Florida lawmakers stay quiet as corporations buy homes

What happened in Austin?

After that there are the disused and blighted former commercial or light-industrial areas. See the above.

After that there are large traffic conduits that are near SFH neighborhoods but underutilized and underdeveloped. Want to get rid of some shitty strip mall and build mixed-use structures instead? Go for it!

And beyond all that: "Downtowns" are rarely "full." Downtown L.A., for example. Density is available for those who want it. There's no excuse for trying to force it on those who specifically chose something different. They didn't demand that apartments be wiped out to create yards and houses; they moved to an area set up that way.

One approach to the "housing crisis" is to tax the shit out of empty rental properties.

Meanwhile: Unlike homeowners, corporations don't typically die and leave their houses to their children.

But when people do, and their out-of-state children want to dispose of the asset quickly, they're going to sell that house to the fat corporate all-cash offer... not to a new family who wants to move into the neighborhood.

At this point we all know that home ownership is the best way for anyone of any walk of life to build wealth. Corporations are destroying that opportunity.

A company town should be exclusive to company employees and their families, because it would be economically infeasible for the corp to support unaffiliated families or workers. It would also be the type of urban distraction that a company town can avoid: if all your neighbors are fellow employees loyal to the corp, then your leisure time will also be oriented toward a collective good and you'll be less likely to be exposed to disruption, spying, or discontent fostered by corporate rivals or outsiders.

Whichever corp it is, doesn't need to be directly responsible for all the amenities. Clearly they're going to subcontract nearly everything. Already happens: the cafeterias are run by catering professionals and the van transportation is probably also subcontracted by pros. The corp can provide everything within the corp's core compentencies, such as Internet connections and security, but the janitorial and fire safety and pharmacies would be third-parties specifically selected by the corporation and on an exclusive contract to operate there, which contracts could become really lucrative and competitive.

Your family gets screwed not only by the loss of a job, but of a house, and corporations will engage in race to the bottom dynamics, so that a leadership generation or two after the wonderful company housing project gets implemented, you have soulless bureaucrats viciously enforcing arbitrary company guidelines and treating humans like so much excrement to be shoveled. Corporations need to be limited, not necessarily in their profits, but in how they're allowed to spend. Spending money to purchase and squash competition, to file egregious lawsuits on dubious IP claims, to acquire and merge and conglomerate ultimately results in the same sorts of non-human creatures ending up with most of the power over almost every aspect of human life.

These corporate entities own all the food, all the media, the platforms, the entertainment, the entertainers, the gadgets, the clothing, etc, etc, etc. It's not that capitalism is bad; it's not. It's that the particular set of rules we're playing by, especially in treating corporations like people, create toxic incentives and dissolute responsibility for acute harms. If you just forced all the corporate homeowners to divest all their properties, you'd be dooming tens of millions to poverty and blowing up the economy in general - they likely knew and intended to invest in something that is 100% critical to the functioning of society such that the government absolutely has no choice but to bail them out if they ever need it. Blackrock isn't doing this because houses are so lucrative and profitable. They're doing it because the consumers are a captive audience with no choice.

We've created these beasts and now we've got to live with them. Thanks, boomers.

Now we use "eScrip" which is really streamlined. We go into our grocery store account and register a charity number with them, and every purchase is credited to that charity for a certain percentage of the proceeds.

But I suppose the name is the same because charitable scrip is only good with a certain vendor, and in the old days, the "paper days" it needed to be purchased in advance, like a gift card, from the target charity, rather than the store itself, and we couldn't convert it back into cash.

So for us in the 21st century, "scrip" is a good thing, a voluntary program, a way to make charitable donations without making charitable donations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip#Company_scrip

Once awhile ago, my employer called me into the office and said they wanted to increase my pay, but they knew I'd lose some benefits if my income increased. They said if I work enough extra hours, they'd pay me with gift cards beyond my agreed salary. Gift cards for grocery stores, or restaurants, or whatever specific purpose. (my employer was not a grocery store nor a restaurant.)

I declined. I suppose there are a lot of legal regulations that prevent employers from paying "in-kind wages" rather than cash money. But "in-kind" is still a line item on the forms I fill out. I frankly don't see much wrong with "in-kind" wages if the company town provides all essentials and necessities, and hopefully workers can earn a certain percentage of cash for incidentals.

By the way, in mining towns or logging camps, these were often quite remote outposts, where travel and shipping was extremely difficult for workers, and so the company town NEEDED to provide everything, or nobody could live there! And the workers had little hope of calling up Amazon and having a color teevee delivered!!! Cash would be nigh-on useless, and scrip was quite a logical substitute.

The worker-exploitation aspects of scrip are probably quite separate and distinct from the realities and logistics of a company providing goods and amenities, in spite of how Wikipedia makes it sound so intrinsically evil. Some are good at it, most aren't; what do you expect?