this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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Antiwork
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A community for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles.
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Edit: this response was part of a chain, but I posted it when lemmy.world was having issues and I think my lemmy client couldn't find the comment it was responding to, so it just posted it at the top level, here's the chain for context: https://lemmy.world/comment/1973311
Capitalism is an ideology, you have a very weird relationship with definitions, first denying what scalping is and now denying what an ideology is. I don't know why you choose to live in a world where you just make up your own definitions, but it makes it harder to communicate.
Demand outstrips supply absolutely, and yeah if we built an infinite number of houses we'd have a fine supply, but also if we didn't have 16 million vacant homes we'd also have a fine supply. We currently have more vacant housing units than homeless people (by a factor of ~30), and capitalists are purposefully restricting supply to increase cost.
I don't know why you choose to live in a world where there is only one possible solution to the housing crisis. I've already said building more would obviously help supply, I don't know why you're so ideologically motivated that you can't admit that putting literally millions of housing units on the market would also help supply. You seem to have an inability to even consider that capitalism could have any problems. That's the epitome of an ideologue.
There's a surplus but they're restricting supply?
Yup. GPU scalpers do the same thing, they buy up an entire stock, and then restrict supply by only letting a couple units go at a time, which inflates the price.
In housing, capitalists lovingly call this practice "investing", when you buy up land or housing and don't rent it out or sell it, you just let it sit and increase in value.
That's an easy explanation to reach for, but the theory rapidly breaks down without a unified cartel controlling the entire thing, because it's opportunity cost down the drain to sit on properties to try to drive up prices across the market - each individual participant would make more money breaking with the cartel and just selling/renting their stock. Hence, the sheer number of actual participants in the market disproves it.
There are a ton of reasons why individuals/corporations would scalp housing units and hold onto them without opening them up to use, from laws requiring fair treatment of renters like in NYC (where 90,000 rent controlled apartments remain vacant), to "unified cartels" actually have incredibly large influence over some areas (there are some companies that hold 10s of thousands of housing units, like blackrock, and these corporations purposefully keep some vacant to inflate the price of all units and control supply).
But even if you want to just close your eyes and ignore my last paragraph, you can try to rationalize away the data, but the data will still be there. There are 16 million vacant housing units in the U.S. Even if you can't fathom any reason why these might exist, they still do, and they still impact supply even if you'd like to believe they don't.
I'm not pretending they don't exist. I've called the problem out myself. But simple "capitalists are hoarding them to price gouge" is not a plausible explanation as to why.
You didn't respond to anything I said. You essentially said "I agree and you're wrong" with some fluff, so uhm okay good talk buddy.
I really don't know why convos go this way.
Consider more deeply the problem of how competing firms respond to prices. Consider that these firms don't actually have monopolies over a single geographical area, and also that people would have the option to move somewhere else even if they did. When there is actual competition, the theory immediately breaks down, because sitting on stock without selling/renting it actually just wastes money, and any other competing provider will just slip in below the price you're trying to sell it at.
No people don't "just have the option to move away", that's an incredibly naive way to look at the world, some people need to be in certain locations for social or work reasons.
Also, what I'm saying isn't a "theory", it's an observation of data. You keep trying to rationalize it away, but whatever way you slice it you can't get rid of the 16 million vacant houses that are not in use, while we have half a million homeless people and rising costs housing costs.
You seem to be insinuating that people don't just buy up housing and sit on it, like that's not a phenomenon that exists because you can't fathom why, despite my last comment clearly outlining several reasons how it could happen, and more importantly the fact that it does actually happen.
I am not trying to "rationalize it away". This is a phenomenon that exists, a large stock of unused real estate. The question here is why it exists.
You argued that there are localized monopolies. This is a contentious point already, so I pointed out a mitigating factor, that people (not all people, sure) have the option to move if such a monopoly became unbearable. You seem to want to frame this like I'm just dismissively telling people to move if housing is too expensive or whatever, but the point of bringing this up is to demonstrate one item in the long list of things that prevent your theoretical phenomena of "big players hoarding real estate to raise prices across the market" from occurring in the real world. And I really don't appreciate trying to be depicted like I'm spouting alt-right viewpoints here, which I'm absolutely not.
This is circular reasoning. You're citing your theoretical "hoarding real estate to raise prices" phenomena as proof that "hoarding real estate to raise prices" occurs.
And right back to trying to smear me as "not caring about the homeless".
Again, the point here is to figure out why this phenomena of a big surplus of vacant property exists. Doing a thorough root cause analysis is how you actually solve the problem. Latching onto popular pseudoscientific talking points about the problem and ignoring any attempts to investigate the problem is how you guarantee the problem continues. And trying to smear people who want to figure out the nature of the problem is absolutely ass backwards.
Gonna go ahead and disengage at this point, happy to actually discuss this if you want to do it intelligently and not adversarially.
You can't tell someone they're being pseudo-scientific and then accuse them of being adversarial as if you're not.
I wasn't using circular reasoning, I was citing data. 90,000 rent controlled housing units in NYC are left vacant (this number has been rising). As we both understand, "individual" (either actually an individual or a corporation) capitalists act in their own best interests. They're not leaving these apartments vacant for years just because they want to fuck over poor people, they're doing it because they make more money off their other supply if these units are kept off the market.
If you don't want to feel like you're spouting alt-right talking points, stop using verbatim the talking points that capitalists use to defend housing scalpers. At best, your entire point is "housing scalpers aren't as big of a deal as this other problem", and at worst you're ignoring the real problem so capitalists can keep exploiting the housing market.
You haven't made a case in favor of housing scalpers, and for good reason, there's literally no case to be made for them. The capitalist position is that scalping houses isn't a big enough problem to have an effect on supply. Even if that were true (which would require 16 million housing units being vacant having no impact on housing supply), it doesn't mean that it couldnt be true in the future. What if the number rose to 30 million vacant units with the same population? Or 100 million? Or a billion? At some point it gets ridiculous. To me that's pretty clearly when you're at "we have 30x as many vacant houses as homeless people", but maybe your tolerance is much higher because homeless people aren't economically valuable to capitalists (except as a reserve army of labor).
Alright dude, good luck with that.