How to solve… I’d like to find a model to apply in my HOA to slow or reverse the corporate takeover of my community…
This mindset needs to die.
Yes. If you do something ostensibly immoral, it's still bad even if it's legal. It's still bad even if other people were going to do it if you didn't, anyway. It's still bad even if there's negative incentives that ultimately led to it. It's just still bad in general. If you have a reasonable decision and you choose to do a bad thing, you still chose to do it. It doesn't matter either, if a single person made this decision, or if a corporate board made this decision, or if a bunch of people in an angry mob collectively decided something.
What you can do is explain why it happened, but that doesn't mean that there is absolutely zero social responsibility to have. All that something being legal means is that it's legal. Something being legal doesn't necessarily mean it's good. Something being illegal doesn't necessarily mean it's bad.
We've conflated what we've come to expect from corporations to the standards we must hold them to. The standard that a corporation should live up to is indeed much higher and significantly more nuanced than "technically not breaking the law."
I'm not suggesting that I believe in no regulation. Regulation is clearly valuable in many cases, but I believe that it is clearly not inherently good (duh, bad regulation is everywhere) nor is it inherently the only solution to any class of problems. Believing that companies should not simply maximally exploit what is technically legal while still regulating them when they do abuse the system is possible and I'm pretty sure if we don't start thinking that way, we're even more screwed than we think we are.
Even if some corporations amass unthinkable amounts of influence and power and fundamentally escape the pressures of social responsibility through this, I still think that it's necessary to fight the learned-helplessness mindset. If absolutely nothing else, I think everyone is at least responsible for ensuring the bar doesn't drop so low as to allow this kind of thought process to remain "normal". It should always be thought of as abnormal, and as the threat to liberty and democracy that it clearly can be.
The other one I wish would die is: "It is not illegal if you don't get caught."
We shouldn't try to hold a standard that we can't or won't enforce. If we want better behaviour from corporations we need to actually make them behave better, not wring our hands when they don't do it by themselves.
> Even if some corporations amass unthinkable amounts of influence and power and fundamentally escape the pressures of social responsibility through this, I still think that it's necessary to fight the learned-helplessness mindset. If absolutely nothing else, I think everyone is at least responsible for ensuring the bar doesn't drop so low as to allow this kind of thought process to remain "normal". It should always be thought of as abnormal, and as the threat to liberty and democracy that it clearly can be.
If you think it shouldn't be normal, figure out how to make it illegal. But raging against greedy landlords/corporations/what-have-you is just its own form of learned helplessness.
Survival bias get in the way. The morality you refer to exists, it just doesn’t survive long enough to notice. So yes, you do something ostensibly immoral but legal for some advantage, that advantage allows you to economically out compete your more moral neighbor, who winds up insolvent eventually. If morality isn’t encoded in law and their is an economic advantage to being immoral but legal, then that’s what you will ultimately wind up with, because the moral actors will simply die off.
What's immoral is preventing construction of housing to allow supply and demand to meet. What's immoral is zoning rules that allow prices to rise well above the level of what would historically have been considered affordable.
Obviously, from looking around, we cannot rely on people to just not raise prices to market levels in exchange for feeling good about themselves. We need to take action to lower the price of housing.
Housing cannot be both affordable and a good investment.
Housing is for people to live in. That's it. Any other purpose is a long-distant second to that. The fact that it has become primarily an investment product is what's causing all the pain.
You can pull up either narrative in Google by searching specifically for it. Tokyo is cheap, Tokyo is expensive, etc… eg
Tokyo housing is cheap: https://medium.com/land-buildings-identity-and-values/what-i...
And Tokyo housing is expensive: https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/surging-tokyo-property-...
They are both true with nuance.
Moreover, passing on generational wealth shouldn't be a feature we want to make easier. You don't want a to push society in the direction where generational wealth is required to live a good life.
Paragraph 2 reeks of "I know what to do with other people's personal property better than them." If you pay that house off and die, it's in your will and it's yours to pass on to whoever you want. We should absolutely be incentivizing that kind of responsible behavior and respect for long-term financial planning and thinking over real estate getting gobbled up by megacorps to rent out.
Right, and in countries with sane planning laws the same is true of houses.
> If you pay that house off and die, it's in your will and it's yours to pass on to whoever you want. We should absolutely be incentivizing that kind of responsible behavior
Locking up as much prime real estate as possible for your family forever isn't being "responsible", it's a "fuck you, got mine" move. In places where housing is limited it should go to those who need it most, not to those who were lucky enough to have parents who were rich, or happened to buy in the right place at the right time.
Re #2: it's obvious that most people aren't the most objective when it comes to their offspring. That's why we should have policies that discourage overallocating resources to an unqualified child of a rich parent.
Finally, "personal property" is a construct of law. Something is yours because society has decided it's yours. If the laws change, and if you can't physically defend your property, then it's not really yours any more, is it?
News flash: this noble group of disinterested autocrats you think can allocate people's property better than themselves doesn't exist. They're the same biased schmucks as the rest of us are.
I think the debate is far more nuanced than that. Dislodging families, eliminating the ability to save for retirement, sucking up capital that could otherwise be put to economic use, etc. are all worthy of discussion without flushing it away via the term "market rates".
It's not like landlords are doing remodels and making their property more valuable. Every landlord I've ever had does just about the bare minimum. There's simply no competition. I don't know how we can have a "market rate" without anything that really looks like a market. They've lucked (or manipulated) themselves into a situation where their property value goes up while their costs stay fixed and they're using their good fortune to squeeze others.
There's a reason we use the term "rent-seeking" for businesses that want to get guaranteed income without having to improve their product. I'd certainly consider it immoral.
> What's immoral is preventing construction of housing to allow supply and demand to meet. What's immoral is zoning rules that allow prices to rise well above the level of what would historically have been considered affordable.
I don't see these as separate issues. Rising rents influence property values and vice versa. Many of these landlords are the exact people opposing new construction or rezoning.
Who's "we"? The problems you cite, zoning rules etc., are all local issues caused by the people in those places voting for leaders who maintain these anti-housing policies, because it's good for their home values. And it's not just the homeowners; the renters have a vote too, but I don't see them voting for anyone who wants to change zoning laws and increase density.
>Housing cannot be both affordable and a good investment.
True, but obviously most Americans prefer the latter. Just look at many of the comments right here: people advocating for "generational wealth" and how housing must be an investment.
That's the only way, because, as you said, municipal governments only answer to the people who live there. Here in Japan, they passed a national zoning law decades ago that prevents localities from enacting their own zoning legislation, and makes uniform (and extremely permissive) zoning across the whole country. Basically, if you own land, you can build housing there if you want, unless it's one of the uncommon heavy industrial zones. So there's no real shortage of housing; if it's profitable to build, they'll build it.
Lots of people complain that the result is chaotic-looking neighborhoods where there's no way to get the buildings to look similar to each other, but I really like not having to deal with all the crime and homelessness that results from the western model.
If it's bad -- let's make it illegal. Law is a reflection of what people consider fair and just. If it's legal -- it's fair and just.
Law is a reflection of what people with political power consider fair and just, and that set of people is only a subset of all people affected by it.
A quick look at history shows this to be false (Jim Crow laws, Nuremberg Laws, a million other examples). People should never derive their morality from bureaucrats.
Jim Crow laws were "fair and just" at the time, according to most people of the time; that's why the laws existed. The people wanted them (well, the majority who had political power anyway, obviously not the Black people). "Fair and just" is simply an opinion, and according to the people at that time, those shitty laws were fine. They weren't getting their morality from lawmakers; the people at the time simply had bad morals.
> well, the majority who had political power anyway
You're making a massive assumption that this somehow equates to voters/the people.
The idea that common white people 100+ years weren't massively racist is, honestly, ridiculous and downright insulting. Racist policies didn't come from a few leaders that somehow got themselves elected; regular people believed that way too. There's no shortage of historical evidence for this fact, and you trying to deny it really sounds a lot like flat-eartherism.
Go talk to your grandparents about how racist people were in those days.
People stating "nothing that is legal is immoral or unethical" is one parry in that "message social pressure", and those of us disagreeing is a counter-parry. And that's the way I think it should work! People who care what I think (my family, my friends, my kids, people at work and in my community who respect me for whatever reason) will feel pressure from me, pushing them toward what I think is right (and vice versa!), and people who don't know me, but who think what I'm saying rings true will also be affected, almost certainly to a lesser extent, by what I'm saying. And people (presumably like you) who don't find it compelling, will debate what I'm saying, and other people may find their perspective more compelling than mine, and that's fine too!
And in my view, this is just how society works, we messily influence one another toward a loose consensus on what is good and right, above and beyond what we've enshrined into legislation and legal precedent.
Democracies are welcoming for people stepping down, not up.
I'm on the board of my condo building's HOA. 5 or 6 years ago, we passed a rule that requires 50% of units building-wide to be owner-occupied. Once the limit is reached, there's a waiting list for anyone who wants to rent their unit. (Meaning you must wait until an owner moves back in or sells their unit.) There's also a hardship waiver at the board's discretion.
The PE/RE investment firms won't touch units with this rule in place; a unit they can't rent makes no revenue and is a waste of capital for them.
Note that this (or any kind of arrangement meant to discourage these kinds of buyers) gets contentious when someone is selling, especially if they're struggling to find a buyer. We recently had someone who needed to sell quickly, had interest from some kind of firm, but no offers from normal buyers (ie human people) due to the soft market. The firm made an offer contingent on the HOA rescinding the rental rule. We were very much not inclined to do so, so there was a lot of tension until the sellers finally got an offer from humans.
(This is not meant to insinuate that PE firms are run by non-humans. Evidence remains inconclusive.)
Of course, this rule can also spook human buyers, but IME once the details and reasoning for the rule is explained, it isn't usually a blocker.
Or maybe was an individual with a conscience who didn't want the old couple that had been in their property for 30 years living on the street. I guess you could call that naivety though.
It was completely legal to have slaves. It was completely legal to fire women when they were pregnant and/or married. It was completely legal to send your kid off to work. We've been jailing folks for weekend pot smoking for decades. Back in the 90s, you could get discharged from the US military for having consensual sex with the same sex. Or giving a blowjob - sodomy laws were still in effect.
Obviously, you can get blame even though you are doing something legal. Legality doesn't make you good.
Every horrible thing which decent humans no longer allow was once legal.
Yes. Many things that fall short of "illegal" are blameworthy (that you don't even push back on calling them predatory is telling). Our legal system is not meant to be a moral system (and almost always favors people with more money). Also keep in mind, these folks have money to contribute to local politicians who then bend laws/regs in their favor anyway.
Do you think the law and regulations fell out of sky?
Or maybe we saw some shitty and bad-faith actions from powerful entities and then the people demanded to enact some laws to prevent that behavior in the futuer?
Which one is more likely?