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Comment by monkeywork | Hacker News Reader

>Landowners are as a rule completely worthless

That's funny seems to me that without them we would have a LOT of homeless people. They have an asset and allow others to use it for a fee.... banks do the same thing, they have liquid capital they offer to others for a fee... would you say that banks as a rule are completely worthless?

If we are talking about a fantasy utopia where 250-300 families who don't know each other are all going to gather together and put funds together to build an apartment complex in a major city and run it like a co-op then continue to live in fantasy land because that rarely if ever is the case.

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You don't have government funded housing projects (eg housing associations in your country)?

Community built housing can work well if there's the political will to make it work.

Why do you think we'd have a lot of homeless people, if people couldn't own more land individually than they needed then there wouldn't be a lack of affordable land.

My house 20 years ago was 4x my salary. As it happens I recently started the exact same job, at the same grade. The wage is better compared to the job market than it was before, the house is now 5-6 times the salary (modernised 6-8x, based on several sales in our street last year).

It is difficult, because you have to stop rich people from leveraging their power to feed their greed, which means you need politicians who don't just mindlessly do what rich people pay them for.

Gov funded housing projects exist yes - are they majority of the construction .. not even close.

The problem isn't cost of housing it's that income hasn't grown at same rate.

>would you say that banks as a rule are completely worthless?

OP didn't talk about banks, and I'm not sure the comparison is even valid.

As for your second paragraph. This is a possibility. Why don't we do this? That seems like a good business opportunity. Someone to organize the coop, provide startup investment, and receive a fee for x# of years afterward. Like a mortgage, but for coops, requiring coop rules and regulations for everyone involved. That seems interesting.

Sounds a lot like a condo?

you mean like a condo that only exists because the contractor KNOWS it will sell all it's units, and the reason they know it is because rental companies buy in bulk.

Hmm. Yep. Exactly like a condo. For context - I live in rural America, and have virtually no concept of how condos run. After googling -

Are they really collective? Like, everyone for the greater good collective, or everyone for that one pissed off old man who wants to run the HOA collective?

And do you actually own the condo at the end, or is it just rent?

I like when I am ignorant of something! Learning!!

> That's funny seems to me that without them we would have a LOT of homeless people.

No you wouldn't because the real estate market would adjust to the lack of landlords. Current prices are the result of the current economic system. If landlords never existed, home-builders and banks would figure out a way to make sure people are paying them to have a home.

> That's funny seems to me that without them we would have a LOT of homeless people.

We have a LOT of homeless people. So...

Though it's true we’d have a lot more if we didn't have the small landowners (i.e., those who are homeowners but not landlords.)

It's only the larger landowners that are useless.

> They have an asset and allow others to use it for a fee....

Yes, them having the asset is a cause of homelessness. Them allowing others to use it may be a mitigation of the problem, but so would the user simply having the asset. Or the asset being held in common and allocated. Or...

>Yes, them having the asset is a cause of homelessness

you should really look into what the cause of homelessness is. generally it has a lot more to do with economic issues, addiction issues, etc than it has to do with someone else owning property.

>Or the asset being held in common and allocated.

Ya that worked out super well in the past letting the ruling class own all the land and everyone else worked it...

> generally it has a lot more to do with economic issues,

Distribution of ownership of real property is an “economic issue”, and one intimately linked to homelessness.

> Ya that worked out super well in the past letting the ruling class own all the land and everyone else worked it..

Common ownership of land is not the same thing as letting the ruling class (e.g., the nobility in feudalism or the bourgeoisie in capitalism) own all the land.

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