Are the three events exactly the same? No, of course they’re not. But that doesn’t mean the similarity isn’t interesting….
AngryBrownButch, in a post about gentrification, quotes a interview with a fashionable New Yorker she heard on the radio:
Q: Now, why do you think a neighborhood suddenly takes off like that?
Melena Ryzik: Well, it starts with the low rents. That’s the key thing –
Q: Big spaces and low rents.
MR: Exactly, exactly. And of course I think there’s also the idea for New Yorkers that you want to be the first person to discover something, so there’s a certain cache in having been maybe the first person or the first set of people living over on the Meatpacking district side of things.
# # #
Dodosville on how Europeans settled America:
In case the Europeans weren’t totally convinced that it was OK to take people’s land by force because they didn’t believe in the Christian God, Europeans also decided to redefine what it meant to “occupy” land in legal terms. This justification was probably for some of the more intellectual Europeans as it was a less crude justification than they are heathens, do what you want to them. So the monarchs, clergymen and scholars if Europe got together and said, well, yeah those people are living on the land, but they aren’t really using the land in the way that’s intended. Civilized people built settlements, planted food in the ground, had cattle and other livestock, chopped down forests in the name of progress, and tried to grow as big as they could. The Indians of the Americas weren’t doing that, well, except for the Inca and the Aztec whose settlements were bigger than most in Europe, but we’re not talking about those people – we’re talking about the hunter/gatherers who live in small tribes – those guys weren’t using the land right and it was an affront to nature and God’s plan that people used it in that way. So since they weren’t using the land the way it was meant to be used, it was terres nullus, or empty land, and everybody has the right to take empty land, by force if you have to. It was just what had to be done – it’s the natural order and all those things.
# # #
From a 1982 article in The Link, by Muhammad Hallaj:
The Zionists’ need to convince the world that their scheme victimized no one required them to maintain the delusion that Palestine was a land without people. When they sought Gandhi’s endorsement of Zionism, their emissary brazenly asserted to him that “Palestine itself was a waste space when we went there… No one else wanted it.” Even after the Zionists created their Jewish state they continued to insist that the Palestinians did not exist. “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them,” Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister, said after the 1967 war. “They did not exist.“
Edited to add: I’ve added bolds to the quotes to emphasize what I was intrigued by: the tendency, in all three situations, to talk about the land as if it were empty and unused. As should be obvious, by noting this similarity I am not saying that the three situations are alike in all other ways.
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Oh darn. I didn’t know Alas was anti-Zionist. I’m very disappointed.
Kai, why are you disappointed by that?
What difference does skin color make?
With the exception of some Pacific islands which are still inhabited by the Polynesians who discovered and settled them, every acre of land on earth is stolen property, drenched in the blood of the people who were slaughtered to take it.
White people just had the bad taste to be slow out of the historical starting blocks, and to do their slaughtering in an era where memory and history better record it.
In reading the “gentrification” posts, I pick out a common thread; that a neighborhood belongs to the residents. Certainly the culture of a neighborhood belongs to the residents, but the buildings belong to their owners, whose major interests are making as much money as they can within the law. They have every right to bump up their rents past the point that the current residents can afford it if they can find new tenants that will pay the new rents. They also have every right to sell out to rich yuppies that want to spend the next few years renovating the properties.
We live in a capitalist society. Things belong to the owners. When the owners rent out things to users, this does not transfer ownership to the users, even if the users perceive that it has. Of course, folks will say that this is an evil of capitalism, but the alternatives will lead to the degradation of the things because, lacking full rights to ownership, the owners will no longer have adequate incentive to keep the things maintained. State ownership and operation of housing also (IMNSHO) depresses the incentive of the tenants to better their status though husbanding their resources and getting an education/working harder/etc. so that they can better their own situation and become able to afford better housing.
Harlem does not belong to black people anymore than it belonged to white people before blacks moved in. Yes, there is very rich history there, and that part of ith worthy of celebration should be celebrated. But that history does not supercede property rights, nor should it. These things move in cycles, and it’s foolish to try to interrupt them.
BTW, let’s not forget the history of some of these neighborhoods. One reason that such neighborhoods are attractive to the yuppie renovators is due to the solid construction of the buildings and the use of materials (stone, hardwood floors, ornamentation) and workmanship in their original construction that are extremely costly to use in new construction. And the reason why those materials and workmanship are present and why the buildings are solidly constructed is because at the time the people who built these buildings had money. In a lot of cases, it’s less accurate to say “this neighborhood is changing from poor people to rich people” than to say “this neighborhood is changing from poor people back to rich people.” If rich –> poor was O.K., why not poor –> rich?
I’ve recently read 1491. I had already known that the Native American population in large areas of New England were laid waste by European diseases, but I didn’t realize just how widespread it was, or that it was something that spread thoughout both continents repeatedly.
The truth of what Robert says is clear as well. Once one tribe slaughters another to take over the space it lived in, what difference in justification does it make whether or not the next tribe to have done so came from 10 miles away or 6000, or what their ancestry was? I’d propose that there were very few locations in the U.S. or elsewhere that was occupied by it’s initial settlers when the Europeans showed up.
Robert & RonF
With the exception of some Pacific islands which are still inhabited by the Polynesians who discovered and settled them, every acre of land on earth is stolen property, drenched in the blood of the people who were slaughtered to take it.
This is 100% correct. Now, just for fun, let’s hear your arguments against the morality of taxing land rents at the highest sustainable rates and distributing the proceeds equally among all.
Equally among all of whom?
Sooo… what’s your explanation for why it’s okay to say that white people would be the “first” to live in industrial districts?
Take your pick:
A. Everyone in the world to the extent practicable, or
B. Everyone in the local area, that is, those who are close enough to be reasonably said to be prevented from the use of the land.
If the current owner’s title is traced back to someone who killed a previous occupant to take possession, how does the current owner have a grater moral right to the land than either groups A or B above?
I appreciate the discussion of the colonialist language used in advancing and excusing gentrification. However, I think RonF hit the nail on the head saying that the another important, sometimes overlooked, culprit in gentrification is capitalism. (Though we disagree because he likes capitalism and doesn’t see it as a problem.) Because of this, one of the best ways to fight gentrification is through good renters’ rights laws. Case in point: my father (white old dude) was evicted from the Seattle apartment he’d lived in for 15 years because it was to be turned into condos now that his neighborhood has obscenly gentrified. This exact thing could not legally happen in San Francisco, where I live, because we have laws that would favor an elderly, long term resident, over speculators. Not that SF laws are perfect, or always enforced, but they’re a start.
The most visible areas of gentrification are ones in which one ethnic group is displaced by another, usually white folks, but this is definitely not the only type of gentrification, and focusing only on the racial aspects of it condenses the issue in a way that makes it harder for us to see some of the structural problems that can be fixed. I believe that the most effective tact to take against the displacement or “pricing-out” caused by gentrification is to work for better renter’s rights within cities.
Jack: because I’m pro-Israel. They’re progressive, they give rights no one else in the region does to women and gays, and they’re a patent and research powerhouse (lots of Nobel prizes go to Israelis).
Decnavada:
Asking for arguments against is putting the cart before the horse, isn’t it? What are the arguments for doing this? Also, could you elaborate on what you mean by the “highest sustainable rate?” Is that the peak of the Laffer curve?
Um, I thought the what Robert wrote that I quoted was the argument in favor, but I will try to spell it out even more explicitly, if possible:
1. No one has a moral right to own stuff that was aquired by killing a previous possessor.
2. What I quoted.
3. Therefore, with the possible exception of a few Polynesian islands, no land on Earth is in the hands of someone who has a moral claim to it, or more acurately, a moral claim to deny others the use of it.
4. Therefore, the owners of land must EITHER allow anyone to use “their” land as the others wish, or they must pay the dispossessed (either everyone in the world or everyone who is “reasonably” dispossessed) the Fair Market Value of the land the “owners” are depriving them of.
I honestly thought all of that was obvious.
“The highest sustainable rate” is the maximum amount that someone would be willing to pay to rent the land (FMV rent), or the entirety of the rental income that could be recieved from owning the land, minus the total of the cost to administer the land plus a reasonable Return On Investment from that cost.
Decnavda:
I don’t agree with premise 1. Obviously no one has a moral right to own stuff that he acquired by killing a previous possessor. And you could argue that his heirs don’t have a moral right to own it, either, even after several generations. And I’d probably agree with you on that point.
Where we part company is this idea of yours that if something is stolen once, it’s forever tainted and can never again become private property. Private property is a good thing; we should decide who has the strongest claim to it and say it’s his. Unless, of course, you don’t think that private property is a good thing, in which case you should just say so, because the argument you’re trying to advance doesn’t hold water.
And I think that in most cases people have a pretty strong claim to the land they own. AFAIK, there isn’t much land in the industrialized world that’s been passed down in an unbroken chain of inheritance since the last time it was misappropriated. I’m pretty sure that most of it has been exchanged back and forth at fair market value a number of times since then.
With the original rightful owners of just about all land dead since prehistoric times, it seems pretty clear to me that having paid fair market value for a plot of land constitutes a much stronger claim to it than anyone else has.
Brandon,
Land that wasn’t transferred through inheritance was transferred through sale.
Do sold stolen goods become the legitimate property of the purchaser? If I steal your tv, sell it to a pawn shop, and then Robert buys it, have you lost the right to recover the tv? Have your descendants lost that right if you are unable to recover the tv during your life time? How many sales are required before it becomes legitimate property? Does it matter that people know that the tv was originally stolen?
28 years ago, it was confirmed that most of the land in the state of Maine was transferred from the local tribes to the US under an illegitimate treaty (the treaty was negotiated by the state government, which had no legal right to make treaties with sovereign nations). The state of Maine refused to recognize that this meant that most of the land in Maine still legally belonged to the tribes, but a few years ago, the title companies in Maine declared that the improper treaty was a shadow on all titles in the state and refused to allow the transfer of titles until the treaty issue was settled. The state then negotiated (presumably through Federal intermediaries) a huge compensation agreement with the tribes. Most of Maine was a bunch of stolen tv’s transferred by inheritance and sale for 200 years, and even though the current owners thought that they had legitimate title, they were wrong. The state government intervened to compensate the descendants of the original owners, rather than requiring the return of the stolen lands, but that was for the general convenience, and not because the return could not have been legally required.
That many of the treaties were coerced under threat of war or falsely negotiated does not matter to the legal legitimacy of these treaties (you’d think that falsely negotiated treaties such as the treaty that led to the Trail of Tears and the theft of the Cherokee lands would pose serious legal problems, but no court has treated them as doing so so far), so that is why all land is not legally under the same problem as a stolen tv (or the state of Maine).
Morally is certainly a different story, and morally most land in the US is basically a bunch of very old stolen tv’s.
Mmm, I’d like to take a stab at this,
If rich –> poor was O.K., why not poor –> rich?
Legally, I’ve no arguement. Morally? A large arguement. Because if rich people, who have multiple ways of getting housing because they can afford many different prices displace poorer people because they can’t afford the prices, it forces the poorer people out on the street because there’s nowhere else to go. The richer people could have just chosen to live somewhere else, the poorer people had no such option given to them.
Kai Jones Writes:
The USA is progressive compared to many places in the world. The USA gives rights to women and gays that are greater than those found in many places in the world.
So should it therefore disappoint you that I’d criticize aspects of US history?
I agree with you that there are many things to admire about Israel. But the myth of “a land without a people for a people without a land” is not one of them.
Charles:
Please correct me if I’m getting this wrong, but it seems to me that the argument you and Decnavda are making is (in my words):
Actually, the bit about the land tax is Decnavda’s. I’m not sure what specific remedy you have in mind.
Anyway, here’s a restatement of my argument:
By the way, I’m not sure I approve of the way the law treats stolen property. If the purchaser bought in good faith, either he or the original owner is going to lose out. I suppose there’s an argument to be made that making the purchaser eat the loss creates an incentive to make sure you’re not patronizing dealers of stolen goods, but this argument doesn’t really apply to land. If all land is stolen, then you don’t have the option of buying from reputable dealers, and it’s absurd to expect people to refrain from buying or selling land until the government decides to straighten things out.
So it’s not at all clear that land stolen hundreds or thousands of years ago should be treated the same as a TV stolen last month.
Case in point: my father (white old dude) was evicted from the Seattle apartment he’d lived in for 15 years because it was to be turned into condos now that his neighborhood has obscenly gentrified. This exact thing could not legally happen in San Francisco, where I live, because we have laws that would favor an elderly, long term resident, over speculators.
Have your dad move to San Francisco. Oh, that’s right, he can’t; there’s no housing available for anyone who isn’t rolling in money. When the market works, it can hurt people; when the market is forbidden to work, it hurts more people.
Devnavda:
1. No one has a moral right to own stuff that was aquired by killing a previous possessor.
Do you have a moral right to eat? Most foods are acquired by killing the possessor. For fruits and vegetables, I guess you’re “just” stealing the children of the possessor, and eating them.
I suppose we can limit the scope of our moral theory to humans only. (I’ll leave the epic intra-left battle THAT will start in your capable hands; have fun!)
Limiting it to humans, the statement still doesn’t hold. “Killing” is far too broad. Your tribe invaded my tribe’s territory, but we fought you off. Are we now thieves if we take your weapons and use them to defend our land against the next wave of invaders?
And so forth. The premise is indefensible as stated. (I’m not trying to be deliberately obtuse. You’re making a moral syllogism; the terms have to be correct before you can possibly make sense.)
3. Therefore, with the possible exception of a few Polynesian islands, no land on Earth is in the hands of someone who has a moral claim to it, or more acurately, a moral claim to deny others the use of it.
Even stipulating, for the moment, that you can formulate a #1 that bears casual scrutiny, this doesn’t follow. I didn’t kill anyone for my land; the people I bought the land from bought it from someone else who bought it from someone else (x 50) who killed somebody for it, or drove them off. Yeah, you can’t fence something twice and then have a clear title, but after it’s been fenced 1200 times…at some point, ambiguity becomes lack of knowledge becomes de facto legitimate ownership. Using the US as an example, the original thefts of land happened literally ten thousand years ago – and we have no idea who stole what from whom.
To put it another way, if you really believe that Frank Jones of 123 Fake Street doesn’t have a moral claim on his land because his g-g-g-g-g-g-father stole it from the Iroquois, then you also believe that the Iroquois had not moral claim on it, either – because they sure as hell stole it from someone else. We just don’t know who – it’s too far back, and no records to speak of. Yet most all of us would acknowledge that the native Americans had a moral claim to their land.
4. Therefore, the owners of land must EITHER allow anyone to use “their” land as the others wish, or they must pay the dispossessed (either everyone in the world or everyone who is “reasonably” dispossessed) the Fair Market Value of the land the “owners” are depriving them of.
Nah. Because what’s happened in the interim – in the time between the last violent theft and the present – is that we’ve come up with a different way of handling land transfers. We buy it and sell it, usually, and accept on a near-consensus basis that these latter-day transactions have legitimacy. We do this because it’s a lot better that way; fewer corpses in the street, and all that. So now our moral consultations regarding ownership have to do with – as in Charles’ example – whether the right paperwork got done, whether people got paid correctly, and other commercial questions.
Capitalism – making life better since 1776.
So should it therefore disappoint you that I’d criticize aspects of US history?
No, but it would be disappointing if you were anti-American.
I am anti-American in the sense that I think, in an ideal world, the European colonists who immigrated to this continent would have acted in very different ways, which probably would have put history on some other course that wouldn’t have led to the USA we know today.
I am anti-Zionist in a similar sense.
However, right now both the USA and Israel exist, and history can’t be undone. I would like both the USA and Israel (and pretty much all other countries) to change, but I accept that they exist. So if an “anti-Zionist” means someone who thinks Israel should stop existing, then no, I’m not an anti-Zionist.
Of course, part of the problem here is that the parallel term to “anti-American” isn’t “anti-Zionist,” but “anti-Israel.” The two terms shouldn’t be conflated.
No, I suppose he can’t now, but if he had lived there before he would be able to stay. Gentrification foes aren’t necessarily against the fact that people can’t live anywhere they want to, but are usually against the displacement of long-term residents. For good reason, I might add.
No, I suppose he can’t now, but if he had lived there before he would be able to stay.
Sure. Retrospectively, it’s easy to find the people helped by such laws, impossible to see the much larger group who are harmed.
Gentrification foes aren’t necessarily against the fact that people can’t live anywhere they want to, but are usually against the displacement of long-term residents.
…And completely blind to the fact that when the displacement does occur, the laws favored by the gentrification opponents are the main reason that there isn’t anywhere else to go.
It would be really nice if we could all lock in the price levels and economic realities of a particular favorable time for the rest of our lives. But creating privileges like that is of necessity going to be restricted to small groups. We can’t stop time for everybody.
With rental agreements, it’s generally understood that the landlord is not required to offer you the chance to renew your lease at any particular price, or even at all. If you’re worried about being priced out due to gentrification, and feel that moving would be an intolerable burden, your best option is to buy a home, which gives you a legal right to remain in it for as long as you continue to make a fixed monthly mortgage payment, and which also gives you the option to profit from gentrification, should it occur.
What are you, some kind of anti-manifestdestinarian?
Oh! buy a home! Why , I never thought of that ! I know, I’ll just go rustle up three hundred grand and get going on that project. All my problems with gentrification solved…
(Brooklyn NY)
I personally don’t think good renter’s rights laws cause rental prices to go up any more than restrictive zoning that favors high-density development or the vagaries of what makes a location desireable to live in (which is what the origianl post is about). The economic causes of high rental prices in large, popular metropolitan areas are so complex that to distill their cause down to laws that attempt to mitigate the suffering of long-term residents is so simplistic as to be basically useless as theory. (You could easily use Seattle as a counter example, given that renters rights are very nascent and rents are still exorbitantly high.) Since good renters rights can co-exist with strong affordable housing requirements, the argument RonF made is a pernicious red herring. Yes, there are always trade-offs in public policy. But more checks on capitalism, especially when considering a vital human need like housing, is far better than crossing your fingers that the free market will provide affordable housing to everyone. It’s simply not designed to do that.
That’s a great idea. My dad really should have thought of that one. I bet he could have found a house that he could afford that would only have been about a 3 hour drive to his work. Or maybe he should have quit his job and gotten a new one at age 70.
I cannot believe that evicting senior citizens because of profit motive is better than the alternative. That’s an ideology I simply can’t support.
Curiousgyrl:
You know about mortgages, right? On average, buying a home costs roughly the same as renting a comparable one, which is why the home ownership rate is nearly 70%.
Stacy:
The rents in Seattle aren’t that bad. Sure, if you want to live in the better part of Kirkland or smack in the middle of downtown Seattle or Bellevue, it’s going to be expensive. But so what? Living in the less fashionable parts of town is no great hardship. You can still get a one-bedroom apartment in a decent neighborhood for $750 or so, or a two-bedroom under $900.
The buying thing is something you have to plan ahead for. You can’t buy insurance at the scene of the crash, and you can’t buy a house on the cheap once the neighborhood’s been gentrified. And are you really trying to tell us that there’s no place your father can afford to live within a three-hour radius of his old residence?
Brandon;
Not here it doesnt! And what about the 30% of people who don’t buy homes.–Any thoughts as to why they dont? Even scraping together 10% for a down payment is out of the question for more than a few people. People who read this blog.
These 30% you mention, along with people who can’t afford property takes in their quickly gentrifying areas, are the ones most at the mercy of the gent. process.
And NYC is not some weird exception, just the ubercase of high-speed gentrification. I wouldnt be surprised if SF and Oakland also extremely high barriers to entry into the housing market.
I cannot believe that evicting senior citizens because of profit motive is better than the alternative.
Evicting senior citizens because of profit motive is worse than having a society where housing is unavailable for everyone – including the selfsame senior citizens – because the profit motive isn’t allowed to operate?
Housing in some areas seems to be in a speculative bubble now. People are paying more than they should because they expect prices to keep going up. It won’t last, and prices will eventually come back down in line with rents.
There are any number of reasons why somebody might choose to rent instead of buy. I rent because I’m not sure how long I want to live here, and because I don’t want to risk getting stuck in an upside-down mortgage. I know several people at work who rent as well, and they’re all paid pretty well. The renters definitely aren’t all in the bottom 30% of the income distribution.
Banks are giving mortgages out like candy these days. You don’t need a 10% down payment.
And even if, for whatever reason, you can’t or don’t want to buy, I don’t see what the big deal is. Your rent goes up and you have to move to a different neighborhood. So what? Prices have been going up in my neighborhood, and I’m probably going to move to another one when my lease comes up for renewal. It’s a bit of a hassle, but that’s life. Why should I get to live here when others are willing to pay more for the privilege?
From what I can tell, most of the recent research shows that laws like modern-day rent control have more limited effects than proponents prefer, and more limited harms than opponents imagine. The idea that modern anti-gentrification laws have a bigger effect on housing availability than (say) interest rates seems implausible, to say the least.
What neither proponants nor opponants seem to understand is that the rental housing market is incredibly complicated and often not very flexible; there are dozens of factors that go into determining rent. Especially given the relative mildness of present-day rent control laws in the US, it’s ridiculous to point at those laws and say “There! There’s the culprit! If not for those dratted laws everyone could live in Manhattan cheaply!”
And, unfortunately, it’s equally unrealistic to think that legal regulation is going to be able to prevent gentrification. Maybe it does sometimes, in some neighborhoods, but most of the time it’s just going to be one factor of many. We’ve all heard the amazing anecdotes, but studies show that most of the time, the laws have only a small downward effect on rents.
curiousgyrl Writes:
March 3rd, 2007 at 12:50 pm Oh! buy a home! Why , I never thought of that ! I know, I’ll just go rustle up three hundred grand and get going on that project. All my problems with gentrification solved…
(Brooklyn NY)
I imagine there are many people in Cambridge Ma. making the exact same comments as you. When I purchased a run down triple Decker back in the late 70’s people laughed at me and pointed out the fact that the numbers simply did not add up. In order to afford the monthly payments, taxes, and upkeep I had to move out of the top floor of my own building and into the basement of a store I rented. I laid down carpet onto a dirt floor used the bathroom in my store and joined the local YMCA so that I might be able to shower.
Cambridge Ma. was under rent control at the time and many areas were considered fairly cheap. My rent before purchasing that house was $190 per month. At those rates the landlord simply could not afford the upkeep. Cambridge is now extremely difficult for people to afford. It took vision and sacrifice to make a purchase in such an area prior to rent control being defeated. The time to purchase a place is not when the property is cost prohibitive. You need to get into an area when the prices are reasonable and build equity.
There are plenty of areas with opportunities waiting to be realized today. Complaining after the fact is useless.
For many reasons some people prefer never to own. In fact. I have a wealthy friend who owns many rental properties yet prefer to rent the space in which he lives. If you are frozen out of the market it is the result of your own poor choices.
curiousgyrl Writes:
March 3rd, 2007 at 3:50 pm Brandon;
Not here it doesnt! And what about the 30% of people who don’t buy homes.–Any thoughts as to why they dont? Even scraping together 10% for a down payment is out of the question for more than a few people. People who read this blog.
I suggested some reasons above. But there will always be others who simply do not have marketable skills which are conducive to earning a decent salary. But most people can scrape together the down payment needed to purchase a home in an affordable neighborhood if they are willing to be flexible.
Stacy Writes:
March 3rd, 2007 at 1:24 pm
That’s a great idea. My dad really should have thought of that one. I bet he could have found a house that he could afford that would only have been about a 3 hour drive to his work. Or maybe he should have quit his job and gotten a new one at age 70.
I cannot believe that evicting senior citizens because of profit motive is better than the alternative. That’s an ideology I simply can’t support.
Many people do make a 2 or 3 hour drive to and from work in order to live in an upscale home in southern New Hampshire rather than be shut out of the market in Massachusetts.
Those who purchased 5-10 years ago have seen their home more than double in value. The time for your dad to buy was decades earlier. Many people with that vision have sold their homes in Massachusetts and retired in relative comfort on the profits they realized on their primary residence
You seem to think that senior citizens have some special right not to be evicted from a place they can no longer afford. If that seems cruel to you, simply pay the difference. That is exactly what you are asking someone else to do,
oh good lord.
oh good lord.
It’s merely the logical conclusion of both libertarian and capitalist philosophies. Sink or swim on your own. If you weren’t prescient enough to make the right (or even best) choices, tough shit. I got mine.
i think one of the central perceptions of unfairness in capitalism that has gone unspoken here is this:
the owners of rented land who price out tenants for a profit motive are using the privilege of having money to obtain more money at the expense of people who don’t have money. for better or for worse (and i suppose that’s debatable), that is the central problem that the left (which includes me) finds unfair about capitalism. money breeds more money, and those without have a hard time breaking into that cycle (in fact, those with money have an incentive to keep them out with things like high-interest mortgages intended to force foreclosure).
sure, property rights must exist and be respected but haven’t we all heard how the presence of rights implies the presence of responsibilities? where are those in the purely capitalist view? they have to come from laws, since capitalism has little incentive to enforce them on its own.
that’s why san francisco has those laws. they’re trying to define responsibilities that go with the rights. i hope you don’t have a problem with saying that some people have responsibilities?
Yes, having money buys you convenience – the convenience of not having to move when the place you rented becomes more than you can afford. Remember that those landlords are not evil money-grubbing denizens of Hell – they’re people trying to make a living, just like their tenants, who are coping with rising heating prices, rising insurance costs, and rising maintenance costs. Most of them are not rich. Most if them are paying their mortgages by renting out units in their own homes. When the market value in the neighborhood goes up, their property taxes go up, and landlords are not a public charity. Yes, we could say that all rental properties should be state controlled, and run as if they are a public charity, but you’d be taking away one of the easiest paths to home ownership that middle class families take advantage of. Some people would prefer that. That’s their right. I personally think that laws that protect tenants from being forced out during their lease terms and that require that landlords provide a habitable environment, coupled with some amount of government subsidized housing to ensure a minimum amount of low and middle-income housing availability is a good way to balance the free market, but at some point there has to be an understanding that when you rent a place, it does not belong to you. Just because you’ve been there forever does not make it any more yours.
I think part of the problem is the variations in the concept of ownership.
If I own a car that I want fix up and sell, or even rent out, I can put any price tag on it that I want. I can get the absolute highest price someone is willing to pay me. I doubt many people actually believe they have the “right” to my car at the price of their choosing, or that I should have to sell it at a discount if the person who wants it is poor. But for reasons that I cannot fathom, some people think they have some kind “right” to live in my rent house and want to limit my ability to raise the rent to get the most money that someone is willing to pay me to live there. That after all is the reason I bought the land in the first place. My rights of ownership of my house (and it is “mine” no matter who is living there) is much more fundamental than my ownership of my car despite the USSCs dilution of those rights.
(I don’t actually have a rent house now, I am just making a point. I used to have a rental for a few years though so I am familiar with this attitude first hand.)
Polymath:
You could say that, though I would argue that having money can’t really be considered a “privilege” when you’ve earned it rather than inheriting it. Or you could say that they’re using their money to obtain more money by giving the new tenants—the ones who actually are willing and able to pay market rent—something of value. Or you could say that the new tenants that have more money are using their money to obtain a more desirable living space at the expense of the existing tenants.
But let’s be explicit about what the expense is. We’re not talking about throwing people out on the street at a moment’s notice. When your lease expires, you’re generally notified of the new terms at least a month in advance, and the worst that can happen is that you have to move to another neighborhood. It’s no great tragedy.
IANAB, and I’m not clear on the details of how foreclosure works, but I don’t think that foreclosure is anywhere near as good a deal for banks as you seem to think it is. Why do you think banks would prefer loans with a high chance of default?
Interesting. What other rights imply the presence of responsibilities? Is the right to free speech limited by the responsibility not to offend anyone, or damage anyone’s reputation (even with the truth)? Is the right to abortion limited by the responsibility to get the father’s consent first? Is the (alleged) right to free medical care limited by the responsibility to avoid risking injury or illness? Should we pass laws enforcing these responsibilities?
And how’s that working out for them? Have you tried to find housing in San Francisco recently?
Certainly not. I just want responsibilities defined in a way that doesn’t place absurd and arbitrary limits on property rights, like giving a tenant the right to hold an apartment hostage beyond the terms of the lease. Examples of valid responsibilities might include the responsibility to pay market price for the property you rent. Or the responsibility to vacate an apartment when your lease expires and you find the terms of the new lease unacceptable.
Polymath –
From looking over your blog, you’re a math teacher. And from what I can see, a damn good one – good on ya.
Let’s say you get paid $60,000 a year. (I don’t know if that’s absurdly high, absurdly low, or about right; just roll with it.)
Tomorrow, at the Annual Math Teacher’s Conference in New York City, which you couldn’t attend because you have to go pick up your baby (congratulations!!), a meteor hits the assembly hall, killing thousands of innocent math teachers in a pyrotechnic smash of tinkling protractors. Tragic.
A month later, you start getting offer letters in your mailbox from a variety of private and public schools offering you jobs (to replace your fallen colleagues, natch). The offers range from $70,000 to $90,000 a year. Your school, we’ll assume, can’t afford to pay you any more than they do.
If you take one of the offers, are you “using the privilege of having money to obtain more money at the expense of people who don’t have money”?
Or are you simply selling your asset (your work as a teacher, your knowledge and skills, etc.) at the new market price?
“Privilege of having money”. Gotta love it.
Are the three events exactly the same? No, of course they’re not. But that doesn’t mean the similarity isn’t interesting….
There’s no similarity at all, except for the bare fact that in all three situations, some people are moving somewhere else. That isn’t very interesting.
The reason that gentrifying isn’t remotely like the other situations:
1. Gentrifying = the general word for a process in which private individuals put their homes in a particular area up for sale, while other private individuals look at real estate ads, etc., and then decide to buy those homes in that area.
2. European settlement of America and Jewish settlement of Israel: Not quite so many voluntary transactions going on there; lots of forceful evictions of the rightful owners.
Let me know if there’s an example of “gentrification” where rich white people roam around a neighborhood with guns and force black people out of their own homes.
What is missing from this discussion is the fact that rents don’t always go up? The South End of Boston where I now own a condo is quite fashionable. A small condo now sells for over half a million dollars. But the picture was quite different before the revitalization. As working class people left this area to buy homes in the suburbs they were replaced by people who had less money to pay for rents. In many cases the owners no longer lived in one of the units and larger homes were chopped up into smaller apartments just to make the rents pay the bills. Crime increased and the area became drab and run down. As a result, rents became depressed.
But when this spiral was at its worse was anyone advocating the rents should be maintained artificially high ? There were no housing rights advocates demanding that tenants pay more than the going rate.Naturaly many residents took advantage of this situation and purchased homes at very affordable prices. As a result of the area making a come back many people with vision did quite well.
So property values rise and fall as a result of many factors. We all make choices based on our wants and needs. In addition we have the right to live wherever we want. But that right is not a guarantee just as I have the right to own a Mercedes, I must still be able to afford it.
There are people who lack the ambition to earn more money or the discipline to save. Others have no desire to take on the responsibility of home ownership. Yet some of these same people seem to feel they should be guaranteed to stay where they are. The responsibility lies with the end user. If you want to stay living in an area make sure you take the steps necessary to do so .
Robert’s response to premise #1 is laughably bad. Whether or not it implies veganism or vegitarianism has no baring on whether or not it is true among humans. And I suspect that the acreage of land on Earth last taken by the killing of the previous possessors in legitimate self-defense is smaller than the acreage possessed by heirs and assignees of the original settlers.
Private property is a good thing; we should decide who has the strongest claim to it and say it’s his.
The second statement does not neccessarily follow from the first. If private property is a useful good – and it is – the we should assign private property rights in the manner that best for all, not just the few who currently hold it. If the person who has the strongest claim still has a weak claim, we can give them ownership subject to a duty to pay FMV rent to the dispossessed. This is still a strong
private property rights system. It is simply a private property system that is both strong and morally fair.
Robert and Brandon Berg are both arguing for a “last innocent possessor presumption rule”. This claims that the last person to acquire property innocently should be presumed the moral owner of the property unless another specific person or entity can prove a better prior claim. This is a pro-status quo argument. People should be able to keep what they bought unless someone else can prove otherwise.
The probalem is that under the status quo, *I* win the argument. All governments on Earth that have issued titles to land have done so claiming the right to tax that land at whatever rate they wish for whatever purpose they wish. When the last innocent possessor purchased their land, they did so knowing that their ownership was subject to the burden of paying whatever taxes the government levied. That knowledge was reflected in the purchase price the owner paid – if the land was expected to not be subject to taxation, the purchase price would have been *MUCH* higher.
Are there practical arguments against full land taxation? Perhaps, but I suspect all of those are really practical reasons against implimenting it immediately, as opposed to slowly over, say, a 20 year period. But is the last innocent possessor presumption rule a moral argument against full land taxation? Sorry, no. That was a risk that you knew, and paid for, when you bought the property.
Your syllogism having collapsed, and you having no counter-arguments, you jump to the happy assumption that even if you’re wrong, you’re right. OK, I don’t mind playing the game.
The basic moral argument against full land taxation (or any tax) is that governments are intrinsically immoral institutions, because they rely on force and coercion. And you shouldn’t give money or power to immoral institutions, so no taxes for you, Mr. Government.
But we need governments because the alternative is worse. It’s better to have one arbiter of force, which is at least somewhat subject to popular and democratic pressure, than a million thugs running their own private anthills. So too bad for morality; we have a state and it gets to tax stuff.
Pragmatism is thus the relevant ground for argument on any taxation question. And on those grounds, it seems pretty clear that a total tax on rent would be a disaster; nobody will put their property out for rent if they cannot profit by it. If I do nothing with my land, I owe the state nothing and earn nothing; if I maintain it and put structures on it and find tenants and maintain things, I owe the state everything and earn nothing; hmm, which route towards earning nothing shall I take? The one where I work hard, or the one where I sit on my ass? I think the ass-sitting path has a certain appeal.
Ramping up to this happy state of affairs, rather than doing it all at once, would certainly delay the inevitable. But if your end program is total taxation, then your end result is total absence of rentable property on the market. To foreclose the job path of “landlord”, you end up putting a third of the population on the street.
Good plan.
I defended point 1 of the syllogism, you did not reply. Point 2 was yours. The conclusion, 4, follows the other three.
I did not argue point 3 because I do not think your refutation is really arguable. That refutation is the last innocent possessor presumption rule. As you stated: Yeah, you can’t fence something twice and then have a clear title, but after it’s been fenced 1200 times…at some point, ambiguity becomes lack of knowledge becomes de facto legitimate ownership.
Um, no, I do not think it does. You give no reasons for this assertion, so it is apparently just something a person believes or not. Mr. Berg appears to atempt to give a reason when he claimed that it is necessary to having private property, but I already showed that is not true.
But I have apparently convinced you that the the last innocent possessor presumption rule is not a moral argument against full taxation, and so you have reverted to:
The basic moral argument against full land taxation (or any tax) is that governments are intrinsically immoral institutions, because they rely on force and coercion.
But the counter here is that what is being taxed – property – was created by government force and coersion, esspecially in the case of land held by the sucessors in interest to blood conquest.
And on those grounds, it seems pretty clear that a total tax on rent would be a disaster; nobody will put their property out for rent if they cannot profit by it.
True. I previously (post #13) wrote:
“The highest sustainable rate” is the maximum amount that someone would be willing to pay to rent the land (FMV rent), or the entirety of the rental income that could be recieved from owning the land, minus the total of the cost to administer the land plus a reasonable Return On Investment from that cost.
Robert,
On point three of the syllogism, look again at the example of property in Maine that I gave. 200 years of land transfers did not protect the land in Maine from falling under the shadow of an illegitimate treaty. Property doesn’t eventually lose the trait of being stolen, although it may eventually lose the trait of being provably stolen. If the first person to sell it doesn’t have legitimate title, then no one in the chain of transactions has legitimate title, so no one in the chain of transactions can give legitimate title to the next purchaser. The original owner or their heirs retain the only legitimate title.
universal declaration of human rights:
article 25.1:
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
article 29.3:
In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
i quote these to counter the examples of competition for my job and ownership of a car that came up in response to my previous post. i claim that when it comes to housing (and, for that matter health care and education), the workings of the free market can’t be trusted to fully provide for everyone. all purely capitalistic models for any good or service imply that someone could go without—when that good or service is a fundamental right, that is unacceptable, and we need special laws to protect people from capitalism. i’m actually quite a proponent of free-market solutions for a lot of things (more than most on the left), but not in the case of fundamental human rights.
also, i will accept that the “privilege of having money” is poorly worded. more precisely, i mean that the privilege that comes with having money ought to come with some social responsibility to the communtity that allowed you to make or inherit the money. in my opinion, that includes some restrictions on landlord practices.
also, predatory lending really does happen: http://www.mortgagenewsdaily.com/Mortgage_Fraud/Predatory_Lending.asp
OK. Does it include restrictions on math teacher practices?
If it doesn’t, why not?
Decnavda:
1. Regarding the sentence starting with, “If the person who has the strongest claim still has a weak claim…” I strongly disagree that the condition holds. If you’ve bought land at market price, that gives you a pretty strong claim to it. And for reasons which I’ve already given, in almost all cases no one else who has any sort of legitimate claim at all to it. This is critical. If someone else had a valid claim to the land, this argument would be problematic. No one does.
2. Government is not an innocent possessor. It simply asserts authority over territory and enforces it by violence.
3. “That was a risk that you knew, and paid for, when you bought the property.” You’re essentially saying that might makes right, that because government has the power to tax now, it will always and forever have the moral authority to do so. No.
Polymath:
1. If you’re going to resort to a naked appeal to authority, you’re going to need a better authority than Eleanor Roosevelt. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a left-wing manifesto, not a list of unassailable moral truths.
2. Again, the “right” in question here is not the right to decent housing, but the right not to have to move to a cheaper part of town. If anyone would like to explain why I’m wrong on this point, I’d be happy to listen. But please don’t persist in framing the issue this way without justification.
3. The free market is perfectly capable of providing housing for everyone, within the limitations of reality. You can only pack so many people into a given area, so prices in the most desirable areas tend to be bid up accordingly. And there are various regulations (building codes, land-use restrictions, etc.) that restrict supply and drive up prices. I’m not saying that the regulations are necessarily bad (and I’m not saying they aren’t), but they do drive up prices. And you can’t blame that on capitalism.
4. The page on predatory lending doesn’t appear to offer any evidence for your claim that banks want borrowers to default. Am I missing it?
I think that if there were a fundamental shortage of math teachers (that is, a shortage of people capable of being math teachers, not of people willing to be math teachers), so that extremely high math teacher wages would not bring in additional math teachers, but would instead merely represent a windfall profit for the math teachers at the expense of the possibility of equality in education, then math teacher price controls (probably in the form of requiring long term contracts) would be legitimate. Isn’t this done in professional sports, with restrictions on free agency and head hunting? Although those restrictions aren’t put in place by the government, aren’t the leagues granted exemptions from normal employment law in order to be able to have those rules?
I don’t particularly see the justification for doing this in professional sports, which are not a fundamental human right, but I do see the justification in doing this in education, which is (of course, the justification in sports is much the same if much less important: price controls prevent wage inflation from converting wealth inequality between teams into physical inequality between teams, it’s just that sports matter less than education or housing).
Probably the biggest difference between housing, math teachers and pro-sports is that the wage controls in pro-sports benefit the rich (team owners) rather than the poor.
Brandon,
Decnavda’s point #3 isn’t an assertion of might makes right, it is an assertion of pricing. The purchase price of property includes the risk that the property will be subject to government regulation and taxation, a risk which has been permanently associated with the property since the government created the property right as a government protected right (generally by taking it by force from someone else, e.g. the Native American nations). If the property were protected from those risks, it would have had a higher sale price when you bought it. To claim that the government doesn’t have those rights to the property is to inflate the value of your property at the expense of everyone else in the country, who benefits from the government’s regulatory and taxation rights on your property.
I think that if there were a fundamental shortage of math teachers (that is, a shortage of people capable of being math teachers, not of people willing to be math teachers), so that extremely high math teacher wages would not bring in additional math teachers, but would instead merely represent a windfall profit for the math teachers at the expense of the possibility of equality in education, then math teacher price controls (probably in the form of requiring long term contracts) would be legitimate.
Well, good luck ascertaining that flexibly enough and far enough in advance that you can switch your price controls on and off. Sounds to me like all you’ll accomplish is to foul up the market signaling mechanism.
In any case, that scenario doesn’t appear to apply to residential and commercial real estate. Although, technically, the supply of land is finite, there is obviously no fundamental shortage of real property. Higher rents create more opportunities for developer profit, and developers aren’t shy about seeking it out. The only places where massive development doesn’t occur in response to massive price spikes are markets where regulation has blocked new growth.
By the way, I honestly don’t get the Georgist obsession with land. I mean, I can kind of understand Henry George’s obsession with it—once upon a time, land was wealth, and wealth was land. If you had it, you were set. If you didn’t, you’d probably never amount to anything.
But I don’t get modern Georgists. The world just doesn’t work that way anymore. Land is just one of many forms of capital. You can become fabulously wealthy without ever owning a single square foot of land. There is no landed aristocracy anymore. Anyone who wants land can buy it, but it’s really not a uniquely good investment. If it were, why would anyone bother with stocks?
The short-term effect of taxing land would be a sharp drop in land prices, resulting in a transfer of wealth away from current holders of land. Which doesn’t make any sense, because, again, land is just one of many forms of capital. Why pick on real estate and natural resource investors while leaving all other investors alone?
The long-term effect of taxing land would be not to tax a particular class of people, but rather to tax a particular class of activities, namely those that are land-intensive. This would have the effect of encouraging inefficient economization on land: Highrises would be built too high, crops would be packed too close together, suburban backyards would be smaller, etc. Huzzah! Power to the people!
Robert,
Obviously, if it is not a reliable long term problem, then labor price controls are probably not the best solution. However, regulations that dampen signaling mechanisms without completely squashing them are beneficial, for the same reason that dampening mechanisms are frequently beneficial: while we do want the signal to get through, we don’t actually want spikes and crashes in critical resources.
Brandon,
Personally, I don’t have any particular obsession with land taxing. I’m just nit picking your arguments.
Personally, I’m just as happy with income and age based housing subsidies as I am with rent control, although I am also favorably inclined towards rent controlled public housing.
It strikes me that a major gap in public subsidizing of housing in the US (which is currently heavily biased against the poor and in favor of the upper middle class in this country, with virtually no section 8 funding, no public housing funding, but tax deductions for mortgage interest on second homes) is that there is very little support for low income co-op apartments (I may be mistaken, but I’m pretty sure many government loan subsidy programs don’t cover co-op apartments, just single family homes).
robert…
does the privilege that comes with having wealth include responisibilities that involve restricting the practices of math teachers??
is that really your question?
my point is that
1) if you somehow achieve a degree of wealth, you ought to be respectful of some restrictions on how you use that wealth in the society that allowed you to be wealthy…
2) especially when it comes to making money from business sectors (like housing) that involve providing basic human rights.
i’m not sure what this has to do with restrictions on math teaching.
But there are already restrictions on landlords – they have to abide by the terms of the lease set forth, they can’t evict tenants or change the rent before the lease term is up, they have to provide a habitable environment during the term, and in many states tenants without leases are given enormous protections. The question isn’t whether landlords ought to be subject to regulations – they already are. It seems to me that the point some people here are making is that landlords should be subject to additional regulations that makes it somewhere between hard to impossible to raise the rent on a unit occupied by a tenant at the end of his or her lease term, regardless of whether the market value and/or operating cost of that space has gone up. Is that a fair assesment of what we’re talking about?
2. Again, the “right” in question here is not the right to decent housing, but the right not to have to move to a cheaper part of town. If anyone would like to explain why I’m wrong on this point, I’d be happy to listen. But please don’t persist in framing the issue this way without justification.
Why are people against restricting free market evictions of renters from their longtime (sometimes decades) homes, but for restricting government evictions of homeowners (via rising property taxes) from their longtime (sometimes decades) homes?
Is there something better about one than the other? Because from my perspective, both of them are rotten.
Why are people against restricting free market evictions of renters from their longtime (sometimes decades) homes, but for restricting government evictions of homeowners (via rising property taxes) from their longtime (sometimes decades) homes? Is there something better about one than the other?
Yes. In the former case you have ownership by a private party who presumably earned the ownership of the property through hard work. In the latter case you have a presumption of power by an entity that did nothing to earn it.
In the latter case you have a presumption of power by an entity that did nothing to earn it.
This is a joke, right?
1) if you somehow achieve a degree of wealth, you ought to be respectful of some restrictions on how you use that wealth in the society that allowed you to be wealthy…
2) especially when it comes to making money from business sectors (like housing) that involve providing basic human rights.
i’m not sure what this has to do with restrictions on math teaching.
Because YOU have achieved a degree of wealth. You possess a big stock of human capital – a hard-to-learn academic/mental discipline, and the ability to propagate it to other minds. And you make money from a business sector (education) that involves providing a basic human right. You are in a strongly analogous position to the landlords.
So, do the restrictions that you want to apply to their specific sector of the economy, also apply to you?
Or are you special?
Are the wage demands of math teachers creating a scarcity of reliable education opportunities? Are there sudden math teacher rushes that deprive students of math teachers in the middle of the school year?
See, it would hurt you personally, see, see! Is not an effective argument if you can’t construct a scenario that is at all equivalent (or even comprehensible). Anyway, polymath is probably perfectly capable of becoming a landlord (and I am a landlord), so you don’t even need to go making up scenarios.
Charles, Polymath isn’t holding up market failure as the reason that landlords should be controlled, he’s holding up moral sentiments as justifications. Well, the moral sentiments apply absolutely and 100% orthogonally to his own situation.
I want to know if he really believes what he says about the moral sentiments, or whether it’s just rhetoric to bash landlords with.
>
why is this a reasonable presumption? Most of the landlords I know in NYC “earned” their property through inheritance. Give me a break.
Despite the rich renters mentioned above, most renters work for a living while any landlord “trying to earn a living” via extracting rents does not, by definition.
my comment was entered badly. I was responding to this
there is a social benefit in not forcing people to move every 2-5 years. community hurches, extended families, locally owned businesses etc etc. Its not simply about moralistic sentiments (which is equally applicable to the characterizations of “earned wealth” government intrusion and rights to property as it is to anything else) but also about what kind of cities and society we would like to live in.
Charles:
As a pricing argument, it fails miserably. The probability investors assign to the US Government jacking property taxes up to the levels Decnavda is suggesting is rightly so low as to have little to no effect on pricing. His claim that “if the land was expected to not be subject to taxation, the purchase price would have been *MUCH* higher” is true but irrelevant if he’s talking about current levels of taxation, but false for any reasonable value of *MUCH* if he’s talking about *MUCH* higher levels of taxation. And property prices would be *MUCH* lower if it was expected to be subjected to *MUCH* higher levels of taxation.
This argument applies equally well to all forms of taxation. You knew government could tax profits at 95% when you started that business. You knew government could confiscate all income above $100k when you went to medical school. You knew government could jack up capital gains taxes when you bought that stock. Heck, you knew you might get robbed when you bought that electronic equipment, so burglary must be okay, too.
So it pretty much does boil down to “might makes right,” insofar as Decnavda’s essentially asserting that the right to tax follows inexorably from the might.
And yes, I know you’re not a Georgist. Even if we non-leftists all look the same to you, I can tell you non-libertarians (Decnavda: No you’re not) apart.
Actually, I have not defended single-taxing. Plenty of other forms of wealth are created by government coersion and should be taxed acordingly. The land tax was relavant to this thread because it is a thread about the poor being priced out of their homes, and because Robert brought up what looks on the face of it to be good moral argument for the land tax – the fact that most land on Earth was stolen by force.
Buying land, that everyone knows or should know was stolen by force, is a strong moral claim as long as you paid market price? Well, now you are admitting to some frankly sociopathic sentiments where I, and those of us who do not have Antisocial Personality Disorder, simply have to agree to disagree.
2. Government is not an innocent possessor. It simply asserts authority over territory and enforces it by violence.
Um, that is exactly what I have been arguing…
3. “That was a risk that you knew, and paid for, when you bought the property.” You’re essentially saying that might makes right, that because government has the power to tax now, it will always and forever have the moral authority to do so. No.
Wait, YOU were the one arguing for the right of might – that the title created by might (see your point 2, above) is legitimate, at least after it has been fenced some unknown number of times.
You and Robert keep wanting to have it both ways – You want to be able to buy a blood-saoked title issued by the government at a price that reflect’s the conquer’s right to tax it at any level, and then whine that the violent government is immoral when it coersively levies the tax. You want landowners to benefit from the blood conquest and then call the killer who took the land immoral and send them away when they come to collect the price the landowners agreed to pay. Neat trick.
The long-term effect of taxing land would be not to tax a particular class of people, but rather to tax a particular class of activities, namely those that are land-intensive. This would have the effect of encouraging inefficient economization on land: Highrises would be built too high, crops would be packed too close together, suburban backyards would be smaller, etc.
This ultilitarian argument is bizzare. The land tax would be on the rental value of the land. Land rents not for what it is used for, but for what it could be used for. Why pack everything together too tightly when you have to pay the same tax on the empty lot next door?
The fact that the businessmen (correctly) assigned a low probability to the risk of full taxation does not mean they did not buy the risk. And the difference between assuming the risk of high land taxes and assuming the risk of a burglary is that you did not get your property from the burglar.
It does apply to capital gains on the stock, though. Government created corporations. Buying the special benefits of corporation that come from the government’s ability to coersively enforce corporate privledges hardly puts you in a place to whine about thst coersive power when they tax you on those benefits.
No, I am not a right-libertarian. Do you really need to be school in the history of the term libertarian? Believe me, if I could find a better term than left-libertarian, I would, but everything else is taken.
There is a social benefit to cheap university education for everyone. With much of the expense of education in the form of salaries we should cap all teachers and administrators salaries at, say, $35K per year. Teachers have a responsibility to make some sacrifices for the knowledge that was obtained within the society that allowed them to become educated. This would greatly reduce the cost of education for everyone and serve the greater good.
There is a social benefit to cheap legal services. With the price of legal services appallingly high, we need to cap the hourly rate that a law firm can charge. I am thinking that $20 per hour seems fair. No longer should we allow widely divergent levels of legal services. This would level the playing field and allow those of modest means to get the same caliber of legal services as the wealthy.
There is probably a social benefit that could be argued for press censorship, or and not allowing protestors in most instances. The thing is I am not sure a subjective social benefit is sufficient justification of trampling on other’s rights and the free market.
agreeing with one policy doesnt mean you have to agree with the others. its a matter of balancing rights.
I personally think that the right to make investment profit is less compelling than the right to make a living wage off of your work, though professionals who didnt have school loan debt could probably do with less money.
In terms of balance of various rights though, I would argue that capping university presidents’ salaries at say, $100K/year and evening out professors’ salaries (the stars dont need $250K but no classes should be taught by adjuncts making $10K) would be a fine way of reducing the cost of edcuation.
curiousgrrl wrote: Oh! buy a home! Why , I never thought of that ! I know, I’ll just go rustle up three hundred grand and get going on that project. All my problems with gentrification solved…
Well, that’s what starts gentrification – people who have the same problem as you find somewhere where they can afford – like my wife, ms_xeno, did seven years ago, when Alberta wasn’t yet the “Alberta Arts District”.
The real problems come when people who don’t see a need to drive hard bargains for property come in, especially if they come from a place where properties are expensive and condos preferred to houses. That starts the influx of high-end condos replacing apartments.
I don’t think that using teacher salaries is a good way to demonstrate how someone in a public service position could sacrifice more to the public good. For Washington State, a starting teacher makes $30k per year and the max salary for a teacher is less than $60k for a PhD with 16+ years of experience. Most teachers are paid very little in comparison to what they could make in the private sector (one reason why I am not a math teacher, although I was accepted to a master’s program). On top of that teacher’s are put in the position of supplying schools supplies, books, classroom decoration materials, and any number of other items. As a child of a teacher I can say that they don’t get rich or anything approximating it.
There was a story recently here in the Seattle area about how property values are rising so fast the owners of trailer parks are selling out to developers. People who previously owned their homes are having to abandon them because they don’t have a place to move them Some of those people are trying to create co-ops to buy the land with mixed results, mostly because they are having a hard time getting enough capital together to apply for a loan.
It’s good to bear in mind that the people being displaced aren’t lazy, they aren’t good for nothing. They are people who work and paid for their homes, whether through rent or a mortgage and now they are being forced out because someone else wants their home and is willing to pay more.
No one can be forced out of a house they own by someone willing to pay more money for it. It they are renting, that’s an entirely different matter since they do not own the property.
Aaron;
its true what you say, but in New York at least, the problem goes beyond the individual decisions of renters, homeowners and small-time landlords. The brokers, the big land owners and the realestate moguls have plans for these neighborhoods for years and those plans dont really include working people or most of the “middle class”. plans for gentrifying my neighboorhood were underway before I was born, more or less.
in 1970’s when this process started in brooklyn a lot of community groups were able to fight back at first, keep thier city services, demand that landlords stop running down their property and evicting people, even draw attention to the rash of fires set by landlords, but that only slowed the process down. I have to admit that I dont see a clear way toward mixed class, integrated, human-scale, community-supportive housing in New York. But I hope somebody smart does.
curiousgyrl Writes:
March 6th, 2007 at 11:21 am
>
why is this a reasonable presumption? Most of the landlords I know in NYC “earned” their property through inheritance. Give me a break.
Despite the rich renters mentioned above, most renters work for a living while any landlord “trying to earn a living” via extracting rents does not, by definition.
LANDLORDS DON’T. WORK? IS THAT WHAT YOU ARE SAYING? What a brilliant thought. Have you ever been a landlord? My guess would be NO!
Part of how I earn a living is by renting out commercial properties. I have never inherited a single piece of land or building. Several of my friends own property in New York with one just purchasing a multimillion dollar condo. They are also building a beach house which is in excess of 11 thousand square feet . ( not a typo) This couple were high school sweethearts with the husband never graduating. They started selling real-estate and eventually became successful builders. They also own dozens of rental properties in Southern New Hampshire. Like me, they worked very long hours to get where they are today.
Although I never received money or property from my parents, my children are all set for life. But they will be acquiring land and property which I purchased or built. These properties have been paid for with money I earned and which has already been taxed. The fact that I choose to give the value of my work to my children should not illicit such
class warfare and envy.
Owning rental property involves risk and work. Just as an area can go up in value so too can it go down. Units require upkeep. If you don’t want the management hassles you pay a company to handle them for you. Obviously this diminishes the return. This only touches on the many aspects involved in ownership. The reality is that being a landlord is a JOB. Go buy a multiunit residential building and tell me how much fun it is after a year. Also, be aware that many people with your view end out selling for a loss or bankrupt.
Aaron V. Writes:
March 6th, 2007 at 3:05 pm curiousgrrl wrote: Oh! buy a home! Why , I never thought of that ! I know, I’ll just go rustle up three hundred grand and get going on that project. All my problems with gentrification solved…
Well, that’s what starts gentrification – people who have the same problem as you find somewhere where they can afford – like my wife, ms_xeno, did seven years ago, when Alberta wasn’t yet the “Alberta Arts District”.
Bingo. Aaron hit the nail on the head. I mentioned the South End in Boston. The place went from one of the premier areas of Boston to a run down and dangerous area infested with drugs and crime. It is now back to being one of the elite places to live. Many working class people purchased large brownstones at easily affordable prices. When I purchased my first triple Decker it was in a lower middle class area between Harvard Square and M.I.T. Few people saw any potential in these worn down structures. But people with vision and the willingness to work found a small gold mine. I recall a hard working kid who bought
one of the buildings across the street from mine. His parents raised their family in one of the units. Although he worked a full time job as an electrician he found the time to put the effort into that home. In essence, he bought a second full time job. Over 20 years had past when I last saw him. He made a profit of well over half a million on that structure and could easily afford to find a single family home in one of the surrounding suburbs. But instead of that, he purchased several more such units in poorer areas which held potential. He continues to work his full time job and to manage his buildings despite the fact that he could sell now and retire elsewhere.
Twenty years from now we will hear of success stories involving people who started today. There is no dearth of opportunities if one has the desire and the vision. I see them constantly.
Brandon,
I think it was the thread on immigration where you defended TangoMan from charges of racism that I was misremembering as you being anti-illegal immigration. Re-reading it, I see that I had your views on immigration completely wrong. Sorry about that.
But yeah, you guys all look pretty much the same to me. Next you’re going to tell me you aren’t anti-gay. :p
Michael in post 79 – There’s a (black) woman who invested in properties on Alberta in the mid-90s, when no yuppie would even stop at the lights in the neighborhood.
The abandoned storefronts she bought 10 years ago are all thriving businesses, mostly independent ones as well. She’s not a bad landlady (she rents to the co-op we belong to), and has been able to take care of ill family members in the South with her rental money.
There is *some* hope – that and convincing residents of soon-to-be-up-and-coming neighborhoods that they can buy houses with standard 30-year fixed mortgages, as well as smacking down those low-ball house buyers who put their ugly litter “We Buy Houses!” signs up everywhere.
My assertion that landlords dont work is less ridiculous than the assertion i was responding, that tenants dont work and that we should presume wealth is “earned.” My purpose was to demonstrate that.
I’m sure running your company takes a lot of effort.
Once you get above the very low near-poverty rental levels, most people who rent CAN own property if they want to.
They may not be able to own property that is as nice as what they can rent.
They may have a longer commute.
They may (as did my grandparents when they bought their first house) have to live without furniture for a decade or so.
They may have to eat cheaper food.
They will almost certainly have to have a longer commute.
They might even have to move somewhere else.
But for a huge proportion of renters, it’s possible to own. None of those things above is a violation of human rights. None of them is so bad that we “shouldn’t ask folks to do it.”
Do you rent a three bedroom in boston? You can probably afford to buy in Roxbury. Do you rent a three bedrom in Roxbury? You can probably still afford to buy in Fall River.
yes, robert, restrictions on my practice of math teaching absolutely apply to me.
the state in which i live requires that i go through some very specific university training before i can teach in public schools. since i have not gone through that training, i cannot hold a job at a public school (unless i go back and get an education degree). i’ve never even considered the idea that the state should do away with that. i could probably make a little more money in the public schools, to be frank.
i am also prohibited from doing things to my students that would violate some of their rights: i can’t use corporal punishment, although there are plenty of people who think that it would be acceptable if i did. i am legally obligated to tell a higher authority if a student tells me something that might cause any student harm, even if i swore confidentiality to the student.
it’s not the law, but i’m expected to grade fairly and honestly, disregarding my personal feelings for a student—i’d surely be fired if i didn’t.
there are many, many, many moral expectations on teachers—in fact, the constant barrage of moral decisions i make daily is the part of teaching that most non-teachers simply can’t understand. i take my provision of education to my students absolutely seriously because i do consider it a right. and i try to live up to the corresponding responsibilities. (and so do most teachers i know.)
so the answer to your question, i think, is a resounding yes. do people who provide housing for income hold themselves to some kind of moral standard? most, to some extent, yes. but if they don’t we need laws to make them.
Bradana said:
There was a story recently here in the Seattle area about how property values are rising so fast the owners of trailer parks are selling out to developers. People who previously owned their homes are having to abandon them because they don’t have a place to move them.
It’s good to bear in mind that the people being displaced aren’t lazy, they aren’t good for nothing. They are people who work and paid for their homes, whether through rent or a mortgage and now they are being forced out because someone else wants their home and is willing to pay more.
First of all, while renters work, they didn’t pay for their home and don’t own it, so it’s entirely legitimate for the actual owner to (at the end of their lease) raise the price and see if someone else will pay more to rent it. This has nothing to do with whether the people in those homes spend their time working their asses off or selling crack.
OTOH, in the specific example you give, the trick is that it is not uncommon that while people in trailer parks own their homes, they don’t own the land they are on – they rent it. They know full well when they put themselves in this situation that the trailer park owner may decide at some point to sell the land to someone who has the intent to do something with that land other than run a trailer park. Sometimes the owner dies, or wants to retire. Sometimes the area gets built up and the park owner’s taxes go up to the point that he or she can no longer keep the land rent at a level that the residents can pay. Sometimes the owner just wants to sell out and get the money.
The fact that people pay rent for a property gives them no rights to that property past those defined in their lease (that’s what the lease is for), and gives them no rights at all past the termination of that lease.
We have had a couple of trailer parks in my area get redeveloped. One was turned into regular single-family homes, and the other turned into commercial property (Walgreens, gas station, restaurant, UPS store, auto shop, etc.). It was in all the papers, so I found out about this own-your-home/rent-the-land bit. It also turns out that this is common even for single-family homes in Hawaii; the Dole familiy and other such interests own a lot of land there that they have stopped growing (or never grew) pineapples on and have developed instead. I can’t imagine building and paying a 30-year mortgage on a house on land I don’t own, but I guess if you want to live in Hawaii this is something a lot of people have accepted.
That’s a contrast with my house, where if I sold it I would get about $350,000 for it, but the next day the new owner would most likely bulldoze my house down and build a new one. I want to live here until I can’t live on my own anymore, I just hope the taxes don’t go out of sight. The next door neighbor is trying to sell his 10-year old house for about $500,000. He’s not getting it. He refuses to accept that while people want the land, no one wants the house; it’s a “knockdown”, even though it’s a perfectly nice 17oo or 2000 square foot house. The property is only worth the cost of the land, and he’s trying to get money for the house as well.
Polymath – so would you take the higher offers, or not?
And if you did, would you be engaging in economic rationality? Or would you be abusing your wealth, as you claim landlords are abusing theirs?
whatever we may think of their respective political or moral qualitites, getting paid for a job and making money as a landlord are not the same economic equation.
Individual landlords may be good, bad or otherwise, may spend all day fixing toilets or may let the ceilings fall in on their tenants heads but they aren’t getting paid for that work as work.
I used to live in Andover Ma. Many of the homes including the one Jay Leno grew up in are being purchased and demolished. The same can be said near my beach house. It is not uncommon to buy a very large home in good condition for 1 mil and knock it down to rebuild. In both cases you have wealthy people paying for the retirement of older folks.
..getting paid for a job and making money as a landlord are not the same economic equation.
I disagree entirely. Is making money in any self-employed manner the same as getting paid for a job?
Why is it not the same economic equation? Maybe I’m not understanding the distinction that you’re making.
getting paid for a job and making money as a landlord are not the same economic equation.
I suppose not, if you want to draw a particular line around paid third-party employment. What would be the point of that? Do I not have a job because I write my own paycheck, instead of doing what I do on behalf of someone else?
Work is work.
Being an active landlord is work (pretty much the same work as being a property manager), but there is nothing inherent in being a landlord that is work (that is, the person who owns the property, chooses whether to rent it or develop it, and gets the net profit of the rental income is not required to do any work other than that).
That some/many landlords are property managers, etc doesn’t make the owning the land part of being a landlord work. Being an active landlord is work, but if you own rental properties and hire a property management company to actually manage the rentals, then being a landlord is not work. Being a rental property manager is work, but it is the same work whether you own the property or work for the person who owns the property.