wind0w
Yours is a bizarre liberal conception of racism that totally ignores historical and material context, where you can just replace words in a sentence to prove it's racist. If you replace the word white in that sentence with another race, it has a totally different meaning, because the context is totally different.
White men DO have disproportionate access to money and power in the US, are you disputing that?
That magic wand is called public policy. There are similar things you could say about food -- i.e. how unregulated markets lead to developing countries being forced to export cash crops instead of growing food that people in that country need to actually eat.
>That is a huge claim. If people could use their land as they like there probably wouldn't be a housing shortage. Developers make large fortunes out of install dense blocks of apartments; and doing that isn't going to make housing more expensive.
4.8 million households in the U.S. depend on Section 8 to afford rent. These are direct subsidies to landlords to house these people. In an unregulated market, landlords would not rent to these people, and they would be homeless, or they would live in actual slums, which don't really exist in the U.S., but would have to in a fully unregulated market.
Exactly! That's the problem with housing as a market commodity -- developers will only build luxury housing or slums. A deregulated housing market looks like this: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slum#/media/File:Mumbai_03-20...
Affordable housing requires public investment, public housing. There is no other solution.
Libertarians have this idea that the housing market is restricted by government regulation and just needs to be freed in order to flourish. In actuality, the only reason there is any affordable or low-income housing in the U.S. is because of government money (Section 8, LIHTC, public housing, etc). Homelessness is a totally solvable problem, and any place that has solved it knows the solution: build enough homes for people to live in, through state-funded programs!
Economists love to criticize rent control because in some abstract economic sense it is "bad", but most people don't care about the market efficiency (Which mostly means maximizing profit to landlords and developers) of the housing market. They care that their communities are not destroyed by gentrification and that they are able to stay in their homes without being dislocated, both goals that rent control is successful at achieving.