• Aceticon@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Clearly they must be giving out free land in good places to live (near were all the jobs are), free materials and free time over there.

    It’s either that or that house you mention is supposed to be made out of opinions and built in fantasy la-la-land, as it’s only how the materials and places to put it in would be endless and free.

    • Alteon@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I mean I get both sides here. We live in a free market economy, where the scarcity of something affects the cost of it. People want land close to the city and there’s an extremely limited amount of it. If there are n*100 people and only n parcels of land in a small area, how do you provide it to people? Do you sell it? Is it a lottery system? Is the land sold at a base value that never changes? Like, how do you envision this going?

      Right now, people have to freedom to buy as much land as they want and set the pricing for that land. What we need is a property owner tax that scales up depending on the amount of property that you own. Though this will just make more land available. No one in their right mind will sell it for less than it’s worth though.

      • justJanne@startrek.website
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        10 months ago

        If parcel A has a property value of X

        And parcel B has a property value of 2X

        Then you can have the same rent on both of them if building B is twice as tall as building A.

        The whole “single family residential only” zoning in the US is the issue.

    • Maalus@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Oh so wait, so building a house isn’t free then since nobody is giving the land and materials away. So why do you expect a landlord to let you live for free if he had to pay to buy the land and build it?

      • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Nice to see you’re getting close to the core of the problem.

        Yeah, Land is owned rather than belonging to everybody as it used to be back before monarchs and as land ownership works in this system - any one individual with massive wealth can own way more Land than they need - it can be easilly hoarded by those with more money in a way that’s impossible for those with less money to overcome (short of a Revolution) and thus create cartels or even monopolies in Land in desirable places to live, a market positions from where they can extract as big a rent as they want since everybody else has no alternative.

        It’s from the massive imballance thus created by Law in the main, essential and irreplaceable, “raw material” for housing that the massive house prices we see come from, and landlords usually use their priviledged position in that highly imbalanced market to extract excessive rents.

        The whole situation is actually the very opposite of the “Free Market” you state it is - Land (and thus housing) ain’t like teddy bears and soap were a competitor can just enter the market and make more of it when somebody tries to corner the market, quite the opposite: it’s dependent on a naturally limited resource on top of which a trully ancient kind of legislation makes hoarding extremelly easy for those lucky enough to have lots of wealth, artificially transforming the limits of that resource into an extreme kind of scarcity.

        In this Not-At-All-Free Market, most landlords will extract excessive rents far beyond the value they add. If rents were not mainly based on exploiting a dominant position in a market dominated by hoarding and artifical scarcity and only paid for the actual service being provided by landlords, they would be tiny in comparison with the current situation and very few people would be critical of landlords.

        • BringMeTheDiscoKing@lemmy.ca
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          10 months ago

          Private interests are the ultimate autocracies.

          Let private interests amass huge amounts of resources and you have hugely powerful autocracies.

          Let these autocracies hire so-called economists to convince everyone that they will settle into some kind of optimal state if we just let them be and you have the current situation in the USA.