Comment by LapsangGuzzler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LapsangGuzzler | Hacker News Reader

I love the idea of this, but I see one huge obstacle to making this happen: the current property owners.

The whole reason we're in this situation is because the power asymmetry between property owners and renters seems to be growing at a significant rate. Rapidly rising property values benefit property owners at the expense of the renters and redistributing the rights of a property owner to the community would have massive ramifications for how real estate is valued.

The main hurdle to overcome is finding the politicians you'd need to take power from property owners to give to non-owner residents, and the big problem (at least in the US) is that even at the local level, governments tend to be run by property owners and supported by property-owning donors. Money is fundamental to who gets elected, and as long as this is true, balancing the power disparity and giving real voting power to non-property owners to determine what happens to property will be a massive challenge.

> The main hurdle to overcome is finding the politicians you'd need to take power from property owners to give to non-owner residents

The opposite is true. We need to overturn Euclid and similar rulings that took rights away from individual property owners. Property owners should be allowed to build housing on their own land. There is no legitimate public interest in preventing it (beyond banal, ordinary preferences that are better expressed in a market) and an immense public interest in allowing it.

You get rid of the veto point by restoring property rights, not by further limiting them.

This might work if you put a hard cap on how much property any entity can own individually or by proxy. Otherwise Blackstone, et al. will build the cheapest apartment blocks they can everywhere and lock average Americans out of ownership until the revolution comes.

Homeownership only has value because it's effectively (buy-in) rent control. Without rent being too expensive, there's no real need for homeownership. It's actually a negative when you consider reduced mobility and the cost of selling.

> It's actually a negative when you consider reduced mobility and the cost of selling.

A lot of us homeowners enjoy the things you described here. I want to live in a neighborhood with people who have lived here 5-10+ years. The last thing I want is for my family to be amongst a transient population who have no vested interest in their neighborhood.

Up until the phrase "real estate" this same argument could be applied to all sorts of ownership/rentership dichotomies, e.g. subscription-based services (streaming, SaaS, etc.) vs ownership of content media (buying albums, self-hosting, etc.).

Software and digital media more generally really calls into question the notions of property per se.

The benefit of this proposal is that it pits property owners against each other. It might be in the interests of property owners as a class to not build in order to see values increase but the greed of individual owners will lead to some cracking and building in order to maximise their individual wealth.

Given there are enough property owners, this is expected. But in the presence of a few property owners, the opportunity for collusion is higher because the opportunity cost of defecting is higher than the opportunity cost of not defecting. This centralization of property into a few owners is something that is happening all over the Anglosphere.

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