this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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Fuck yes. As a libertarian it bothers me that I can’t make my home in any space I can own.
I understand not building rendering plants next to houses. Some zoning is okay. But there is zero reason why I shouldn’t be able to run a 7-Eleven and sleep on a cot in the back if I so choose.
Libertarians: Always finding the rarest of occurrences to continue their dismantling of government and the systems that gave them everything they have. lmao
The rarest of occurrences?
Ubiquitous government meddling (in the form of, among other things, rules like “no more than one dwelling per half acre”) in the real estate market has resulted in this housing crisis we all face. People are dying of stress related illnesses and self inflicted gunshot wounds, and the survivors are dealing with enormous amounts of anxiety and hopelessness, because rents keep rising and rising,
Supply is artificially, heavily suppressed and people wonder why prices skyrocket.
Everyone attributes it to “landlord greed” but provider greed is regulated by market competition when supply is allowed to follow market forces.
A person having to spend $1500/mo just to sleep when they’re trying to run a business, when they’re perfectly willing to crash on a couch in their office, means the threshold for going into business for oneself is artificially raised.
I could rant about other markets too but there’s plenty of government-created horror to be found in real estate alone.
Also the notion that the government “gave them everything they have” is ridiculous. The government gave us the Drug War and a nuclear-armed Israel. Other governments gave us The Holocaust, the Rape of Nanking, the Trail of Tears, and other unimaginably horrific acts of human savagery.
Humans’ ability to negotiate and make deals to trade resources and cooperate on projects — willingly — is what gave us what we have today.
I have a counter-point that I’d like to hear your thoughts on: at least to some degree, it seems like part of the housing crisis is caused by private equity firms not being restricted from buying up property, artificially reducing the supply of housing that can be purchased by then renting it out, which artificially increases the cost of housing and making it less accessible. More of the population then has less wealth, while smaller portions of the population end up with more wealth, again making homeownership farther out of reach.
Yeah, that’s the proximal cause. A small cartel gains control of the limited supply, allowing them to set higher prices.
This happens all the time. The thing is, free markets have a solution for that. It’s a negative feedback loop that goes like:
The problem I’m talking about in our housing market is that step 3 is blocked. Despite other companies or individuals wanting to get in on this gravy train, by building their own housing to start producing profit, they can’t because there are laws prohibiting them from doing so.
Now, it’s not impossible to do new construction. But it is far more expensive than it naturally would be.
Like, let’s say a certain area is highly sought after. Let’s say there’s 1000 people who’d like to live there. But there are only 100 units (houses, apartments). Some billionaire buys all 100 units, and now controls the supply of housing. For each apartment they have ten candidates willing to outbid one another. They get to crank those prices up like mad.
The solution in a free market would be that a different billionaire (or maybe a lowly millionaire, or a coop composed of twenty fifty-thousandaires), or a big corporation, or whoever, decides they’re gonna build 500 more apartments.
Now you’ve got 600 apartments for those 1000 who want to live there, and you don’t have quite the same power to ask ridiculously high prices.
But the way our housing market works, it’s either extremely costly (like you need an environmental impact statement and you don’t know how it will turn out and if it turns out against your favor you can’t proceed, losing everyone you’ve invested so far), or zoning says “you can’t do more than ten dwellings per block here” and instead of 500 new units you can only build 50, or it’s just straight-up impossible to get permission to build.
That’s what I mean by an artificially-constrained supply.
The real ideal is for those 1000 people who want to live there, you’ve got 1100 housing units, and now the landlords are in competition with one another to attract tenants. 100 units are vacant and that is a source of negotiating power for the tenants.
But because we’re so stuck seeing that would-be investment — that would expand the supply — in terms of rich people getting richer, (and for many other reasons) we block that new construction and keep supply limited, which is to the benefit of the people who control that supply, and to the detriment to both (a) the people who would like to come in as alternate suppliers, and (b) to the people who need to use that supply.
I mean, even if we don’t want to think about incentives or negotiation, if we only want to focus on physical events in the world you can see, if there’s a housing problem the solution is to build more housing, and laws against building more housing are a problem.
It's artificially limited, but I don't think the number of housing units is necessarily how the limitation is imposed. You see, landlords aren't actually interested in tenants, they're interested in property values going up. Why? Because land and housing are legally considered capital, the value of which they can leverage for loans. That results in what we see happening in NYC and many other places, where apartments and retail spaces can lie vacant for years because the rent demanded by the owner is absurd, but to ask for less rent would lower the building's valuation. It's also why we have far more empty housing units than homeless people in this country, about 27 empty units for each homeless person. If these landlords were honestly participating in the market, or if housing wasn't considered capital, housing prices never would have gotten this high - and I suspect the same is true of the number of homeless.
The hyper-wealthy basically gave themselves a cheat code decades ago and have been abusing it to the detriment of markets and regular people ever since. We have a government body, the FTC, that's supposed to put a stop to this kind of market abuse, but the last time it really did its job at all was when it broke up Ma Bell forty years ago. For far too long it's been content to let corporations that are already far too big and have far too much influence over the market continue buying up their competitors or colluding to inflate bubbles.
How does deregulation restrict the housing supply?
Were there regulations at some point in US history that prevented that?
Not allowing foreign investment is reducing capital for construction. Living in Canada this is not helping like you think.
What economic reality results in more houses being built with less investment.
We have a lack of houses. Lowering the price will not make houses materialize or do you think some magic will happen?
Landlords being allowed to permanently take rentals off the market (by pretending to do construction work on them forever) to artificially reduce supply and drive up prices is a major problem. This practice used to be blocked by inspection laws that were removed.
Why can't you? I don't believe that there is any law saying you need to have a home in a residential zoned area (anti-homeless laws say that you cannot use public space as a home).
As far as I know, zoning laws just say that you cannot sell or rent out a property in a commercial district as residential. That is a false advertising/minimum allowable quality law, much like you cannot sell the meat of an a diseased animal. Commercial areas likely don't have the infrastructure (schools, utilities, safety) for people to live in.
This is what most Chinese food joints around here do. They are usually family owned, and they live in the back.
And, lo and behold, Chinese immigrants tend to be successful. They work hard, ignore the rules trying to hold them down, and as a result kick ass and make the world a better place.
Those of us born here tend to be too naive and trusting to break the rules, and we complain about how the system is designed to hold us down.
Except people think the economy is that system that’s been designed to hold us down. No, it’s the law. Law can be useful and helpful but the way we use it is harmful. And it’s the part that is actually designed. Like, we literally have committees dedicated to designing the law.
TOS can be kinda shit, and negotiated contracts in general can be lopsided and unfair, but that is mitigated by competition. A person must select between a handful of cell carriers, which sucks that it’s not more, but nobody’s choosing governments, at least not without dedicating like 10 years of their life to the process of switching.
Thank god we have a federated system in the US, because that allows people to shop around for governments to a quite limited degree.
Anyway. I have high praise for immigrants who are willing to break the rules. I think it’s a sign of maturity to be at least capable of breaking the rules, and I think it’s telling that the set of people who arrived here through a harrowing journey, as opposed to just being born, are the same set of people who give the finger to stupid laws.
Yeah but the combination fried rice has to be on point
Wait why can’t you do this? People definitely live in their gas stations / offices / whatever. It’s just not zoned for that, meaning it wasn’t made for that purpose, it’ll be suboptimal. But like, I don’t think the cops are out to look for your sleeping bag.
Why are you attracted to children?