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Comment by norov | Hacker News Reader

When do people start protesting over all of the decent housing being gobbled up by those who are not living in these houses?

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My guess? Sooner rather than later. I think a LOT of things are going to come to a head sooner rather than later. Even those of us who make good money should be worrying about the direction things are going.

Employment is up, wages are up, booze is cheap.

And young people, oftn the most screwed over by housing and employment conditions, still don't vote

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/upshot/youth-voting-2020-...

(probably that's part of why they're the most screwed over)

Wages are up. But inflation has eaten that and more away, so in terms of real money, wages at best are flat and at worse have gone down.

Who cares who's buying it? What do you have against people buying a property and then renting it out?

Nothing. That's not what's happening though. In a lot of places people buy houses and don't even bother renting them out. So not only buying prices are increasing, but renting prices are increasing too, because there is a group of people choking the supply for own financial gain.

>>Who cares who's buying it?

Well, that's certainly one way of looking at it, but another is that as a society we might want to take a step back and think what do we want out of our cities - if we collectively want affordable housing that people who live in a city can use, then allowing foreign investement funds to buy houses and then not live them is probably a bad idea.

This problem is vastly overstated. The real issue is that there simply aren't enough homes being built for all the people who want to live in desirable cities

Why do you care what someone else does with THEIR property?

If I want to own something and leave it "empty", that's my prerogative

But your property rights are not absolute. We don't allow people to dump toxic waste or burn tyres on their land, even if the land, the tyres and the toxic waste is entirely theirs. YOUR prerogative ends somewhere. I know indidualism is a tantalising idea but we live in a society with rules.

People collectively can decide(and frequently do decide) that the values important to a town, a city or an entire state are more important than your right to buy and leave property empty. There are many places which either forbid owning property entirely if you are a foreign national and don't actually live there, or impose a heavy tax on such purchases. Vacancy tax is a thing too.

Basically if a city(and by that I mean people of the city and its representatives) don't want houses to be sitting around empty, there are laws that can be introduced to force people to either move in, rent or sell the place, or they can keep the place standing empty at a heavy financial penalty if they wish. Like I said earlier - your prerogative ends somewhere.

>YOUR prerogative ends somewhere

Yes - and YOUR prerogative ends at demanding I rent-out property I OWN

If someone wants to own 50 houses and leave them empty, more power to them

Well, I disagree with that, and if I can get enough people to agree with me, we can pass laws to make it unprofitable for people to buy out housing and have it sit empty.

Also known as passing laws to impose a penalty on unwanted behavior. Just as GP mentioned - vacancy tax.

That's how the country works. It all depends on who has more people in agreement, and can make more of a rallying cry (and has moneyed interests on their side).

(I'm also in favor of land value tax as opposed to property tax to encourage productive use of land. And severely relaxing zoning restrictions)

> I can get enough people to agree with me, we can pass laws

while that's true in this case of vacancy laws, it is not a universally applicable rule to be followed blindly.

Just because a large number of people agreed with a certain set of actions, doesn't mean those set of actions are good to undertake for society. Look at how venezuela got to the place they did, via democratic elections. The a majority of the people wanted the gov't handouts, and wanted nationalization of private property by force.

>Well, I disagree with that

Obviously you think that what I own is actually yours

At least we all know where you stand now

Correct, because you live in a society and the society imposes some obligations and constraints on you, as all societies have done since the dawn of humanity.

Honest question - are you writing these comments from like the depth of the Amazon jungle where laws don't apply? Because pretty much any civilized country in the world has laws that govern what you can or cannot do with your own private property, even the bastion of "freedom" that is US has loads of regulations about private property. If you live in a place like that and still think that you have some absolute control over actually yours property, then sadly, you are very mistaken.

So yes, I think we know where we stand now, except that it's not where you think it is.

JFC libertarianism is a shitty, petulant ethos.

It creates a world-wide network of exploitation of the less wealthy.

Increasing world inequality drives massive foreign buying of properties that are then kept empty or rented at higher values.

The staggering increase in rents across many cities in the world in the last 5 years is caused by this.

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