Fried_out_Kombi

Fried_out_Kombi, 2 months ago

Honestly, I care far more about untangling our rat’s nest of NIMBY land use laws. As it stands, it’s literally illegal to build anything denser than sprawling, low-density suburbs on the majority of urban land thanks to NIMBY policies such as restrictive zoning and arbitrary mandatory parking minimums.

Tbh, the whole “corporate ownership of homes” is a red herring. Shuffling around ownership does nothing if you’re not massively expanding supply. And what we need most right now is massively expanded supply.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/1188a7a7-116a-48e2-80d1-dc550d88eccd.png

Fried_out_Kombi, 2 months ago

Yeah, political opinions based on “regulations always good” or “regulations always bad” are lazy and unhelpful. For one, it ignores that many regulations are written for the express purpose of manufacturing or solidifying a monopoly.

Regulatory capture

And NIMBY land use policies really are just a textbook example of regulatory capture. Homeowners, who expect their homes to perpetually increase in value, lobby their local governments to manufacture an artificial scarcity of housing so as to drive their property values to the moon. All of this at the expense of renters and new home buyers.

Imo, we should all be trying to form nuanced political opinions where we judge policy on whether it’s good policy or not.

Fried_out_Kombi, 2 months ago

The “we have enough homes already” is a common (and unfortunately very harmful) myth.

A couple good in-depth videos on the topic:

• youtu.be/evYOhpjMql0?si=IRUAo9RxDjZVenpI
• youtu.be/3xZXdXxYBGU?si=DF-MesH6FIetbur-

The gist of it is that statistics on how many vacant homes exist are highly misleading, for two main reasons:

1. Many of the homes are not where the demand is. A vacant home in St Louis does nothing to help with a housing shortage in NYC. People want to live in NYC because that’s where the jobs are. A house in St Louis isn’t worth much if you can’t find work there. And statistics consistently show that the most expensive cities have the lowest vacancy rates.
2. A lot of the homes that are counted as “vacant” aren’t actually just free for the taking like “vacant” would have you believe. In these statistics, “vacant” can mean: 1) a unit that is between tenants, 2) a unit that just finished being built and is awaiting its tenant’s move-in, 3) a unit occupied by someone who doesn’t legally state it as their primary residence (e.g., student housing where the student still lists their parents’ home as their primary address), 4) a unit in horrible disrepair that is unfit for occupation, etc.

Add to this the fact that high vacancy rates are GOOD for you, as it means landlords and sellers have a credible threat of vacancy, meaning they can’t demand ludicrous prices. Reducing vacancy rates is an incredibly anti-consumer, pro-landlord move.

Fried_out_Kombi, 2 months ago

NYC itself doesn’t have much (although it still has some! see image below) low-density zoning, but their suburbs sure do. The city itself also has a lot of other bureaucratic barriers to development that result in it having abysmal housing construction rates.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/6b105e18-ea14-4922-96bf-38f0c0393611.png

As for vacancy, yes, the threat of not being able to sell is what stops builders from building too much. For example, it’s the reason no one’s even trying to build the Burj Khalifa in Bakersfield. But if you make it legal and reasonably easy to build, yes, people will build.

Perhaps Tokyo is the best example. Biggest city in the world, and yet it’s actually relatively affordable, thanks largely to good land use policy:

In the past half century, by investing in transit and allowing development, the city has added more housing units than the total number of units in New York City. It has remained affordable by becoming the world’s largest city. It has become the world’s largest city by remaining affordable.

Two full-time workers earning Tokyo’s minimum wage can comfortably afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in six of the city’s 23 wards. By contrast, two people working minimum-wage jobs cannot afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in any of the 23 counties in the New York metropolitan area.

…

In Tokyo, by contrast, there is little public or subsidized housing. Instead, the government has focused on making it easy for developers to build. A national zoning law, for example, sharply limits the ability of local governments to impede development. Instead of allowing the people who live in a neighborhood to prevent others from living there, Japan has shifted decision-making to the representatives of the entire population, allowing a better balance between the interests of current residents and of everyone who might live in that place. Small apartment buildings can be built almost anywhere, and larger structures are allowed on a vast majority of urban land. Even in areas designated for offices, homes are permitted. After Tokyo’s office market crashed in the 1990s, developers started building apartments on land they had purchased for office buildings.

I think the key idea is to not have government bureaucrats or existing homeowners or landlords decide whether there’s “enough” housing, but rather let builders determine if there’s unmet demand. If there is unmet demand, they will build if you let them. If there truly is enough housing in a certain city, then you don’t need to tell builders not to build – they’ll simply stop building if they sense there’s not enough demand for it.

Fried_out_Kombi, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

They’ll ban you for acknowledging the existence of the Uyghur genocide, for one

Edit: wording

Fried_out_Kombi, 2 months ago

Imagine if someone defended nazis with “they were calmly denying the Holocaust”. I’ve seen far too many tankies denying the Uyghur genocide every chance they get. Like you say, it doesn’t matter the tone; genocide denial is itself a line you don’t cross.

Fried_out_Kombi, 2 months ago

Exactly. When the accused has paid off half the jury, you shouldn’t put much stock in the verdict.

The only thing I care about when determining whether something is a genocide is the facts of the case (which are overwhelmingly in favor of describing the Uyghur genocide as a genocide), not the outcome of a highly political vote by countries all with their own motives and interests.

Fried_out_Kombi, 3 months ago

People live in an artificial binary where they believe communism and capitalism are the only two economic systems in the entire world.

I’ll be bold and say it outright: communism is a fundamentally broken idea and sucks balls, and so is capitalism, but both in similar-yet-different ways.

Communism is faulty economics and fails to differentiate between man-made capital and god-given land and natural resources, grouping both as “the means of production”. The problem with this is land and capital have very different properties. Where land (and natural resources) cannot be created and are zero-sum, capital must be created and is not zero-sum. Communism blatantly ignores this and has a zero-sum view on capital, meaning it suggests policies that fail to effectively produce new capital, and thus fail to effectively produce new wealth and prosperity. Further, when the state takes monopolistic control over land and capital (in addition to its existing monopoly on violence), it concentrates far too much power, which is why communist countries keep on becoming brutal dictatorships.

Capitalism, on the other hand, also fails to differentiate between land and capital, but in a different way. Instead of socializing both, it privatizes both, allowing massive rent-seeking and exploitation as a result of monopolization of land and natural resources. It also often willfully ignores that negative externalities and other market failures actually make society, on the net, poorer and less prosperous. Further, this concentration of wealth into the rent-seeking, monopolist class grants them more political power to make it even easier to rent-seek, further concentrating their own power and wealth.

What I want instead is a Georgist system that correctly identifies this distinction between land and capital, and then uses economically proven policies that respect the inherent differences between land and capital.

Fried_out_Kombi, 3 months ago

But society already values flexibility as well. As a basic example, I was hired in my current job in large part because I have a relatively broad range of skills within my field, rather than being hyper-specialized in one particular thing. Sure, in an abstract world where replacing employees is frictionless and firms are all megacorps with tens of thousands of employees (or more), tremendous specialization would probably be more commonplace. But in our real world, companies value flexible employees who can respond to changing projects, requirements, conditions, etc., because just firing and hiring a new specialist costs times and money, and many companies (startups especially) can’t afford having thousands of specialists in every niche they touch upon.

Further, even specialists have to communicate and collaborate with other specialists, and they need to be able to understand each other well enough to do so. If you wanted to build robotics to pick tomatoes automatically, for instance, it would be ridiculous to hire one tomato farmer and one roboticist who know nothing about each other’s respective specializations. If neither has any flexibility or breadth of knowledge, it will be very difficult for them to communicate and collaborate to get the project working.

Fried_out_Kombi, 3 months ago

I agree that I think worker coops elegantly solve certain problems (notably the principal-agent problem), but they also have certain drawbacks. Notably, they have more difficulty raising funds, they tend to be more risk-averse, they tend to be more growth-averse (people don’t like to dilute their own stake within the company with more people, but this means they don’t typically scale as easily or quickly to benefit economies of scale), and they tend to pay worse than hierarchical companies (counterintuitive as that may seem at first if the whole goal of market socialism is to have workers get more of their value back).

So is the solution to just throw our hands up and say, “Screw it, nothing we can do but let hierarchical organizations win”? Not quite. We still do see plenty of successful coops, notably in the form of credit unions. We also have unions and syndicalist solutions. We still have minimum wages (which are supported by most economists, as it turns out you can raise minimum wages a certain amount without raising unemployment because there’s often a non-zero amount of monopsony power in the labor market).

Further, I do think a Georgist system would empower labor much more than now. Without a housing crisis (thanks to LVT and YIMBYism), with a citizen’s dividend, with quality public education (education has positive externalities and thus deserves a Pigouvian subsidy), with more jobs (thanks to more economic growth and less rent-seeking), and with public works projects (essentially Pigouvian subsidies for things like environmental cleanup), I think labor would have much more bargaining power with employers.

For instance, the professional class right now gets good pay and generally good quality of life , despite rarely having unions or worker coops, precisely because they have high negotiating power with prospective employers.

My inclination is to strive for a more Georgist system, encourage unions, use minimum wages and government spending technocratically, and then see if more is yet needed.

Fried_out_Kombi, 4 months ago

Just today I saw this list of the largest tram networks in history: …wikipedia.org/…/List_of_largest_tram_and_light_r…

The largest existing one is Melbourne, at a little over 250 km of tramways. Los Angeles at its peak had over 1700 km of tramways.

Truly insane what we tore up. A crime against humanity.

Fried_out_Kombi, 4 months ago

Similar with Montreal. A whole grid of streetcar lines just got torn up and replaced with buses. We now have a nice metro now at least, but it certainly wasn’t made from pre-existing tramways.

Fried_out_Kombi, 4 months ago

Wow, even Terre Haute. Almost went there for college (Rose-Hulman), but decided against it in part because the city itself was so small and sprawling. It must’ve been 1000x livelier back in the streetcar days when things were probably more densely built and less obscenely car-centric.

Also, Trump got elected, so I was like, “Nah, I’m moving to Canada”, which is how I ended up in Montreal instead.

Fried_out_Kombi, 4 months ago

Yeah, I certainly don’t regret moving to Montreal, as it’s where I met my wife and now where I’m working full-time. But yeah, I got the sense that attending Rose-Hulman would have meant being in a college bubble for 4 years and never doing much outside of that bubble.

Fried_out_Kombi, 4 months ago

Land value tax would fix this

And abolishing exclusionary zoning, parking minimums, and other anti-housing land use policies

Fried_out_Kombi, 4 months ago

I think part of the problem is that what we refer to as landlording includes two separate roles: landlording and property management. The former isn’t a legitimate job, gathering its profits from economic rents borne of land and housing scarcity, while the latter is a legitimate job, earning its profits from the labor of managing and maintaining rental housing.

And so with a sufficiently high LVT, approaching the full rental value of land as Henry George proposed, and a much more YIMBY regulatory environment, I think we would likely see landlords converge towards being mere property managers.

That said, you are fully correct that the non-zero costs of moving would still give landlords a little leeway to rent-seek, and I’m curious what solutions may exist to remedy that.

Regardless of whether it 100% solves landlording, I do think LVT and YIMBYism do largely solve real estate “investment” as the meme talks about. Since LVT and abundant housing stop the “line goes up” phenomenon, and LVT in particular punishes real estate speculation, I think they would largely, if not entirely, eliminate the phenomenon of people buying up land/property just to resell later after appreciation. Because, well, housing wouldn’t appreciate under a sufficiently heavy LVT and a strong YIMBY regulatory environment.

Fried_out_Kombi, 4 months ago

Good solution is to tax land. The land value tax cannot be passed on to tenants, both in economic theory and in observed practice.

Plus, it’s just a super good tax. Progressive, hard to evade, super efficient, incentivizes density and disincentivizes sprawl. It’s so good that economists of all different ideologies agree, from free-market libertarians like Milton Friedman to New Keynesians and social democrats like Joseph Stiglitz.

We should be taxing land, not labor.

Fried_out_Kombi, 4 months ago

This can probably answer your questions.

A key idea of land value taxes is it’s on land value, rather than land area. Urban land is faaaaar more valuable than urban land on a per-acre basis, so someone who owns 1 acre of land in Manhattan will pay vastly more than a farmer who owns 1 acre in rural Nebraska.

As for appraisal, we already sorta do this with property taxes, as property taxes tax the land value + improvement value. With land value taxes, we simply seek to tax just the unimproved land value. Why? Property taxes can disincentivize development and incentivize land-hoarding and speculation. In contrast, even a milquetoast land value tax has been shown to reduce land speculation.

Fried_out_Kombi, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Personally, I think our philosophy of taxation should be “tax what you take, not what you make”.

Because there’s finite land on Earth and nobody has created it, you occupying any parcel of it necessarily denies others from its benefit. Hence, a land value tax in proportion to the value of land you have taken from the rest of society.

Similar for finite natural resources. There are finite mineral deposits, finite oil deposits, finite phosphate deposits, etc., and anyone who extracts them takes something from the rest of society. Hence, we ought to have a severance tax in proportion to the value of the resource you have taken from the rest of society.

And also similar for negative externalities. When you pollute a river or the atmosphere or cause any other negative externality, you are forcing those around you to bear some of your costs, that is you are taking value from them to give to yourself. Hence, we ought to have externality taxes (aka “Pigouvian taxes”) in proportion to the amount of harm you have caused to society.

Further, I think taxing along this principle leads to the best overall outcomes, not just from an abstract sense of “fairness”, but from pragmatic economic outcomes.

Take land value taxes: economically speaking, LVT is just a great tax with great properties that has seen great empirical success.

Or severance taxes: Norway has used them brilliantly to solve the resource curse.

Or Pigouvian taxes: basically all economists agree carbon tax-and-dividend is the single best climate policy.

But yeah, absolutely everything else should be tax-free. The government shouldn’t even be tracking your income, much less taxing you on it. Tax the land hoarders and polluters instead.

Fried_out_Kombi, 4 months ago

What about Henry George, then?

Henry George (September 2, 1839 – October 29, 1897) was an American political economist and journalist. His writing was immensely popular in 19th-century America and sparked several reform movements of the Progressive Era. He inspired the economic philosophy known as Georgism, the belief that people should own the value they produce themselves, but that the economic value of land (including natural resources) should belong equally to all members of society. George famously argued that a single tax on land values would create a more productive and just society.

Fried_out_Kombi, 4 months ago

My main issues with vacancy taxes are three-fold:

1. The cities with the worst housing crises are typically the ones with the lowest vacancy rates. This makes sense, as if vacancy rates are super high, potential tenants have a lot of negotiating power against landlords, so they can demand lower rents. When there are very few vacancies relative to the number of prospective tenants, landlords have all the negotiating power and can demand high rents.
2. Vacancy tax focuses on shuffling ownership of existing units and doesn’t do anything to encourage densification and development. Own a detached single-family home right next to a metro station in the middle of Manhattan? So long as someone lives in it, you pay no vacancy tax, despite the fact it’s clearly a massive waste of some of the most valuable land in the world.
3. It’s easier to evade and thornier to implement. For instance, there are a lot of “statistics” thrown about regarding “millions” of vacancies, but many on-paper vacancies aren’t what you or I imagine. For example, “vacant” technically includes student apartments where the student lists their parents’ address as their permanent address. Getting back to the point, if you can just on-paper claim a unit is occupied, you can evade the tax, which means the government then needs to actually go out and check if someone us actually living there at least 180 days out of the year, which is way harder to enforce.

Altogether, vacancy taxes are a pretty marginal solution, and I think our focus is much better spent on land value taxes and YIMBYism (e.g., zoning reform).

Fried_out_Kombi, 4 months ago

gameofrent.com/…/can-land-be-accurately-assessed

The key downsides of income taxes, though, are it requires tracking everyone’s income, and it’s very easy to hide income by doing under-the-table work and getting paid in cash. In contrast, it’s impossible to hide land.

Fried_out_Kombi, 4 months ago

Plus, no human created the Earth, so why should we be able to place arbitrary boundaries upon entire regions of it and restrict others from crossing them based solely on their having been born in a different closed-off region of it?

There is no moral or logical argument in favor of anything but moving towards global freedom of movement one day.

Fried_out_Kombi, 7 months ago

It’s especially dumb because RISC-V is – dare I say it – inevitably the future. Trying to crack down on RISC-V is like trying to crack down on Linux or solar photovoltaics or wind turbines. That is, you can try to crack down, but the fundamental value proposition is simply too good. All you’ll achieve in cracking down is hurting yourself while everyone else gets ahead.

Fried_out_Kombi, 7 months ago

This talk, given by David Patterson (a legend in computer architecture and one of the people who helped create RISC-V at UC Berkeley) is an excellent (and accessible) introduction.

Fried_out_Kombi, 8 months ago

Last year, my sister had her driver’s license suspended because of a medical condition, but she’s still perfectly capable of riding a bike. But the problem is our societal assumption of cars-for-all-whether-you-like-it-or-not means her neighborhood street design is extremely hostile to her getting around by bike safely, and it’s way too sprawling and car-dependent to walk anywhere. There’s also no public transit within a reasonable walking distance.

So I might ask you: Do you believe people like my sister deserve the same right to mobility as the rest of us? If so, why support a system that make life actively hostile to her and people like her? You act as if disabilities are a monolith, and that cars are only ever their saviors, as if cars are never the thing making life actively more difficult for many people.

Fried_out_Kombi, 9 months ago

Enshrinklification of the internet

Fried_out_Kombi, 10 months ago

No impropriety in supporting local sole proprietors