Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

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> Not if the state funds housebuilding

Chicago, Detroit, and NYC all tried that and abandoned it due to cost overruns, corruption, high liabilities, and the limiting of eminent domain powers following the civil rights movement - most urban housing projects were built by demolishing historically African American neighborhoods, and the resulting structures were segregated (as James Baldwin eloquently pointed out in 1963 during the height of the civil rights movement)

The same thing happened in Western Europe as well with France and the UK abandoning similar urban housing projects.

Singapore and HK are unique in that the governments are authoritarian and can kick people out with minimal notice or recourse if they really want to.

The biggest blocker is always going to be land acquisition - either we reject the entire notion that you have property rights and the right to recourse, or you accept that these basic civil liberties are a requirement for a democracy and thus building will have to be done by the private sector because unlocking public funds would take 3-5 years on top of 2-3 years of construction.

For a more recent example, look at China's urban renewal projects in the 2000s and 2010s, and how local governments would use forced evictions as well as minimal compensation and occasionally shooting protesters [0][1][2] or the mass evictions in Beijing in 2017-18 [3] - this was how Housing Projects were built across America from the 1930s-1960s.

Opposition to that policy was also a major reason why Xi Jinping was initially quite popular, because he was opposed to these kinds of projects at scale, and Fujian never saw the kind of mass demolitions that you'd see in other Chinese provinces.

[0] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6968-2004Oct...

[1] - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4507130.stm

[2] - https://www.reuters.com/article/olympics-evictions-idUSPEK57...

[3] - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/world/asia/china-beijing-...

“ The biggest blocker is always going to be land acquisition - either we reject the entire notion that you have property rights and the right to recourse, or you accept that these basic civil liberties are a requirement and thus building will have to be done by the private sector because unlocking public funds would take 3-5 years on top of 2-3 years of construction.”

Reflecting on the conflict of Israel and also in the show “yellowstone” basically originates from land ownership issues, i really think this human constructed abstraction and entitlement is fundamentally flawed. I really think it needs reworking and needs to be held as less sacred in America. Besides do people really own land when the government demands rent in the form of property taxes?

So long as housing is so fundamentally stressful in current systems with resulting pervasive homelessness and rent seeking capitalism applied to shelter thats long paid for its investment yet still inflates in costs applying pressure on low income residents: i dont think mostly inalienable rights to property ownership in many cases is a public good.

If my family has owned this house for multiple generations, why should I give it up to at best be resettled in a 2 bedroom apartment in the boonies?

There is no good answer to that.

Either you accept civil liberties of which property ownership is a critical part or you accept that civil liberties like ownership do not matter.

Owning property is a right every human agrees with (it's literally article 17 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights). This is why you either need to compensate exhorbitantly or threaten to break a few legs and skulls in order to gain property.

The mass urban housing projects of the 30s to 60s were literally built by mass demolishing black neighborhoods - look at Central Boston's redevelopment for example, as well as Cincinnati's.

And that's why these projects ended once the Civil Rights movement succeeded - why should black residents lose their property and intergenerational wealth to urban projects built by governments that didn't care for them.

Look at how the 1968 DC Riots and 1967 Detroit Riots were exacerbated by HUD plans to revitalize "slums" (black majority neighborhoods) like Capitol Hill and Lafayette Park

> Besides do people really own land when the government demands rent in the form of property taxes

In return for those taxes they get piped water, roads, police, local schools, sewers, garbage collection, and other basic services.

> resulting pervasive homelessness and rent seeking capitalism applied to shelter

Mass Eminent domain of land only leads to crony capitalism anyhow. Either way it's the same contractors and builders who are doing development - the difference is now instead of wooing voters you just woo the political class instead.

Nor is there actually a need for mass development to alleviate homelessness - housing subsidies can and do help, as SLC and Houston have both shown as well as Section 8.

That said, you will have to follow the law - meaning no substance abuse or criminal activity.

According to traditional american propaganda yes civil liberties of property ownership is critical. According to a deep reflection on the indirect impact these civil liberties have in different scenarios, suddenly these civil liberties start imposing a staggering cost on others that becomes intolerable to pay. In less abstract wording it’s like the one hold out property preventing the building of a dam.

Civil liberties are just a human abstract construct which go at odds with reality and as such cause inevitable downstream problems no matter how the civil liberties or laws are constructed or fabricated. Like you said theres no good answer but as such (while fully cognizant of issues with all sides) im beginning to dislike the current state of the status quo thats really only a modern phenomenon (nation states and most pieces of land being claimed for ownership by individuals or worse: large stakes of land claimed by small groups).

> According to traditional american propaganda

Literally every society holds ownership of land and property as a fundamental core value.

> im beginning to dislike the current state of the status quo thats really only a modern phenomenon (nation states and most pieces of land being claimed for ownership by individuals or worse: large stakes of land claimed by small groups)

People will not willingly give up their property without adequate compensation (and even then might not due to emotional attachment).

If you want to back your words with threats of physical force, feel free to go ahead. There's a major reason most civil and criminal cases in both China and India revolve around land disputes and conflicting ownership.

This has been the status quo of society for millenias - this is why you have folk stories like Hattefield McCoy, the biblical story of Zelophehad, the dishonest plowman of European folktales, the qissa of Dulla Bhatti's revolt against the Mughals, and the conflict between Der Shin and Der Yi in Chinese folklore.

Private Land Ownership has literally been codified in the Hammurabi Code, the Arthashastra, the Bible, and the Book of Rites from the Zhou Dynasty.

Yes yes i get it :) ive grown up in a capitalist society, thats been vitriolically anticommunist, which ive drunken the koolaid fully, i get all the standard implications.

I wish typing on an ipad with a flip phone size keyboard wasnt so troublesome. So please excuse issues with my typings.

Funny enough in the bible, one can not cross into the spiritual realm with any earthly possessions. This partially highlights how nonintrinsic ownership is to reality. Looking at past serfdom societies or others ownership took a different form. Hunter gathering societies think borders are incomprehensible. Then theres colonialism where european powers took over Africa then claimed its inhabitants owed them an annual tax for the land which the natives already resided on. Israel claims ownership of Palestine on behalf the jews based on some 2000year religious inheritance and used force and manipulation to settle/colonialize already claim lands. Thats not to say im pro palestinian claims either. People will make some rationalized justification on why they are entitled to something when the natural state of nature is to just roam and intermingle freely. Theres all these weaselly ways to deprive people of property like gentrification or legal manipulations.

Then theres always exceptions like imminent domain. Theres also the flipside if force used to seize territory, theres also the force used to protect illgotten territory from trespassers. Then theres the capitalist stakeholder math that crudely gives a vast disproportionate share of ownership to a few stakeholders (usually the progenitors of the capitalistic endeavor) despite it really being a rather conmunist at least laborwise endeavor. To put clearly its strange that jeff bezos can own ten percent of all of amazons collective largess despite it being a product of a million or 100000 laborers.

All im saying is property ownership isnt natural and is usually stitched together in a crude manner usually according to the values of the times. Im uninterested in holding it sacred though i do recognize confiscating peoples properties at willynilly whims is quite problemmatic.

This comes across as bamboozlement, based on conflating the actually broadly-accepted right to own property with an imagined right to own land. There is nothing in the UNHDR that says people ought to be able to own land. As you already pointed out, any property that a person might own is at best just a temporary structure on land that in most countries also includes other structures provided by other entities. Land itself is widely understood to be a shared resource. If it wasn't, there wouldn't be any controversy over who gets to use it, and the right to freedom of movement wouldn't exist either.

Of course it violates human rights to force people out of their homes, but that's because it's wrong to interfere with how people choose to live, not because people have some kind of intrinsic and exclusive right to the land they are currently occupying.

> There is nothing in the UNHDR that says people ought to be able to own land

Article 17 [0]:

1. Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.

2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property

---------

Land is a form of property in every single definition used in literally every form of jurisprudence.

[0] - https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma....

Edit: why the negative downvotes to an a proven refutation

Guns are also a form of property, but nobody thinks that declaration says every human has a right to own guns. The right to own property doesn't mean you have the right to own all forms of property, almost nobody thinks you should have the right to own all forms of property.

> Edit: why the negative downvotes to an a proven refutation

You didn't refute anything, red being a color doesn't mean a color is necessarily red. That is a classic logical mistake to make.

> The right to own property doesn't mean you have the right to own all forms of property

Maybe?

If you want a specific form of property, and you have the means to acquire it, lots of people would probably think that you should be let owning what you want.

Of course "means to acquire" encompasses a lot of situations in which ultimately a person has more power than others: you might have more money than your peers bidding for this property, or it might be an "adverse possession" kind of situation, or anyhow ultimately you get the state/law/authorities to agree with you, which means that you can benefit from the state's monopoly on violence...

> Land is a form of property in every single definition used in literally every form of jurisprudence.

Not everywhere. At least not in the form of private property that an individual can own

> All urban land in China is owned by the Chinese government and is commonly referred to as “state-owned land.” All rural and suburban land is owned by rural collectives (i.e., local groups of farmers) and is commonly referred to as “collective land.”

https://resourcehub.bakermckenzie.com/en/resources/global-co...

Allowing private ownership of land is a mistake, but thankfully this mistake is not universal

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