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Comment by kelseyfrog | Hacker News Reader

> How? Please elaborate.

Ignoring all other factors, it's quite easy. The landloard-tennant social relation is able to exist because the legal system has a system of laws backed the threat of violence to secure and perpetuate its existence. To deconstruct the social relation as such, one would need to catalog federal, state, and local code to identify which clauses establish houses, apartments, condos, etc as private property and remove them. Voila! the legal construction of landlords no longer exists. without the threat of state violence, landlords cease to become a social category. If this sounds terrible to you, please refer to the first clause of this comment.

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> To deconstruct the social relation as such, one would need to catalog federal, state, and local code to identify which clauses establish houses, apartments, condos, etc as private property and remove them

So if I purchased or built a house with my work, then it is not longer mine?

> If this sounds terrible to you, please refer to the first clause of this comment.

Which is "Ignoring all other factors, it's quite easy"

Exactly, this works only in imagination land.

Thanks for ignoring my links to CCP China where they exactly followed what you prescribed and ended up killing landlords.

Summarizing, there is a problem X (= housing), scientists say solution is Y (= more supply). But common folks say solution is Z (= confiscation of other's labor and property).

Z has been attempted in other societies for X and always resulted in bloodshed. I ask how can this not happen again if we follow Z and I get a response that is just a slightly more detailed plan for Z.

I feel a lot less for landlords than I do for people who die from lack of housing at all. The former could simply choose to not be landlords, the latter cannot simply choose to live in a house.

The question was how to get rid of landlords, I answered that. What I'm attempting to dispel is the myth that landlords are some fundamental aspect of nature or reality - they aren't. Landlords are a product of a specific form of ownership and the legal structure that supports it. Those two things are choices even if they seem to you they aren't.

> > To deconstruct the social relation as such, one would need to catalog federal, state, and local code to identify which clauses establish houses, apartments, condos, etc as private property and remove them

> So if I purchased or built a house with my work, then it is not longer mine?

Well, the criterium to become landlord is not "purchased your own home" but "convince bank to give you mortgage" then just charge more than mortgage costs you. It is essentially passive income with little to no effort put once you get above certain level of wealth

> once you get above certain level of wealth

which took effort to obtain - either by sacrificing consumption, or by working more or doing more valuable work.

The banks' mortgage is the fact that there's evidence that you have the productivity to service said mortgage.

If you cannot show evidence that such a mortgage can be serviced, the bank will not lend you money. Lending isn't free - there's risk involved.

Calling it passive income with little to no effort is just hiding the work that went on previously. You only see the results, and not the work that went into achieving it.

We could simply remove density restrictions. Landlords are not your enemy, and hear me out on this one, single family homes are.

Zoning limits the competition for property to single households. I can compete and win against a lot of single households for land. I could not compete with 10 households looking to build apartments. It is illegal to build ten apartments on most lots though, so good for me I guess.

Landlords own land and make it available to others to use. They generally want to build more housing because they like money. They are a strong ally in the fight for more housing (which means cheaper housing). Single family homes are the enemy.

I fundamentally believe that markets do not function correctly for goods with inelastic demand and have a lower bound that when crossed result in a loss of human dignity. I'm not sure there is a way to convince me otherwise. This seems to be a core way in which I process the world and relate to other humans. Changing this would mean that I would relate to people as a means rather than an end and I don't have a way to operate ethically in that world.

Housing doesn't have inelastic demand though. If the city gets cheaper (+capacity) more people can live in it. As well, if it gets too expensive people are priced out and leave. Ask any state about the Californians moving there.

We are already at the lower bound. We have already lost human dignity. You either need to afford 1k per month or be homeless. This homelessness is to spare them the indignity of living in a 350 sqft efficiency?

Build more housing. Remove parking minimums. Remove minimum unit sizes. End density restrictions. 8 units on every lot.

Housing has plenty of inelastic demand and it's getting worse[1]. This isn't a controversial statement.

1. https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/declining-elasticity-us-housi...

The article you linked is titled "The declining elasticity of US housing supply", where as all your comments speak about "demand".

>The more inelastic housing supply becomes, the more rising demand translates into rising prices and the less into additional housebuilding.

My argument is that we should remove barriers to building housing so that increases in demand (it is already very high) translate into more houses. Landlords aren't the problem. The single family zoning that constrains supply is.

Thank you. My mistake. Either way http://www.nber.org/papers/w22816 shows statistically significant demand inelasticity with the relevant section being

> a simple regression of the log median rental share on the rental price index, recovering a median expenditure share, sy, of 22.5 percent, and an implied price elasticity, εy,p of -0.83. ... The regression line has slope β1 = −β2 in equation (5b), with β3 = β4 = 0 imposed. Both slopes are positive and statistically significant, indicating demand is price-inelastic

This is like having a conversation with a wall.

It seems like you would identify with Georgism[0]. The fundamental premise is that land/natural resources should belong to everyone, so it is necessary to pay everyone for the land we exclude others from.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

> The landloard-tennant social relation is able to exist because the legal system has a system of laws backed the threat of violence to secure and perpetuate its existence.

So, if no one can own the property, then high rent will be solved with a state monopoly?

I think it's a little bit of a false dichotomy and a deficit of creativity that the only two conceivable ownership models for housing have to be private or public. There are an infinite number of ways to conceive of housing, than those two. Just try.

> There are an infinite number of ways to conceive of housing, than those two. Just try.

I'm not sure where you are going with this, because there really are only a few options, all of which fall into two buckets: private ownership or government/state/tribal ownership.

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