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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.
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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