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The law which says "Don't be a wise-ass." Or, more formally, the legal principle which says that laws should be construed so as to do justice.
Which law would that be?
There is a reason that the US constitution is about 4500 words instead of just
All elections shall be free and equal.
Laws should be construed so as to do justice.
The point of having fine-grained, specific laws is that "the judge already knows what outcome is just, and will just reach for some law to justify it" is a terrible procedure. It gets you decisions like Roe v Wade, where reproductive freedom hangs on a very shaky legal decision until some later SCOTUS takes the common sense approach that the amendments did not mention abortion at all.
Nobody sane would campaign for the biggest employer in some town also getting a single vote, because that would not change anything -- they clearly have a vested interest in the local politics, and can trivially spend money on donations or campaigns on a scale which will give them a lot more influence than a single vote ever could.
"One man, one vote" is a very simple Schelling point. There is always some quibbling over details, and we end up at something like "one adult, non-felon citizen of any gender whose primary residency is registered in the municipality at the reference date", with the voting rights of alien permanent residents being up for debate.
It is also somewhat robust, because people are very expensive. Sure, a company could just pay politically sympathetic people to settle in their town, but they might spend northwards of 100k$ per vote that way, so it is much cheaper to just pay bribes to the voters already there.
By contrast, corporate entities are very cheap to create and maintain -- Delaware LLCs pay 300$ in taxes a year. So @birb_cromble's question is exactly the right one: how does this scale?
Even if there is a limit to one corporate vote per property lot, that would still leave a lot of loopholes. A family living in their own house might decide to form a holding company which leases their home back to them for a dollar a year, then cast that company's vote. Landlords would wield a lot of votes. (Seriously, who looks at the present system and says "the problem with that is that landlords have too little political power"?)
There is a reason that the US is not organized as a stock company, where everyone starts out with one share and the federal government can simply emit more stocks to raise funds, and voting power is simply the amount of shares you own. This would lead to the effective disenfranchisement of the majority. At least in a democracy, the 1% will have to spend money on campaigns to get the 99% to vote for them, and different 1%ers might be competing with different political visions rather than just their budgets.
That would be me. Renters protections are excessive. Rent control is destructive and sadly becoming more common.
Landlord freedom combined with a liberalization of zoning / planning rules would solve the housing cost situation. The former without the latter wouldn’t do much. To harness greed you need to allow people to do business, which in residential construction means making it cheap and fast to build. Capitalism can take care of the rest.
I tend to disagree with this. Even before the 'Rona, it was significantly cheaper and easier to rent commercial real estate in Manhattan compared to residential real estate. Logically, it seems likely that a big part of the reason for this discrepancy is that commercial tenants have far fewer rights than residential tenants.
I do agree that from the perspective of overall housing cost, relaxed zoning would tend to help.
Even before WFH commercial real estate, particularly office real estate, has the ‘pressure valve’ of a move to the suburbs. Sure, Goldman Sachs isn’t going to relocate its trading floor and Vogue isn’t going to relocate its editorial team to Long Island or Jersey City, but the marginal finance or law firm back office, mid level accounting firm, healthcare provider, insurance company, tech firm, state or municipal (or federal) government office, or medium to large sized corporate headquarters can move out to either Jersey or LI city, or to one of the countless super cheap strip mall offices all around the further reaches of the outer boroughs and the more distant suburbs that are still within commuting and driving distance. This limits price increases for office space in Manhattan to some extent. Many employees may even already live nearer these places and so support this kind of move.
By contrast the residential real estate dynamics are different because of zoning. A lot of housing around cheap suburban office parks on Long Island is super expensive because it’s single family zoned for wealthy PMC in the burbs of one of the richest cities in the world. There’s also far greater sentimentality attached to residential real estate by residents obviously.
Goldman Sachs in fact did relocate a lot of its less-prestigious jobs to Jersey City.
There's plenty of dense-zoned land on the New Jersey side. Even the more desirable stuff (Hoboken, Paulus Hook, Grove Street, Weehawken) is far less desirable than Manhattan or close-in parts of Brooklyn and Queens, possibly because young single women simply won't cross the Hudson for any reason. The less desirable stuff is less desirable for the usual reasons.
There isn’t really comparable real estate. I went to visit some friends recently and their quintessential rich northern suburb town had (after years of legal issues preceding construction) a new generic apartment building with probably a few dozen units. A) The prices were still very high, maybe 20-30% below semi-prime Manhattan and like half ultra-prime like the West Village for a generic modern apartment and B) this is in a small town where you realistically need a car, have limited amenities, and lack any of the real advantages of living in the outer suburbs like a big backyard, garage, lots of space. If you want those you’re out $2m, probably more in the same place.
If you’re going to live in an apartment you may as well live in NYC, even if it’s somewhat more expensive, whereas companies are more keen for many reasons to shift operations to the suburbs. This building, if I had to guess, was mainly occupied by nurses, medical residents and other moderately-but-not-very highly paid jobs that were actually based locally, or indeed by people who work at IBM HQ which is probably the iconic example of a big northern suburban NY employer.
It’s also one thing to live in a shoebox apartment when most of the people around you do too, it’s another to do so when everyone else is enjoying their expansive suburban lifestyle.
I mentioned several areas with comparable real estate (parts of Jersey City, Hoboken, Weehawken) -- these are not small towns where you need a car, they are dense cities. As for the outer suburbs, they're not $2M you can get that for $1M easy; my own house in an Essex County suburb is probably $750K.
Suburban Westchester is another story, not only is it more expensive but it has the whole of Upper Manhattan, the Bronx, and Yonkers (technically in Westchester) between it and the commercial centers of Manhattan.
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