to have compared with much more forms of ID that older people will have, but that one form of ID is a blanket scheme that providers of ID sign up to in order for it to be valid as proof of age. There is no equivalent blanket scheme for ID that older people are likely to have.
In 2017 for example the minimum number of votes across the country needed to take down Theresa May (or more realistically have her form a true minority government) was something like 2500.
We have an extremely disproportional electoral system.
If we are talking about 0.25% on average then I doubt it could have changed much in these local elections (back in May in England and Northern Ireland).
If anybody wants to play with the data from the General Election in 2017 they can do so here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2017_United_Kin...
Sort the table by "Mjrty." in ascending order. Right at the top we see wins for SNP, Labour, SNP, Labour, and Labour that easily could have been wins for Lib Dem, Tories, Tories, Tories, and Tories.
And 67m is nothing close to the size of the electorate of the local elections that number comes from.
And as another commenter wrote, a small number of votes can matter a great deal.
It also says nothing about the remaining 30% except that they "brough a type that was not accepted". We don't actually know if they even had the right to vote.
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/about-14000-people-england-...
Those who did have the right to vote could have gotten a free Voter Authority Certificate before the election:
https://www.gov.uk/apply-for-photo-id-voter-authority-certif...
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/about-14000-people-england-...
It also doesn't say how many of the 30% actually had the right to vote. It only says that they "brought a type that was not accepted".
To be clear, it’s not a real problem in the US either, but some people like to pretend it is. Don’t believe things you read on Reddit or wherever.
> they paid for the right kind of ID, or navigated an impenetrable web of underpaid bureaucrats
Pretty much everyone starts driving around 16-18 and has a driver's license
> manage to get off work on election day
CA is an early voting state where ballots are mailed to you ~1 month in advance. You can drop them off at your convenience at one of the numerous drop-off locations.
Really, CA makes it as easy to vote as possible including same-day registration. There is no excuse for young people to not vote, except for their apathy.
Many people in the UK don't bother with a licence. It can be prohibitively expensive when you consider the costs of lessons, a vehicle, and of the licence itself.
Many people in the UK don't bother with a licence.
where a driver's licence is almost essential in order to go about daily life.
According to https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati... there's about 1.2% of the people in each age group <17 in England, which means 1.2*17 ~= 20 of the people in the England are ineligible for a drivers licence. So there's only about 6% of people in the England who could have a full drivers licence, but don't. So either they give licences out in the cornflakes at Tescos, or almost the whole adult population of the UK wants a drivers licence.
https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/culture-a...
My country solves this by issuing a plastic ID card to each citizen. You apply for it at your local town hall, and it is free of charge. You can use that ID for voting, or any other interaction with the government when they need to confirm your identity. Hell, they even issued a smartphone application recently, that can be legally used as ID.
And more HN vagueness in this post: "My country" Why not just say your country name? After all, most of the world is developing. You don't have much to lose.
A passport costs £82.50 and is rather less useful as ID inside the UK because it doesn't show an address.
Large polities result in the same policies being applied to regions that are fundamentally different in ways that make policy good for some and bad for others.
I think housing issues present a good case for confederalism or even anarchism. States rights in the US or Swiss Cantons are examples where different regions have more control over policies and thus can suit them to their own specific needs. The smaller the polity the better. Also why special economic zones tend to produce good outcomes.
There is no plot against young people. Remember that most old people have children. If today's young people would time travel to some decades back, they'd too make the most of the conditions then. I would not imagine any young person that owns a home to sell it at a discount out of solidarity, they too would self-optimize without any consideration for anybody else.
Young people today aren't especially targeted, they are at the end of what was a demographic/economic/infra/building boom. Those conditions cannot be recreated.
You wouldn't imagine any young person doing something to help another person out in some sort of solidarity and yet I generally see this exact mindset in terms of voting for left wing parties that will raise taxes, including theirs, voting and campaigning for increased density which will affect the character of their neighborhoods and possibly decrease their property values. Hell I have never voted for a party that would decrease my taxes and I am pretty up front about needing to be taxed more as I am very fortunate with my employment and income situation. I've had conversations at length with boomers advocating for tax cuts which would cut funding to education, arguing that it is pretty convenient that they want these cuts right around the time that they have no children in public school and asked if we should also cut medical funding, funding that they disproportionately draw on and the response has been universally "No", that funding is good and necessary.
So I don't think that they young are "especially targeted" and more that anyone who is not a boomer and up is targeted and that happens to include the youth. We can tell ourselves a bunch of stories but stats around home ownership, lifespan, healthspan, median income, etc, etc, etc, a laundry list tells the actual story of what the current relationship is like between generations. You don't have to hate someone to harm them greatly...
What's shifted over the last few decades is that people live longer. Boomers basically just got lucky - they didn't have a huge older generation above them, so the cost of social security was fairly low when they were young. They managed to buy houses at a time of massive urban expansion, meaning their total lifetime cost of housing was pretty low.
And now they're heading towards retirement, with vast unearned housing wealth and having spent decades with housing as an almost insignificant cost, they've got no incentive to change things.
The low interest rates/high house prices is now turning into a double blow - at least here in the UK (and for anyone that needs to move house in the US) - as low interest rates meant low monthly payments, which has inflated house prices further. Now people are having to refinance massive mortgages at higher rates, the cost is becoming even greater.
Ultimately you just have to look at statistics of home ownership rates by age to see that things are getting worse for younger people. https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/economic-research/resbull/2022...
In boomer time government probided free milk for babies, now baby formula is the most stolen items and is kept under lock and key in super market
Todays politicians talk about growijg up ina. councill home as a market of being through hard times. They dont even get thay councill homes are gone, and if they were growing up today, they would be on the street
Here is an example -
16 year olds who have a keen interest in their futute, are not allowed to vote.
A 90 year old, who does not even remember that USSR has already collapsed, votes for a war-Mongering government.
18 year olds are drafted into the army and sent to fight a war, and they never had a chance to vote at all. Maybe their entire experience of democracy is getting sent to faraway land to die.
Their experience is indistinguishable from tyrany
This doesn't explain the constant increase in property tax levies being passed in Washington State.
Besides, I don't see how the age demographics in Wa state would be materially different from Britain's.
And a 7% flat tax is a trifle.
So if you have laws restricting that development you need to look further than just "real-estate investors don't want development."
Even ones not doing the development benefit financially - landlords love being able to raise the rents cause other people in the area built a bunch of new shit.
The better off - and therefore more politically-connected - you are as a homeowner, the more you care about "I don't want the wrong people living next to me" compared to "I need to maximize short-term property values." (And the long-term property values trends clearly shows that cities with more development, that more people want to move to, are where you find ROI.)
Nope. It's to make money for the developers.
> Even ones not doing the development benefit financially - landlords love being able to raise the rents cause other people in the area built a bunch of new shit.
Gentrification is a result of shortage. When wealthier people are priced out of rich neighborhoods, the only place for them to go is poor neighborhoods. It just so happens that poor neighborhoods with the least amount of political power are the first ones to be redeveloped when there's a shortage of housing.
> And the long-term property values trends clearly shows that cities with more development, that more people want to move to, are where you find ROI.
Reversed causation. It's literally just supply and demand. Places with high demand and not enough supply have growing property values. Places that are actually able to build housing to even kinda meet demand are doing much better.
You can still see a ton of development without that development actually being enough to reduce housing prices. Often there's not even enough development to meet the rate of growth in a given city.
Sure.
Let's look a simple condo case: Developer pays X for property. Developer spends Y to build a building. Developer sells N units for Z. To make money, NZ has to be greater than XY aka the total value of that parcel is now higher.
> Reversed causation. It's literally just supply and demand. Places with high demand and not enough supply have growing property values. Places that are actually able to build housing to even kinda meet demand are doing much better.
Yeah, short-term, why was that parcel before the condo building worth less? Because there was less demand for what was there before than for what was there after it. Development increase short-term values by providing immediate units with nicer amenities or better condition or more size or whatever. Probably pretty uncontroversial.
But also development increases long-term values by continuing to grow long term demand. Development, residences, businesses, services - in the most successful cities, all that flow of money produces more and more demand and value over time. Not a lot of demand to live on an empty lot in the middle of nowhere where there's not a nice house and there's no nearby jobs...
So flip the causation: if there hadn't been development to allow all the people in [popular city of your choice] in the first place, it wouldn't be so popular and have such high demand today. That's not completely separate from geographical factors like rivers, but it's also got a lot to do with development - take, say, the land where a river meets a train line and compare it to the land downstream without the train.
This is much like, you know, every other thing in the world. When a shoe manufacturer makes shoes, their shoes have value, but the value of all other shoes are slightly less because there's now one more competitor for demand for all those other shoes.
With housing, it depends. There can be a proximity effect. The old house next to all the nicely redeveloped new houses is now worth more, even if the total number of bedrooms hasn't changed during the redevelopment, because it is in a nicer environment (and a buyer might want to redevelop the old house, and live in a nice house in a nice suburb).
Long term development is good for everybody's property values, in the exact opposite way that losing businesses and residents is bad for those property values. Phoenix vs Detroit, say.
"Demand" is a dynamic thing, it responds to changes in the built environment of a city, region, or nation. London didn't spring into being fully-formed and fully in-demand at today's levels. It found a virtuous (for property-owners financially) cycle of both increasing housing units and increasing population and demand for certain areas.
While there is obviously some amount of this whole thing where more housing allows more people to come to a city which can in some circumstances drum up more jobs or whatever, I think it's a significant oversimplification to say that more housing increases property values in the long run. Ceteris paribus, more housing depresses property values. It is possible for there to be a feedback cycle where more people in the area increase the overall prosperity -- and thus property values -- of the area, but I do not think that generally more housing is the most important factor there.
If there is only a limited supply of land to build further on, it is much easier to corner said market of land and sit on it if the prices are not high enough for your liking. The cheapest development is the kind that larger developers do not bother with (one house to two or three on a single plot of land, rather than large complexes)
if the easiest way to make money is to rent houses in a captured market because the local regulations prevent the building of more housing, that's what they'll do. if the easiest way to make more money is to build more housing because the regulations allow for the building of housing, they'll do that too. the problem isn't the developers, they're where the housing comes from. the problem is that at every turn, there's people actively fighting against the buliding of more housing. all they're doing is making money off that situation.
For instance, suppose they build 100 apartments in the suburb of X. They know that for every $1k the price of housing in X drops, they lose $100k. So weirdly, they tend to leave housing vacant and sell it at a drip-feed so that they're always selling less houses than there are buyers - there is a huge difference between selling 3 apartments to 4 buyers, vs selling 4 apartments to 4 buyers. This particularly bad when there are few, large developers instead of lots of small developers, as the few large developers can collude to price-fix much easier.
Please don't interpret this as contradicting the fact that California needs to massively overhaul its zoning/construction permit system - the fact that it can take years to receive permission instead of weeks is a big reason for the price of housing (and raises capex requirements which results in fewer but larger developers, see previous paragraph). Ditto for all the zoning that mandates exclusively single-family homes, and other such pointless exclusionism.
But painting NIMBYism in such reductionist (and long-term economic-investment backward) as "development would make real estate investors and developers lose money" would just result in people fighting entirely the wrong battles with entirely the wrong message to actually have a chance at changing things in a useful way.
Seattle and NYC are both examples of places that funnel all development into a select few areas where the market for land is cornered.
Then, by some modern definition, you are a nazi and a bigot.
I’m reminded of this quote:
> Landlords grow rich in their sleep without working, risking or economizing. The increase in the value of land, arising as it does from the efforts of an entire community, should belong to the community and not to the individual who might hold title.
Look instead to the people who own golf courses, sports stadiums, super yachts, private jets and the like.
In addition, a 90% tax on real estate income (rental income minus costs like mortgage, interest, maintenance, property taxes, etc) would also disincentivize people who buy properties just to rent them out.
They are risking. Land value can go up or it can go down. It just has been mostly going up (in real terms) in the past decades, but it's far from certainty. You can lose money by investing in real estate, just like in everything else.
The question is who, if anyone gets the million bucks, that she didn’t pay for or earn, when the house is sold.
The prices in high demand areas, are going to be high, whether residents can legally oppose new developments or not. How much does a house cost in California or New York?
This is just a self-defeating excuse. "Monopolised" implies that they're somehow preventing younger people from voting. The only way in which this is a thing is by scheduling elections on days that are inconvenient for younger people to vote.
If you want change in who represents you, the first thing you need to do is vote. The second thing is to get others to vote.
There is a real demographic advantage for the elderly, and those who own homes, even if we ignore the propensity for young people to fail to vote.
This, in my opinion, is the biggest factor compared to the other two. Politicians that want to win power have to win votes. Older people (and homeowners) vote more than younger (renting) people. A party that prioritises younger people over older people will be referred to as His Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition.
The reason Liz Truss was kicked out of the PM's office by her party wasn't because her spending plans were economically illiterate. It's because her plans started rapidly increasing interest rates, so higher mortgages, which is starting the process of fucking over Tory voters.
Crime has noticeably gone up and I'm sure it's just going to get worse as gangs increase. Even in safe areas, muggings and knife violence are on the rise.
My children went to a really terrible comprehensive which I had to move them out of. The kind of stuff going on there is just making the next generation of criminals possible. And it's not the school's fault - they just don't have the resources to manage with bulge classes and staff stretched to the mental breaking limit.
It's an utter shambles the state of this country. Without strong leadership it's not changing either - we need an Obama or similar charismatic leader with progressive (or hell, even moderate) ideas at this point to make some change.
One thing this country has going for it over the US is that governments have a mandate to make large changes. In the US, nothing can ever change because of gridlock in congress with filibusters. So we still have some hope here, although lack of proportional representation makes it very difficult to get proper representation.
2. Foreign money keeps flooding into western economies to find a safe haven and lack of capital controls. A bulk of it goes into real estate.
3. Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners.
The entire system is rigged against anything that would impact home prices - such as an increase in supply or change in zoning laws. Entire countries seem to be perfectly okay with watching its young people be priced out of cities and areas they work in as long as "number go up".
All the hand-wringing about political gridlock is just a cover for basic greed. Detestable.