Well, a lot of fools are saying, basically, if not in so many words, this…
That landlordism, through the violence of evictions, “creates” urban planning. And the anguish of the victims is a small price to pay for that boon.
I figured I could do them one better, and dial up the horror of the violence. After all, if the horror of evictions “create” this boon… wouldn’t the greater horror of killing “create” a still greater boon?
Like a reductio ad absurdum.
Exactly nobody is saying this.
I know that. That’s why I prefaced it with “not in so many words”.
I’m suggesting that it might be true to some extent - though I would express it as “results in more development” rather than “creates urban planning”.
Yeah, to the same extent I would say that violent foreclosure results in more development.
Ok, now I get it. Makes sense. Carry on.
SMH. Care to comment…
Landlordism “creates” more urban planning -vs- what? More urban planning than any possible alternative? More urban planning -vs- Georgism? More urban planning -vs- some hypothetical Mad Max Beyond Zillow world?
WTF with “more development”? In the middle of Death Valley, sure, maybe a new duplex would be useful. A quad… IDK, sure. A 20 unit apartment building? I kinda doubt that, but again, IDK. A 200 unit building… I’m calling BS.
Oh, oh, oh… maybe we could call this shiz regarding surplus empty useless housing stock “mis-creation”, and reserve the word “creation” for occupied and useful housing stock. Yeah, yeah, yeah… that’s gotta be the trick.
Well, on a per-capita basis, we already know how much housing pre-pandemic Landlordism “creates”… the (number of homeless folks) less than what is needed. OK fair enough.
So, now we have the tools to examine these claims that Landlordism “creates” more (occupied useful) housing stock. First, let’s try more -vs- the lotto system. Well, in the the pre-pandemic US, there were about 550k homeless, or about 17 out of 10000. That’s like a pandemic. It’s a silly hypothetical, sure, but I’ve just gotta believe that people would buy enough housing lotto tickets to avoid homelessness in order to stave off
pandemic like deaths, especially when everyone has the same chance of “catching it”.
Let’s take a break, and check the scoreboard. So far…
Need I babble on further ???/?
The lotto system might work in a computer program, but that doesn’t mean it could get started with real people. It couldn’t. This is not really an answerable question in this fashion. It’s too complicated. It’s an empirical question.
If you take right now as your starting point and just open all vacant housing, then yes, there’s more useful housing by doing that. What happens in 100 years or 50 years or 20 is all very unpredictable as would be the reactions in the event of a rent strike of every person involved, from the tenants to the landlords to the cops.
For someone to intelligently talk about this stuff, more than just describing some alteration to the existing system (which is not all for-profit, non-profit, capitalist, anarchist, socialist or any one thing - there are currently examples of all kinds of housing in the US), what is needed is a pretty deep look at what there is, how it operates and how other systems have worked in various times and places.
Like I said, I think you can have a theory where tenants stop paying rent and then form committees and work groups and people volunteer to maintain buildings and add on when necessary…but, I don’t know if those objects you’re using in your model are much like real people or like real people in modern alienated society anyway. You take a 50 unit building and have a rent strike and try to get everyone there together it may work if they are a bunch of prarie dogs, but not if they are a bunch of house cats.
There are certainly better proven ways of not having nearly as many homeless people in an industrial society. There are a lot of countries on the list below with much lower percentages of homeless people than the US and pretty much all of them have landlords.
The lotto system isn’t meant to function in the real world. It’s a hypothetical. It’s only purposes are (a) to provide “specifics” for those fools who seem to need “specifics” for no reasons whatsoever, to (b) drive a stake through TINA (not like TINA ever dies, as we’ve seen), to (c ) demonstrate that even a silly made up system is objectively better than Landlordism, given any relevant metric, and (d) make fun of fools.
But, leaving that aside… Again, I’m SMH…
(1) First, Landlordism requires structural homelessness. The “created” incentive to avoid eviction, the “created” incentive to avoid having your family institutionally reduced to homelessness… these have to be perceived as credible and immediate threats. Renting folk need to know real fear if they miss a rent payment. These threats, when not heeded, need to be followed through upon with assembly line precision and lack of personality.
Sure, maybe pre-pandemic Landlordism was suffering a particularly horrific spell, and the number of homeless folks were significantly above the mean. Shit happens I guess. Seems like another point against Landlordism in general to me… but I digress.
Even when Landlordism isn’t horrifically failing more than average, even when at it’s relative best, when it’s failings are at their lowest ebb… it will always “create” less (occupied useful) housing than is needed. It’s not a bug, it’s a “feature”. Returning to our discussion about Landlordism “creating” more gross (occupied useful) housing -vs- other systems… each and every alternate system that doesn’t include homelessness, by definition, “creates” more (occupied useful) housing than Landlordism.
In other words, the whole claim that Landlordism “creates” more (occupied useful) housing stock is, in generally, lol-tastically stupid and wrong.
(2) Nobody is claiming that Landlordism “mis-creates” less surplus unoccupied unless housing stock. It’s not hard to guess why. In San Francisco, there are 5 vacant houses for every homeless folk. In the bay area in general, there are three vacant houses for every two homeless folk.
(3) Let’s try another hypothetical. Let say some nasty space aliens arrived and informed all us humans that we now rent from them. And since it’d be a shame if that death ray accidentally killed your family, that’s just what happened. The Quisling property managers and investment professionals then took all those rental profits, had incomprehensible machine parts manufactured, and shipped the product off world.
So, Landlordism continues “creating” urban planning, and live is good.
But here’s what gets me all confused. Us humans are diverting a whole lot of labor, and materials, to manufacturing shiz that is shipped off world. That’d mean human kind has less labor and materials available to grow human housing stock. I can’t imagine how less available labor & less available materials wouldn’t lead to less growth in human housing stock… not more.
Landlordism does create more housing stock. It’s very simple. There is incentive to build (profits), so property owners build millions of apartments per year. The entire economic system that we see today started with world governments coming up with the concept of property ownership. So the vast majority of housing stock (99%) are built from landlordism.
If aliens arrived and bought all the real estate on Earth. They would have had to create tens of trillions of dollars in value in order to have the money the buy all that real estate. Then they would have had to hand over those trillions to humans. Even in theory that scenario doesn’t work at all.
Structural homelessness… If I walk into a supermarket and walk out with 3 cars of food without paying, what happens to me? They throw me in jail.
If you argue that landlordism is necessary to build housing you also need uncapped pharma profits to develop new drugs.
Property ownership is fine if you live in it but rich people will tell you that you own to rent it out and live for rent yourself. Thats how you accumulate wealth.
I think that a lot of the posters here who I thought were pretty lefty are arguing for landlordism still hope that they once become one themselves which makes them exactly like centrist democrats: Yeah we support progressive ideas but only as long as they dont hurt our bottom line.
Landlordism creates housing to make a profit but they seldom create affordable housing. Thats what governments have to do.
No, construction workers build housing by doing work. Landlordism “creates” nothing but misery.
… Just like a pimp doesn’t “create” prostitution. It’s the same as a landlord and his victims. A pimp has an incentive (profits) to keep his victims violently in line. Instead, it’s the sex workers who do the prostitution by servicing their clients, a form of work.
… Just like a organized crime boss doesn’t “create” fire protection. It’s the same as a landlord or a pimp and their victims. The godfather has an incentive (profit) to keep his victims violently in line. Instead it’s the godfather’s goons who “create” this “fire protection” by the work of doing arson.
Do you see a pattern here? Like these odious parasites (landlords, pimps, crime bosses) have an incentive to act violent (profit) and that’s exactly what these odious reprobates do (by evictions, beatings, arson).
Uh no. They already built up the “value” needed to become all of human kind’s landlord. The built up this “value” off-world, and brought it all with them for the invasion. So they don’t need to engage in the stock market/etc to accumulate any more of this “value”. All they need to do is “exchange” that “value” to “purchase” all that land.
That “value” is, of course, their killer death ray machines.
Again, space alien invasion doesn’t “create” death ray protection. It’s the same as a landlord or a pimp or a godfather and their victims. The space aliens have an incentive (profit) to keep their his victims violently in line. Instead it’s the space alien operators of the death ray machines who “create” this “death ray protection” by working their shifts in the space alien war rooms.
Again, do you see a pattern here?
By definition, most housing that is created is affordable housing.
I’m pretty sure most of you just think there is far more profit in the whole landlord gig than there really is.
We’ve got Sabo over here saying with what I assume was a straight face that the true cost of a $250k house is $209 per month. You don’t know what you don’t know.
I’ll allow uncapped pharma profits and also abolish patents on drugs. There are no patents in property development that forces other property developers out of the market for the same identical product.
Landlordism has no incentive to affordable housing.
Governments have no desire to do affordable housing economically. In order to incentivize developers to build affordable housing, governments have to give tax breaks.
Why would governments give tax breaks to build affordable housing if they can collect 100% tax revenues on non affordable housing.
Governments need to collect maximum tax revenues in order to fulfill whatever campaign promise they made without incurring too much of a deficit.
Saying landlordism requires structural homelessness is like saying restaurants require structural starvation to extract profits through exploitation of people’s hunger.
Are hotels still okay, or are we abolishing them too?
Sex workers are not whores. Jesus. Next up the N word. It’s not a “form of work” it is work.
No. When development is exclusively or primarily in private hands, the investment capital wants the most bang for its buck, which is high-end, luxury residences. Hence govts/LAs implementing regulations requiring that a certain percentage of every development be given over to social housing. It’s very difficult to persuade profit-maximising entities to build affordable housing when they see high-end housing as a better return.
I’m all for respecting sex work as work, but slow your fucking roll there.
You are missing his point. He is saying all housing is priced for the market making it “affordable” to someone.