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America isn't poor. America is expensive. At minimum wage, you're already richer than the median individual in a European country.
Poverty is easier to eradicate than many other social-ills, because poverty is tangible. Food, shelter, and clothing.
At face value, costs for all 3 are relatively consistent across economies with different purchasing powers. The US as fairly cheap groceries1 for a developed economy) and fast fashion costs the same around the world.
Shelter too is cheap. The US has the most abundant land and houses can be purchased pre-assembled from home-depot to mitigate labor costs.
Wait NO. Shelter isn't cheap.......which brings me to what's the central cause of poverty in this nation : Landlords.
Hearing people talk causes of poverty is like hearing about medieval crimes of "Raping and Pillaging". Yeah no, if you were raping, then no one really cares if you also pillaged after. Combining them into a phrase, almost makes raping sound acceptable.
Don't run away from the uncomfortable single group to blame for this. Let's stop caring about 'landlords AND'. Instead let's focus on the landlords themselves. Some landlords are also middle-class salary-men and sometimes they are an investment company like Blackrock, but their secondary identity is irrelevant. When they are a landlord, they are all the same. Landlords the worst kind of burden on the economy. They get paid for hoarding and running what's effectively an extortion racket by limiting where you can build in this country : "pay me whatever I charge, or go homeless. No, you can't manufacture the commodity by yourself." Economically-productive renters lose all purchasing power, and landlords are effectively out of the labor force as they sit on top of feudal-dues extracted from their little 2-bedroom colony. Communists have the worst solutions, but no one points out problems quite as well as a Communist.
The housing extortion racket only works when housing is limited. Let people build and you'll see poverty drop like we've never seen before.
Nothing is entirely monocausal, so I'll do a quick rundown of secondary needs of poor people, how they are and aren't met. (or the pillaging section, as I'd call it)
Bad infrastructure = highways only = cars are needs = At least $5k+ $400/month-per-person just to live life vs 100$/month for top-tier subway systems. That's a lot of extra money for poor people.
Schools - are free
Hospitals - This is a big one, but a bigger topic for another day. (tl;dr - Doctors are evil.)
Safety - American small towns are remarkably safe. The lack of safety seems localized to certain communities, than tied poverty as a whole.
Wifi ? - Wifi is cheap enough
Employment - Unemployment is so low in the US, that the fed can't get people to lose jobs even as it tries its hardest.
Building more housing is the obvious and easy solution, but people hate new dense housing being constructed in their area.
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If landlording is evil and should be eliminated where do you propose people who can't afford a down payment on a mortgage live?
Landlords are evil because the system enables them to be evil. The profession will still exist. But transition to a service profession. Similar to agents who manage properties for people.
If housing stops being an asset, it becomes a commodity. People who manage commodities still exist.
You haven’t actually answered the question.
What do you propose people who can’t or don’t want to buy a house/condo should live in? I suspect if we go far back enough whoever you got this argument for will say ‘we should socialize unoccupied housing and grant it to poor people’, the answer to which is ‘yeah, you can do that, but they’ll destroy it and the bureaucrats in charge will be utterly unprepared for that’, and that’s before the second order economic effects become a big deal much faster than you probably suspect.
Speaking as an ex bureaucrat who did indeed deal with social housing, why would we be unprepared for that? Damage to property from public tenants though social housing stock is entirely predictable and we would indeed budget for that. You can even then employ your own government contractors to fix said stock.
You can argue about how much it costs or whether it passes cost-benefit analysis but why would you think government bureaucrats will be unprepared for it? Government bureaucrats deal with the public a lot, they're second only to police in how jaded we can get about how people act.
Because the people who are demanding the process in the first place are doing so based on ideology, and their ideology deemphasizes any costs created by the poor, and specifically costs created by bad tenants. So nobody will be prepared for those costs.
And the people demanding stuff of bureaucrats can and have oscillated between literal capitalist privatizers and literal socialists. Doesn't mean your bureaucrats who deal with with where the rubber meets the road will be unprepared. They might not get a budget for it of course but thats not the same thing. Thats just business as usual.
Don't confuse ideology for competence. Anyone with experience maintaining housing stock will know that lesson.
And will probably have a notarized memo in triplicate of exactly when they raised that point to elected member number 94. Most career bureaucrats everywhere in my experience from communist Russia to the USA, the UK, China, and more are not very ideological as much as they are disillusioned with the public.
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I guess I'm confused, what is different between landlords and normal homeowners here? The incentive gradient is the same. The landlord is providing a necesary service, I find it difficult to call that evil. The case would make more sense if scoped to the individuals actually lobbying to keep housing stock low.
I think we single-family homeowners count as lords of our own land also. Along with everyone else who doesn't want to live in an anthill.
Condo owners as well. Why alienate your allies like this?
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This seems like it's pretty badly underrating how bad pillaging actually is. Destroying the wealth of a city can easily have effects that are effectively permanent. When I look at something like the sack of Athens in 267 and the fallout from it, it's the raping that seems like the footnote rather than the pillaging.
Yes, pillaging isn't that bad is something you could only think if you have never had to worry about starvation.
I was actually just reading Brett Devereux's posts on how pre-railroad armies managed logistics, and he made the point repeatedly that there were many cases where peasants starved to death because foraging armies would steal literally everything they could, especially if they were enemies who might even plan on ruling the land. I honestly recommend people read his world-building series to get an understanding of just how much media about medieval times and their wars is straight up anachronistic and hides the brutal reality of pre-railroad wars.
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Doctors are evil and landlords have uniform behavior?
Fair enough.
At this point every new-urbanist has made so many videos about this, that I thought the point was obvious enough. 1 2
The current incentives force landlords to behave the way they do. If I was a landlord, I'd be a selfish dick too. Afterall, the system actively promotes it.
Full disclosure, I am still working on this thought right how. Not entirely sure if I believe it myself or I am trying to be transgressive for the sake of being transgressive.
But my underdeveloped argument goes as follows:
Programmers are idiots
Status and wealth of a profession is tied to limiting access
Doctors by and large populate all medically relevant structures - from hospitals, to NIH, to Medical university depts, to Govt. health secretary roles
They have made no effort to make it easier to be a doctor
Introducing AI / tech / new ideas / pathways to be a doctor are limited, not because it keeps medicine safer, but because it keeps doctors a rare commodity
GPT-4 is already a better doctor than most
Lawyers are very similar, but they conceded control on the university side of things, and their profession has lost a lot of prestige and wealth since
Programmers are idiots, we make ourselves obsolete, we make it easy to access our profession, we don't gatekeep and then wonder why it is so competitive
Doctors are evil, doctors are effective at extracting all value from their profession, even if it means worse healthcare
Be like doctors.
Selfless people are idiots
Being selfless has not seemed to have been a bad play for developers so far. The more we try to automate away our jobs the larger the force multiplier one Developer can make and the higher we're paid. Yeah, maybe eventually this virtuous spiral runs out of runway and the last programmer hands the keys to gpt to business people but we've been trying and failing to replace ourselves for decades and the pay just keeps going up.
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So if current landlords are so bad, what's to keep anyone from undercutting them? If you're seriously suggesting co-ordination among all the landlords all the way from Blackrock to your middle-class salaryman, I'm not going to believe you.
Well, no, if you're poor enough, the pillaging might well be worse than the raping. Pretty much nobody in modern America is that poor, fortunately.
Idiotic building and planning regulations. At least here in the UK.
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Why do you think Blackrock keeps buying every open lot with somewhat permissive zoning and converting it into apartment buildings. This is them trying to undercut the SFH mafia. However, it is in their interest for zoning laws to not get tooo permissive. Because they would suddenly have to be competitive, instead of just being marginally better than a SFH landlord.
As of now, it is illegal to build in most parts of the US. The US has only 1 dense city and that's Manhattan. Include the 5 boroughs, and NYC is remarkably underbuilt for its demand. Who controls if building is legal ? -> the landlords for that locale. (It is not that simple, but I'm skipping over a lot of nuance to make my tl;dr point). That's why I call it a colonial extraction racket.
Yep.
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You can't just build a house you need approval from the local government to construct housing. Planning departments aren't approving housing construction or density increases that would allow rent to be undercut. There's market power in offering housing for rent, and the planning department enforces it.
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Natural monopoly. If everyone around them lowered their prices, they increase their market share. If you're one landlord out of 100 in the middle of a city and there are 100 families in need of housing, it doesn't matter if 99 of them cut their prices... that 100th family is still going to pay you.
No, the 100th family is just going to move somewhere else.
You are using terms originating from economic theory, but you have an apparent lack of understanding what these terms mean, given that you describe reality which simply does not exist.
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Natural monopoly.... in a market that includes everyone from Blackrock to middle-class salarymen? There's at least hundreds of thousands of landlords in NYC alone. There's no monopoly at all, let alone a natural one.
Sure, I'm off on my terminology. Here's what I mean by the problem, maybe you can help me put it into economic terms:
If you and I share the market of soda evenly, and I price mine too high, you can double your production and take all my business. You can't really do that with land.
ETA: just want to acknowledge that yes, it was dumb to use an obviously technical term in a made-up way. My use of the terms I think is like this: It is a "monopoly" in that others are prevented from entering the market, and it is "natural" in that the barrier to entry is the fixed supply/location of land.
I think your just trying to talk about the idea of land "rent" in the formal theoretical sense of rent. Monopolists also have rents similar theoretically to land rents.
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There's no special economic term for this situation.
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