How to fix the housing problem?

So in other words, I never requested any data from you about your ideas.

 

It is massively and exorbitantly subsidized, which is why housing is so expensive: you have to buy a house to get the subsidy, and the current owner is going to charge you full market value for the privileged of receiving it.

No, that is false: someone only paid full market value for it in the past, and the person they paid -- i.e., the previous owner -- was thus the recipient of the subsidy before the current owner became the recipient.

Yes, of course they are, by forcibly depriving them of their liberty to use the land unless they pay the current owner full market value just for their permission to do so. Don't be so ridiculous and disingenuous.

That is completely irrelevant to the subsidy.

 

There's both a short-term and a long-term component to it.

If you looked on a graph you might see lots of big ups and downs, but overall on average, zooming out to a 10 or 20 year time period, it still appears to be going up.

Suppose the housing market is in a bubble and is going to crash soon. By the time housing prices go down, the poor will probably be in a worse state than they were before. Housing crashes are typically associated with economic malaise for the poor, since typically more money is being spent in the economy while prices are going up. (Part of this may be caused by the construction industry, so-called construction bubbles)

 

Homeownership is not subsidized.

Home ownership is not subsidized.

Novo du has a right to use land someone else owns. You have never and will never have such a right.

There is no subsidy. Each homeowner pays for the home they own.


No amount of georgist stupidity is going to change reality.

 

OK I still don't see this direct connection between housing and poverty. No one is bothering to make that argument either, it seems in this thread there is just an assumption that housing costs are a direct reason for poverty.

 

Well, to try to discuss that we need to know what exactly is meant by a connection between housing prices and poverty.
I mean if we're going to try to look for specific data.

Some of this is kind of just based on common sense reasoning though. The concept doesn't seem that unreasonable to me.

It might be much more difficult to actually "prove" there's a correlation based on data. I'm not even sure exactly what sort of data would show that.
Economics is a subject that can be difficult to prove things. A lot of it is based on theory, and admittedly a lot of times that theory is wrong.

 

It is indisputably and exorbitantly subsidized, which is the only possible reason housing is so expensive. You just like getting the subsidy, you like being legally entitled to rob, enslave, and murder other people, so you have to deny the subsidy in order to avoid knowing the fact that you are exorbitantly privileged, and your beliefs are false and evil. I've proved that to you many times.

Wrong. It is ownership of land that no one has a right to, because nobody has a right to forcibly deprive others of their liberty rights. That's slavery, as I have also proved to you many times.

No, that is false. Everyone will always have their rights to liberty. Greedy, evil, privileged, parasitic takers like slave owners and landowners may use force and violence to legally abrogate others' rights, but the rights still exist. Being legally entitled to forcibly violate others' rights without making just compensation, as landowners and slave owners are, does not erase the rights of the victims. It just violates them.

Everyone is inherently forced to subsidize landowners, and greedy homeowners are in receipt of additional subsidies such as the mortgage interest and property tax deductions. The greed of the welfare chiseler for unearned wealth is to the greed of the landowner as the brightness of the moon is to the brightness of the sun. Landowners are so greedy that when the community makes their land worth $1M more without their having lifted a productive finger, they become enraged if it asks them to repay even 1% of that subsidy.

The reality is that private ownership of land is the greatest evil that has ever existed. Throughout history, landowners have used their legal privilege to rob, extort, and murder on an inconceivably vast scale.

 

I agree. My OP was about preventing property from sitting idle. My point here is that this can be done while still allowing it to be a profitable investment. As one example: I bought my house with a mortgage so I can avoid paying rent when I'm old. Not paying rent when I'm old will be a return on my investment.

 

"Affordability" is probably the wrong term, because it means something different to each of us. One person will be prepared to do whatever it takes to live in a certain area, and another won't. That doesn't mean the former can 'afford' it while the latter can't. It could be that the former has the same income as the latter, but is prepared to buy in collaboration with others in order to access an area of desirability. Or perhaps is prepared to buy much cheaper housing elsewhere, then slowly work their way towards living where they want to live. Again, that doesn't reflect the respective wealth of the two sample people, nor say anything about affordability.

 

So outlaw property investment and see a wholesale disappearance of rental stock. Where are you going to put everyone who rented, but now has no home?

 

Some have claimed the same thing about college education in the US.

(I don't mean to take this discussion off-topic, simply pointing out there is a precedent for this type of thinking)

 

The economic philosophy of Henry George suggests a way to prevent property from sitting idle, although it does not necessarily make it more affordable. Henry George advocated a tax on the value of the land of the property. Somewhat similar to a property tax, except it excludes the calculated market value of the building from the taxable principal.

Such a tax doesn't really directly help increase affordability so much, but it does help transfer some of the costs away from the land value towards the tax.

Such a tax has many pros and cons. In some ways, economically, it is the perfect tax, but it does have several issues, including outside of economics.

The value of the building represents a form of capital in the overall economy too, since the more already existing buildings that exist, typically the less expensive it will be to buy a building in that market.

So maybe the type of thing you would be advocating is a tax on the entire property, which a regular property tax is, something that very commonly exists in local levels of government.

 

With some justification. Thing is, we want people to be well educated. We don't -- or at least shouldn't -- want them to get rich by idly hoarding land.

 

Here's the beans to show you that this overinflated-overpriced housing market is artificially induced by suppliers and manufacturers.

There are 138,539,906 in the United States. Of those, 17,019,726 homes are vacant.
https://247wallst.com/housing/2019/09/30/there-are-over-17-million-vacant-homes-in-america/

 

It does in at least five ways:

1. It means the land user only has to pay for government once instead of twice, by reducing the something-for-nothing payment to the landowner.
2. By greatly reducing the acquisition cost of the land, it reduces the value of improvements necessary to justify the land acquisition cost.
3. Reducing the land acquisition cost also reduces the something-for-nothing interest payments to mortgage lenders, further reducing housing costs.
4. By requiring landholders to pay for what they take from the community, it encourages them to put the land to its most appropriate productive use in order to avoid losing money to the tax; that will usually mean adding to the total supply of improvements in the community, thus reducing their price.
5. Modern geoist proposals to recover the publicly created unimproved rental value of land for public purposes and benefit all include a universal individual exemption (UIE) or, second best, a citizens' dividend or UBI funded by recovered land rent; this reduces the net land rent cost per person.

See above.

It has many pros but only one "con": it impairs landowners' legal entitlement to steal from everyone else. All objections to location subsidy repayment come down to, "Landowners want to keep on stealing."

True: it is also the only perfectly just and moral way both to allocate secure, exclusive land tenure and to fund desirable public services and infrastructure.

As explained above.

Taxing buildings reduces the supply of buildings. Taxing land does not reduce the supply of land, only its price.

 

Huh??? If it was suppliers and manufacturers, they would be inflating prices by creating an artificial shortage, not an enormous surplus. The inflation of house prices has been caused by the Federal Reserve suppressing interest rates to unprecedented lows and buying up mortgage debt with newly issued money, and by many government policies that subsidize homeownership and idle landowning.

 

The reasons why housing prices are so high is the shortages of materials..

 

government housing is needed, housing for those that can't afford housing, it should not be great, very basic, public intox should get you banned, being loud should get you banned, being violent gets you banned for life

it has to be a safe place, a place that people can go to live and get their life in order, not free, but cheap enough to live

 

It means a modest median price relative to median income. It doesn't mean, "Someone can afford it."

 

No, that's nothing but false, absurd, and disingenuous garbage, as the even GREATER increase in the price of VACANT LAND just flat-out PROVES.

 

We don't need government housing. We just need government to stop subsidizing idle land hoarding.

 

we need both imo

 

And if land sits idle, and the person owning it continues to pay for land taxes, then they are subsidizing the government services for the community.

You are still promulgating an idea that has no honest basis. No land is not taxed for the community services, and there is no 'government subsidy'.

 

No they aren't, any more than you are subsidizing a baker if you buy a loaf of bread and then don't eat it. They are simply paying for what they are taking from the community, just like you would be doing with the baker.

OTC, there is no honest basis for denying the facts of objective physical reality that I identify.

But it should be, because landowners take all the value of those services, which are currently paid for by other people's taxes.

There is indisputably a government subsidy, as there is no other reason for land to cost so much: it didn't cost anything to produce, did it? So the ONLY POSSIBLE REASON people are willing to pay so much for land is so that they can pocket the subsidy.

 

Incorrect. It would be paying a baker for a loaf of bread, and then not taking it. If the land is unoccupied, and they are paying taxes to the community and not using the services the taxes are paying for, then they are subsidizing the rest of the community.

You haven't identified anything, much less objective physical reality. You've attempted to justify the idea that no one should own land, yet someone somewhere has to use the land to produce goods, which they profit from. That is your pothole.

If the land is empty and they are paying taxes for community services that they aren't using, they are taking nothing.

There is no subsidy. You haven't proven there is one, and claiming that there is one does not make it so. The government does not have an independent source of funds, they only have what is picked from individual pockets.

Your theory collapses rather quickly. Georgist theory is not sustainable nor supportable. I recommend you don't dig yourself any deeper.