this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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For one week, can Canadians please talk about land instead of housing? (canadiandimension.com)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

How is that different than any private ownership of anything, and taking the surplus labor of others? Like if you own a store or a mine or a factory. You don’t do shit for the store, your employees do and you steal their surplus labor. Same for a mine, you just own it, and you get money. It’s the same as landlordery, where you own the thing, and people pay you for it.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago

How is that different than any private ownership of anything, and taking the surplus labor of others?

My house is not a means of production. I don't use my home to produce value, and my landlord is not my employer.

The closest thing a landlord can be is a provider of housing as a service. However, as the article points out, the biggest factor in housing costs is the value of the land it sits on. In this way, landlords aren't providing housing, they're charging for access to valuable land. Land they didn't produce nor make valuable. The community around that land has made it valuable.

As the community grows, the land becomes more valuable, and the landlord gets to charge more. This never ends. Nothing is being produced besides a better community, and the community is being charged for it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Capitalism is imperfect, but business owners actually do at least carry some amount of upfront investment and risk. These things are obviously still true in housing (and food production/distribution and healthcare in the US) but they are captive markets. People need a place to live, need to eat, need medicine. This need allows unreasonable extraction of wealth because people can't choose to just not partake.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

When building housing, it is often the municipalities that fund the roads, cables, and pipes run to the neighborhood. For this reason, housing developers carry very little risk and have very little incentive to choose a type of housing with long-term economic sustainability. They can pick a development pattern which will cost more to maintain than it will generate in tax revenue for the city and sell it for a massive short-term profit because they only need to care about the housing market, not the infrastructure that supports the housing.