First of all, that would only apply to companies with a build-and-hold business model, not to ones that develop a property and then sell it off to owner-occupants. Clearly, there do exist people who want to be owner-occupants, so the real issue is how to construct the regulations etc. to incentivize the latter business model.

fair point. i had completely not considered that. especially as we were discussing blackrock which is a buy-and-hold business model.

Also what i find very interesting about this topic is how demographics plays into this

i personally think that the UN predictions about how the population numbers are going to evolve are utter bullshit. it is well known that the population pyramid looks something like this:

and it’s going to get thinner and thinner at the bottom as time progresses.

anyways, i think a lot of organizations that could build housing are a bit reluctant mostly for that reason. a company thinks “if i build a house today, there’s a good chance that there won’t be demand for that house in 30 years, so it might not pay off”. and municipalities, i’m afraid, are way too under-invested in building social housing in general because that would be communism or sth.

after a quick search on the internet, about 1.6 million people live in public housing in the US in 2024. that’s about 0.5 percent. Source

Meanwhile in Europe, about 9.3% (45 million people) people live in public housing according to this article, with some countries like Austria having 24%. (8% of EU according to this OECD study).

yeah the UK is going downhill very quickly and it’s evident in how nervously they respond to that saying.

i indeed only found out about that rn

But you seem like a refreshingly normal person rather than one of the ideologically motivated internet cold warriors

hehe thanks, i try to be.

i mean yeah, literally, look at how the Iranian regime is allowed to post its anti-US propaganda lego movies on Twitter.

edit: nvm that was a bad take.

i’m literally advocating for higher housing creation. i specifically stated

governments all around the world have the liberty and possibility to build houses and rent them out to people at-cost. Like, your city can do that. Where do you live? Seattle? Have you considered looking into how many houses the city of seattle has built in the last 20 years? And how many of them it rents out to people for cheap?

Which is as direct a request of municipalities to build social housing as it can be. I don’t get how people interpret that as “corpo dick sucking”?!?

seizing wealth/companies from billionaires has a name and it’s called wealth tax. i’m saying this again and again because people keep demanding that we take billionaire’s wealth (which i can agree with) but then as soon as somebody utters “wealth tax”, everybody immediately says how that’s not a solution or sth. it is the solution. it is exactly “seize the means of production”. that’s literally what it is.

china gets shit on because they don’t have political freedom; there’s no stuff like “you can speak your mind as long as you’re respectful”. it’s just one committee making all the decisions and you can go to jail for disagreeing.

the problem with that is that it effectively creates a circle of yes-men around a central figure, which is very very bad. every sane government allows at least respectful disagreement and dialogue with critics because it’s an important tool to stay on track and sane long-term. critics can often have valid points and keep an empire from making a grave mistake.

that being said, china did a lot for its citizens and deserves more recognition. especially that they invested in solar energy is a stellar example of good long-term thinking and the advantages that central planning can have.

so what you’re saying is that market manipulation (= monopolies) is the problem, not companies owning houses?

10% of houses being unoccupied sounds like a lot to me. I would guess that a maximum of 3% would be a healthy amount.

I wonder, how do companies actually make money from owning houses that they don’t use? If you are a company, how do you get more dollars per year from a house that’s empty than one that is occupied and giving you rent?

Let’s make an example. Rent let’s say is $1000/month, which is $12k per year. How do you make $12k per year from owning a house without renting it out?

Plenty of housing are sitting empty or underoccupied right now because of speculation.

do you have data?

Edit: do you people not understand that your attitudes play right into the hands of the private equity oligarchs? Y’all are literally defending authoritarian laws that distort the market in their favor.

no, unfortunately people don’t seem to get that. there’s a serious shortage of mathematics and statistics skill in the average lemmy user. i think to actually improve the world one must study mathematics and use it to properly interpret the data about our world that we need to understand and handle it. which i hope somebody does more of. In fact it would be nice to see more lemmy posts about this.

this whole thing just doesn’t add up in my head.

people will bash blackrock for owning houses but really, what is actually happening here?

governments all around the world have the liberty and possibility to build houses and rent them out to people at-cost. Like, your city can do that. Where do you live? Seattle? Have you considered looking into how many houses the city of seattle has built in the last 20 years? And how many of them it rents out to people for cheap?

You can’t ban corporate houses if there’s no alternative. There needs to be an alternative first, otherwise you’re just creating a vacuum, and as the proverb goes, a vacuum always sucks.

The only way to do this is if meaningful alternatives exist first.

you can’t ban corporate-owned social media because the population would revolt. It’s already revolting when social media is about to be banned for teenagers. just ask anyone on lemmy about this.

the fediverse needs to become an acceptable alternative first, only after that can people move away from big corpo-owned networks.

believe it or not, that’s exactly what a wealth tax would do.

Take away the kids access to communicate with friends and what the fuck do they have left? It’s not like we have youth centers or shit any more. Barely had any when I was a kid;

well, i grew up in the countryside and we did have youth centers. i can guarantee you i made a wide circle around them, in the sense that i avoided them like the plague

it’s not the absence of youth centers that’s the problem, it’s the fact that i grew up in a very backwards rural countryside full of the exact type of shitheads that you would expect to find there. one person more annoying than the next, the excesses in alcohol consumption weren’t the worst part, it was how people looked at people who didn’t fit their definition of “normal”. really not a good place to be.

well i get your point that people are stupid and unreasonable, but i learned to look at it like that:

most people are experimental physicists and just need to try things out no matter how stupid these things are, because only from the experimental outcome will people learn. so it’s not for nothing; it just takes a frustratingly long time for things to change.

i’m really sorry, hearing your situation makes it sound quite difficult. the world should be a better place but what can we do to make it one?