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Comment by zamfi | Hacker News Reader

> By being a land lord, you are preventing people from buying and building equity. Instead their hard earned money goes right into your pocket.

What? This is like arguing that someone who owns a car and is a taxi driver is “preventing people from buying” and “instead their hard earned money goes right into your pocket”.

One person being a landlord does nothing to prevent others from owning property. Housing is no more a scarce resource than cars are. Or, at least, that would be true if the US weren’t covered in laws preventing new housing. There’s your actual bogeyman.

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> One person being a landlord does nothing to prevent others from owning property.

In the sense that land ownership is zero sum, yes it does.

> Housing is no more a scarce resource than cars are.

That’s simply not true. In any given market, there’s a limited supply of housing, and it’s much more inelastic than the supply of cars.

> Or, at least, that would be true if the US weren’t covered in laws preventing new housing. There’s your actual bogeyman.

Who do you think is lobbying for these laws? I’ll give you a hint: it’s the people whose property gains value if there’s less to go around.

> In the sense that land ownership is zero sum, yes it does. Blame that on zoning laws + People moving into big cities. Just supply and demand, At least in Urban areas with that problem .

> That’s simply not true. In any given market, there’s a limited supply of housing, and it’s much more inelastic than the supply of cars

Is that the fault of humans wanting to live in close proximity with other humans? maybe, there is an ample amount of land anywhere between cities with an inelastic supply of housing.

> Who do you think is lobbying for these laws? I’ll give you a hint: it’s the people whose property gains value if there’s less to go around.

Moloch is a problem.

it's not zero sum. people are dumb unfortunately and that makes building new housing hard nowadays.

but it's not a human universal. incentives matter, look at China, for example.

in the US renters outnumber landlords in many cities, yet they too mostly voted for stagnation.

Oh if only you were right — plenty of renters also vote to maintain zoning, fearing that their neighborhoods will otherwise change for the worse, and rent control guarantees they can’t afford to move.

Sure, land is limited. But housing is not 1:1 with land! Housing supply is inelastic, but population growth is also slow, and it’s absolutely not a lack of construction capacity that prevents new housing. It’s inelastic because our laws make it so.

The folks lobbying for these laws are interest groups like any other. The problem is they’ve also suckered too many others in to the belief system that neighborhoods must never change or grow.

Land ownership is not the constraint to housing that you think it is.

I can buy thousands of square meters of land that is physically able to support housing for a negligible amount of money.

The land is useless to me because construction is expensive (as a result of regulatory requirements) and I'm not legally allowed to build there (also due to regulatory requirements).

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