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For one week, can Canadians please talk about land instead of housing?
(canadiandimension.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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Really great article. One point I particularly love:
There is no place for leeches in housing.
I liked that bit, but the argument that most resonated with me is that property taxes disincentivize development, but land value taxes encourage density.
Rosedale, the wealthy single-family-homes community with massive lots close to downtown Toronto, should not exist. It's insane. A single person should not reasonably be able to afford to own an acre of land close to an urban core. That whole neighbourhood wouldn't exist if land value taxes had slowly increased over the last century.
I think we need a 10-20 year plan to shift from property taxes to land-value taxes, at maybe 5% a year. Give the market enough time to respond, to buy up and develop the land.
Throw in minimum mixed zoning requirements to get commercial spaces embedded in the new communities, too, while you're at it, so we can actually get some walkability.
So I'm a leech because I bought a single family house?
If you or your family live in it, no. If you're renting it out to someone or flipping it for profit, absolutely yes.
If they are living in it, they are benefiting from massive subsidies toward the suburban development pattern despite the fact that it is known to be financially unsustainable. Essentially tax dollars are being funnelled out of the pockets of people who live in more economically efficient housing and are being spent to prop up their suburban lifestyle.
I'm not saying they are complicit, or malicious. But yeah they are leeching value out of the economy by supporting and living in that kind of house.
And yet, we see lots of new suburbia being built while many higher density projects face push back and NIMBYism.
How is that different than any private ownership of anything, and taking the surplus labor of others? Like if you own a store or a mine or a factory. You don’t do shit for the store, your employees do and you steal their surplus labor. Same for a mine, you just own it, and you get money. It’s the same as landlordery, where you own the thing, and people pay you for it.
My house is not a means of production. I don't use my home to produce value, and my landlord is not my employer.
The closest thing a landlord can be is a provider of housing as a service. However, as the article points out, the biggest factor in housing costs is the value of the land it sits on. In this way, landlords aren't providing housing, they're charging for access to valuable land. Land they didn't produce nor make valuable. The community around that land has made it valuable.
As the community grows, the land becomes more valuable, and the landlord gets to charge more. This never ends. Nothing is being produced besides a better community, and the community is being charged for it.
Capitalism is imperfect, but business owners actually do at least carry some amount of upfront investment and risk. These things are obviously still true in housing (and food production/distribution and healthcare in the US) but they are captive markets. People need a place to live, need to eat, need medicine. This need allows unreasonable extraction of wealth because people can't choose to just not partake.
When building housing, it is often the municipalities that fund the roads, cables, and pipes run to the neighborhood. For this reason, housing developers carry very little risk and have very little incentive to choose a type of housing with long-term economic sustainability. They can pick a development pattern which will cost more to maintain than it will generate in tax revenue for the city and sell it for a massive short-term profit because they only need to care about the housing market, not the infrastructure that supports the housing.
Another piece of evidence! Leeches have many brains but the overall reading & comprehension capability remains remarkably insufficient.
Being facetious here, though. I don't think landlords are leeches, but I do think the government should work hard on bankrupting them as much as possible.
Inefficient and a little hoard-y on land, but not a leech.
Everyone else is saying no, but yes you are.
It's a leach of resources to maintain the utilities to it.
It also prevents its use by other people who also need the land, and who gave anyone the land to start with? Exclusive ownership of land can be seen as the removing access to that land to other people, depriving them of their rights to use the land for survival or improving their condition. You can be OK with this and that's fine, but it doesn't make it untrue. It's just accepted in our society as a matter of how things are, and by those accepting of the status-quo, how things must be.
That seems like a very... capitalistic approach to it. The idea that if someone could improve their situation more with those resources, then you can't be allowed to use it. Zero-sum calculations aren't healthy for anyone. Sometimes there's going to be inefficiency in the system.
Holding resources in excess of what you need to live comfortably is one thing... but just having a home to yourself (and/or your family) is not a horrendous leech on society. Honestly that kind of rhetoric, where you're forced out of your dwelling just in case someone might be able to use it to better themselves, is exactly the kind of thing that vocal critics of communism and socialism claim of it.
I don't know where you're getting the idea of forcing anyone out of housing comes from. The idea is that housing should be available for everyone, and land usage should be to provide for the good of the people, since land is limited. Obviously people still need housing.
Single family housing is a pretty big leech on society though, regardless of your stance. That's what this post is about. As well as costing more for utilities, it takes more space and creates more traffic. It isn't a good thing.
(By the way, Proudhon is an Anarchist, not a Communist or Socialist, though they share many of the same philosophies, and I think is better.)