this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
61 points (100.0% liked)
US News
2063 readers
21 users here now
News from within the empire - From a leftist perspective
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Artificial scarcity isn't real in the housing market
There has never been more houses to workers in the US than ever before, supply and demand is hardly a factor in the price of ground rents, those are directly tied into Imperialism's health.
Corporate investors cannot raise prices above the whole market, and if they do, all homeowners (the majority of which are "proletarians") benefit the same, so they all engage in price raising politics.
Housing prices == rents and vice versa. If housing prices collapse so will rents, because they are the same thing. As long as someone or something is able to purchase at an ever increasing price, housing costs will continue to rise.
This battle over purchasing houses, is between the petty Bourgeoisie and the haute Bourgeoisie. The only difference between mortgaging out and paying rent is whether a so-called worker can profit from their investment in years time, it's a class transition into the petty Bourgeoisie. You can look at historical charts that the price differences for renting vs loans is most often favorable towards renting, but the differences are slight.
These are also SINGLE FAMILY HOMES, 15% are rented out, 4% of those are rented out by corporations, so 0.6% of all SFH are owned to rent by corps, that 0.6% of landlords is raising the prices of all homes country wide? Besides, SFH should be for the most part destroyed for climate reasons when Socialism comes.
this is all correct. US homeowners bear more blame than corporate investors for the current environment. my point is that, given that housing prices == rents and people need housing to be able to live and work, anyone who doesn't already own their primary residence (presumably with a locked in 3% interest rate forever) is going to be priced out of being alive before prices could theoretically get high enough to destabilize profitability.
I probably used the wrong term when I said "artificial scarcity". I know more housing exists than people. what's kept artificially scarce is housing that is sold/rented for prices that can be afforded by most people on the wages paid by most jobs. Bourgeois economists describe this as a problem of "overconsumption" as though minimum wage workers have the option of "reducing their consumption" of things like housing or medical care below the minimum required to be able to continue working.
agreed
This is all cool and big brained theory crafting and what not but I currently live in a 150 square foot shack and just want to
I think more and more people are going to start thinking like this and it is our duty as communists to guide them to the correct conclusions. 
Oh, believe me, my urge to
increases as the impeding size of my shack decreases. As an ML I know the extremely limited systemic utility of individual 
, but it's tough to see a better solution when the people around me in real life are maybe 60% 
, 39% 
, and 1% 
one luigi is adventurism. A thousand luigis is a revolution