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For something to be a basic human right, it has to be available without enslaving other people. Free speech - yep, I can speak without forcing anyone else to do anything. Freedom from unreasonable search - yep, I am asking the government to not do something that infringes on my rights. If you start to declare something like housing as a basic human right, then the government has to provide it for you. What if nobody wants to build houses because of your unreasonable taxation strategy that you listed above? Does the government then compel them to build houses? What if the construction workers don't want to put hammer to nail? Does the government enslave them? Be careful what you declare as something that the government owes you, because the government doesn't do anything independently. It is a proxy for other people, so you are essentially saying "everyone else owes me a house and I am willing to use governmental violence to get it."

If someone needs shelter, what's to stop them from locating a suitable bit of land, scrounging up materials, and constructing a dwelling, through their own energy and ingenuity? Many people try this, but it is the government which stops them, sending police officers and sanitation workers out to "clean up" the "illegal encampment" and remove it from the "public park" or "highway right-of-way" where it was located.

We can see that housing is a right in the same way that freedom from unreasonable search is a right: it is a limit on what the government can do to you. If shelter is a basic right, that means the government cannot force you to be homeless.

A government assumes an obligation to provide housing for its citizens by interfering with their natural ability to provide it for themselves. It is the government which defines the idea of private land ownership, the government which hires police to enforce property boundaries, the government which imposes property taxes, the government which regulates use of public land, the government which enacts zoning codes, the government which requires building permits.

If someone cannot make it through this gauntlet, we cannot demand that they simply lay down and die: government created the problem, so government must solve it. Accepting the existence of shantytowns is one solution; subsidized public housing is another.

> It is a proxy for other people, so you are essentially saying "everyone else owes me a house and I am willing to use governmental violence to get it."

This is pretty much the principle behind distributive and legal justice, expressed crudely. I have no prima facie problem with the idea of a program which is constructed to recognize that everyone is owed shelter, and if it takes declaring that as a "human right" (whatever that might mean) then so be it.

Under the U.S. Constitution, you have a right to an attorney regardless of your ability to pay. Do you think public defenders are enslaved?

My father was. He was a corporate attorney in New Jersey in the 80s and the state ran out of public defenders. The state required that all attorneys that were practicing under the NJ Bar serve as a public defender without pay. They got around the slavery aspect by just encoding it as a requirement for maintaining good standing as an attorney.

That's not slavery.

Your father could've quit, changed careers, moved to another state, etc.

Slaves don't get to do that.

Interesting, federally you get paid [1] but not-federally you don't [2].

[1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/3006A [2]: https://law.justia.com/cases/new-jersey/supreme-court/1992/1...

> Does the government enslave them? Be careful what you declare as something that the government owes you, because the government doesn't do anything independently.

How about the police force that protects your exclusive access to land (a natural resource)?

1. The government offers out contracts to build houses

2. People/Companies refuse contracts based on their principals

3. Other People/Companies take up those contracts

4. Those Companies post job openings to build said houses

5. People take said jobs, they can refuse if they don't want to work for a company working for the Govt.

6. Houses get built

Sounds like regular capitalism to me, no one is being forced to do something they don't want.

If the government are building the houses surely that's the will of the people?

The money the governments are using to pay that contract is generally paid by taxes. So if we go back to the originally OPs point. Those taxes are enforced via force. While not as a direct as forcing a worker to build the house directly. One is still essentially working to build these house in this case. For instance on average 5% income was taxes for this purpose you could treat it as 5% decrease in pay or more cyclically 5% of ones labor is unpaid.

However, you can argue this for just about anything the government does with tax money. It's not wrong per se on an item by item basis of government function. Although, ideally government functions benefit everyone in some regard so in practice its not as bleak sounding. Very few people would be hard pressed to receive zero in return from all functions and programs of a government that is not abusive. Although, unless you get one these houses your not getting anything in return here for this hypothetical 5%, again though that is on an item by item basis. There could be tertiary benefits that one gets, but are hard to quantify with a dollar amount if such a program is working well. Such as a more stable community, ect...

And what happens when no construction firms want to build where the govt wants? How are they going to enforce this human rights violation? After they are built, houses constantly need maintenance which means your right to a home is dependent on skilled people who aren't going to work for free unless you make them.

> And what happens when no construction firms want to build where the govt wants?

That seems unlikely.

Reductio ad absurdum arguments don't warrant entertaining.

You make two basic mistakes.

First, your rights end where mine begin. Even free speech doesn't mean you get to shout "bomb!" in a crowded theater without consequences. Likewise, your "right" to say something also doesn't mean I have to hear it.

Anything beyond what you think will at some point infringe the rights of others so there are natural limits.

Second, no "right" is absolute. If happen to believe in the current Supreme Court's interpretation of the Second Amendment (namely that it's an individual right, which, to be clear, I don't) then even that has limits. There are limits on what weapons you can own, you have to be 18+ and you (generally) can't be a felon. There are limits on where you take such firearms (eg try to take a firearm onto a plane).

>Free speech - yep, I can speak without forcing anyone else to do anything.

Great, except this means less than you think. Negative right (e.g. "freedom from X") free speech means that it's 100% legal for Comcast, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, various Mastodon instances[0], that weird Trump-only social network, and whatever other platforms are out there to censor you because they're "not the government" and are merely refusing to publish something rather than banning it with the force of law. Free speech online is entirely a positive right (e.g. "freedom to have X"), because it all relies on private actors cooperating to publish your speech. In a negative-freedom world, the Internet is a censorship hellscape.

Positive freedom to speak would be something like net neutrality - i.e. common carrier rules. Nobody is obligated to provide Internet services, but if they do, they can't arbitrarily refuse service to certain people based purely on the user's speech. Right to shelter could work in a similar fashion - i.e. you don't have to build housing, but if you do, a certain percentage of it needs to be cheap housing. Or, instead of just mandating housing just exist, we just have the government spend a certain amount of tax outlays - that we already collect - on new home construction on the open market. We don't compel the workers to build housing with a gun, we compel them with money, which is a kind of compulsion that even the most free-market capitalist society readily accepts as legitimate.

Conversely, there are also negative-right conceptions of "housing as a human right", too. It could mean, for example, that zoning laws are unconstitutional. Right now there are plenty of government interventions in the housing market that are there to specifically prohibit certain kinds of housing arrangements - usually multi-family units - in certain areas. These arrangements impinge upon the market's ability to actually supply increased demand, and thus drive up the price of housing and price poorer people out of the market. Even if you entirely deny the existence of positive rights, think taxation is theft, and think Murray Rothbard had some good ideas... how is that not a violation of human rights?

[0] Mastodon is federated, but in practice most people use a large instance if they want to be on the Fediverse. It is possible for instance owners to refuse to federate with one another or block specific users from other instances.

I'm generally in favour of letting free markets sort themselves out, but housing isn't a normal market.

In a normal market, when demand goes up supply usually follows. If a lot of people are buying Widget A, pushing the price up, more factories will pop up to manufacture Widget A, bringing the price down again.

But housing is a zero-sum game - the amount of land is finite, the amount the authorities let you build on is even more limited, so the market can't fix itself, it's not a normal market. That's why you do need some kind of intervention to protect the participants. This is all apart from the fact that it's a basic human need.

Some people are completely against landlords existing. Perhaps you've mistaken me for one of those? Or perhaps I just didn't explain myself clearly enough?

To be clear, I'm not against landlords existing. My guiding principle is that landlords need to exist because forcing people to own property isn't practical or even desirable. There is significant friction with buying and selling houses even if you can get over the financial barriers (eg downpayments).

The simplest way I can put it is that I believe in this guiding principle: Landlords should be part of their community.

What does this mean? Some examples:

1. I'm all for multifamily housing where the owners have 1-2 rental units on their property. This style of housing exists in small pockets of the US as generally a legacy but is now outlawed almost everywhere (most of the US makes anything other than single family housing illegal to build).

2. In the case where the landlord doesn't live on the property they should (IMHO) generally live in the same locale. This is what I mean when I said "New York should be for New Yorkers". Perhaps a better way to say that is "New York should be by and for New Yorkers". Obviously you can substitute any city name there. NYC is just an example; and

3. When it comes to apartments, generally I favour purpose-built rental apartments being built for this rather than renting out condos. Again though local ownership is better.

Housing is not zero sum at current US density levels. You can put one house on a half acre or you can put 3-4 10-story apartment buildings on it with 20 3-bedrooms each. We immorally choose to have a housing shortage to keep the poors out.

Zero-sum because the authorities made it zero-sum is still zero-sum.

You can't start a company that says "let's increase the supply of housing because demand is high." You can do that with most other markets.

What I think you're saying is it ought to not be zero-sum because there's enough land - perhaps. I was talking about the ability of market participants to increase supply.

The free market is a miracle worker in anything that doesn't involve necessities. I don't really count food though because it generally has enough competition and liquidity to keep it in check, but if it gets (really) bad then it too.

But medical and housing? Yeah, it has no problem destroying peoples lives.

> Shelter is or should be a basic human right. Hoarding of housing should thus be viewed as a human rights violation.

What is the basis for this conclusion? Other than an emotionally charged "eat the rich" attitude, I mean.

https://www.un.org/ruleoflaw/files/FactSheet21en.pdf

When the remedy for a violation of a "human right" is "file a complaint with the UN", it is outright theater. UN has no authority or even rapport to instrument or enforce such a wishful goal, noble as it is.

No one gives you rights; certainly they're not granted by a piece of paper. Rights are what you can guarantee and defend yourself and with fellow citizens, through political will or brute force. Everything else is meaningless virtue signaling.

So, a made-up, non-ratified, document is something every human should just accept?

Lolz.

Each of the three treaties listed in that document have been widely ratified.

If "made up" is disqualifying, I've got bad news for you about all rights.

The part that wont work about this is it targets the wrong sector of the housing market. Most of the rules you suggest would apply to luxury properties/vacation rentals/etc. Even if the owner were to sell the property, it wouldn't suddenly become affordable. These are the most "visible" homes, but they are a tiny minority of the housing market.

The problem as I see it is government regulation. There was a thread on Reddit from a LA property developer that explained why only luxury apartment buildings ever get built. Long story short is there was so much red tape, regulation, etc that building anything but expensive high rise units was unprofitable. I heard somewhere that for the average home in California, you're paying something like a 50-80k premium because of red tape and regulations.

The solution isn't to add more rules and regulations, but rather to take them away. The way we are going to get more affordable housing isn't through a program where 10% of a high rise's units are "affordable", but by actually making affordable housing profitable. If a developer can build an "affordable" property and make money on it, we will see more of them.

The problem with this is that not everyone has the down payment or the desire to be a homeowner. What you're describing would likely increase ownership somewhat, but it would also create an incredibly punitive tax on renters, who tend to be less economically advantaged.

If you can't come up with a down payment, then you have to rent. Because you have this captive group of people who don't have any other option, the result of what you're suggesting is that your 10% tax on non-individually owned property will just be passed along to renters. They'll have to pay it, because they have no other choice. The government will collect their tax money, but at the expense of the least advantaged, not the owners of investment properties.

None of their proposals include a tax on renters, only on landlords. You're assuming that landlords would be allowed to pass on this cost. And under the current system, they would. But as long as we're proposing hard-to-implement solutions, we might as well include some kind of rent control.

I'm not assuming, I'm responding to a comment which defines a set of proposals, and that set of proposals does not include rent control.

I can't really respond to your proposal of rent control, because it has no detail on how that would work (How would a newly build apartment building come up with rents that factor in their costs but not the 10% tax? Does any newly built apartment building just have to lose money every month?).

But anyway, rent control is bad because it constrains supply of available units. That's been discussed on HN more times than I can count, so no point in rehashing it here.

Saying that anyone who can’t afford a down payment has to pay rent + 10% of the total home value in taxes each year is absurd.

Investing != hoarding

In fact investing stimulates new construction, having the exact opposite effect.

>In fact investing stimulates new construction

But this isn’t practically true in most major metropolitan areas. When one makes an investment as large as a home, one of the best ways to protect that investment is to block further construction (reducing supply and therefore raising demand on your investment)

Well let’s just make that shit illegal and let builders build new houses until supply meets demand. Voila.

>"just make that shit illegal"

Except those with the money to make investments in real-estate are the very same people who have enough money to make the political system work for them.

"Just make that shit illegal" is simply a refusal to understand how complex these incentives are. If it was so simple to just make that shit illegal it would have been done already; we are nearly decade in to the housing crisis in cities like San Francisco and you think people haven't thought about making it illegal? How do you go about doing that? Eventually you will be forced to consider solutions that the GP was referring to.

Given we're in a multi decade slump in house building I'd argue this is not the case.

It is tremendously hard to build and I dont think its because people don't want to.

reason 1: In fact its not investors who block new building, its single home owners who want to 'maintain' their neighborhood.

reason 2: CA has passed a number of resolutions allowing for ADUs, splitting of lots etc. However the city is glacial and beyond opaque in its approval, closing out smaller fish who would try to build things by miring them in requirements that are difficult to meet without a corporate set-up

That's capitalist propaganda. For example, in 2021 investors bought 28% of houses sold in Texas [1].

I say "propaganda" because that's the idea: that market forces will solve the problem. But in reality it's easy to get to a state where a single or small number of market participants effectively corner the market or become so politically powerful that any government works at their behest. This includes blocking new construction to protect and appreciate the value of existing holdings.

Just look at how much in the last 6-12 months you've seen stories that go "20 offers on this house and it went $200k over ask all cash".

The effect of all this is that it's driving rents through the roof, that is adversely affecting the most vulnerable.

[1]: https://localprofile.com/2022/06/07/investors-bought-texas-h...

People still live in the houses owned by investors!

No you see, evil investors hoard the housing and put bouncy castles in them.

Market forces will solve this issue in one year (or however long it takes to build a house). Just make it legal to build new houses. Right now it is practically outlawed due to insane regulations demanded by NIMBYs.

Good luck with that in America. The US country was literally founded on life, liberty, and property.