The economists are right: Rent control is bad

[jj23]

Nature gives you those choices...

Man removed the law of the jungle shackles a long time ago....or he was supposed to at least.

 

[bnew]

Logic would suggest if housing was more affordable senior citizens would have already paid for their homes or their family members would be able to house them.

The same goes for the disabled. They'd live with someone else. If you can't earn a living on your own you probably shouldn'teexpect to live on your own.

there are senior citizens who did everything the were suppose to do but now to survive they find themselves borrowing from the equity of their paid off homes until they lose it because they're unable to pay back the loans. there are disabled people with zero ability to hold down any job and if it wasn't for family or government welfare, they'd be on the streets dying. whose this someone else you refer to.. you do know that there are millions of lonely senior citizens and disabled who have no personal friends or close family to rely on. roommate situations are not for everyone.

 

[bnew]

Move or die. Capitalism gives you those choices.

hundreds of thousands are moving to the streets.

 

[Json]

You're talking way late-entry stuff, export industry is not a solid base for a rural community.

You're making up wish dreams. It's not the 1920s anymore. Globalization isn't going anywhere. Any rural community will have to be able to export.

How can you see that America's population grows but think smaller farmland is going to compete against global competition without government tariffs.

Some people are saying there's too much population and others saying there's not enough. I don't have a clue why you're talking family size when there's obviously more people in America now than in any previous point in history. We aren't talking about needing to empty the cities, just shift some of the excess back to a healthier way of living.

America's population has always grown? That has nothing to do with lifestyle changes. Again. You are simply focusing on putting people in homes and not the lifestyle that supports.

The reason we had those cities spread out so far was for economic reason. Cities popped up around where commodities were being mined or farmed. As we move away from oil and mining for a healthier lifestyle, why would we keep building cities in those same areas? The sprawl came from people moving further out and travel back to those economic hubs.

We aren't talking about needing to empty the cities, just shift some of the excess back to a healthier way of living.

This is about health. Returning the land to a forest or making room for more farmland. Instead of having 15 smaller cities around a metropolitan area. We have enough room to shrink it down to 10. Just keep letting homes go abandoned cause well, there was a city here is non-sense and a health issue.

Walmart?

WalMart is NOT a solid basis for a rural community under any circumstances. Again, you're talking the late-entry spasms of communities in decline, you are not talking about how rural communities actually work.

First, the basis has to be to develop the products that sustain the country. The obvious #1 is farming (we will NEVER outgrow the need to feed ourselves), to a lesser extent in some areas it can be fishing, logging, mining, manufacturing in some cases, etc.

Second, for the good of our bodies, our people, and our land, we need to break up the corporate control of farmland (a process that has been driven by corrupt and ill-intentioned federal government) and get the lands back in the hands of the people. The need for more farmers and specifically black farmers has been discussed here repeatedly.

https://www.thecoli.com/threads/his...boyd-jr-versus-the-usda.710060/#post-33722680
https://www.thecoli.com/threads/aft...lack-farmers-are-back-and-on-the-rise.425943/
https://www.thecoli.com/threads/wou...on-how-about-for-your-kids-occupation.580607/
Black farmers in Detroit are growing their own food. But they're having trouble owning the land.
https://www.thecoli.com/threads/com...-some-seek-to-transform-urban-society.698860/

OF COURSE WAL-MART IS BAD!!! That's the point.They aren't going to give up their market share in smaller communities to allow local farming.

I'm sorry if i'm on repeat but you're just making things up. Wal-Mart and other box stores are bad for healthy communities but they aren't going anywhere. Of course, having more locally made farmlands would be great, but as technology gets better, in no way would any smaller farm be able to compete.

The trend is and for the foreseeable future is that box stores anchor the health of communities.

Dollar General is No. 1 retailer for opening stores this year
Campaign Pushes for Fresh, Local Food at Dollar General

In what way am I not taking those things into account? The government's failure to provide those things is a big part of the problem. Suburbs are completely unsustainable and in many cases provide services at much greater cost than rural areas would, but the governments have still directed more money into unsustainable suburban sprawl. If we subsidized family farms and small business instead of Big Ag and other big business, if we put as much money into rural facilities as we've been putting into suburban facilities, there would be a much smaller gap.

I do believe, though, that in the long run the only way to get truly sustainable development will be a complete change in the economy. Otherwise we're fukked no matter where the people go.

You are making wish dreams again. The government in no way forced people from a farming lifestyle into cities. The jobs paid more and were less strenuous.

People aren't just going to out in large numbers and pick up a shovel and make farmland anymore than we are going in mass back to making better quality jeans and t-shirts in factories. People throw away shirts when a button pops off.

 

[bnew]

Nature gives you those choices...

false equivalence, in nature just as before capitalism's worldwide pervation. a person or family could build shelter damn near anywhere they wanted to and stay there for as long as they could survive. Now you can't build shelter anywhere without the states permission and producing enough for society that they grant you someplace to dwell.

 

[Pressure]

there are senior citizens who did everything the were suppose to do but now to survive they find themselves borrowing from the equity of their paid off homes until they lose it because they're unable to pay back the loans. there are disabled people with zero ability to hold down any job and if it wasn't for family or government welfare, they'd be on the streets dying. whose this someone else you refer to.. you do know that there are millions of lonely senior citizens and disabled who have no personal friends or close family to rely on. roommate situations are not for everyone.

It's almost like you didn't read what I said. Government assistance and family.

It's a better use of resources to protect our younger generations going forward than the boomers and lost generations who put us here in the first place.

 

[Strapped]

"In the long run, the key to making housing more affordable is to build more homes. "

I disagree. Unless you somehow manage to vastly outpace the market (which looks quite unlikely), then building more homes will not keep you very far ahead of speculators, flippers, and the such, who will continue to buy low, hold the properties unavailable to the people who really need them, sell high, and then buy low in the next inevitable crash.

The issue is that the people who NEED affordable housing do not have excess money just sitting around to buy up said housing when it becomes available. In fact, they are the ones least likely to have money during economic downturns and market crashes, which is when those houses are available cheap. Instead developers, speculators, house-flippers, people buying 2nd and 3rd homes, they are the ones who keep snatching up that shyt and can afford to sit on it until it becomes profitable. Right now many cities are already at 30-40% of homes being owned by people who don't live in them. As the wealth gap continues to increase and wages continue to stagnate, I expect that number to climb to 50% at least. All building more homes will do is make that number climb faster.

Rent controls aren't the solution either. Home ownership is the solution.

How will people buy a home when wages are so low

 

[Consigliere]

I don’t think that anyone is entitled to live in their own home. Key word being “own.”

Instead of rent control which incentivizes the wrong activity from both renters and landlords we should be pushing to build/ convert more 2+ bedroom housing units.

 

[Json]

Just enforce housing standards. So many abandoned homes have owners who don’t keep them up cause they aren’t living in the area or forced to.

instead of building new homes. Take them and fix them and sell them at lower cost.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

How will people buy a home when wages are so low

Yep, one of the biggest problems and it's an intentional part of the system. Keep wages low so the wealthy keep more profit for themselves AND the working class are unable to afford their own home so the wealthy can make money off of them a sending time charging them rent.

You're making up wish dreams. It's not the 1920s anymore. Globalization isn't going anywhere. Any rural community will have to be able to export.

Things aren't a way just because you say so. There's literally zero reason to insist that is any sort of rule. You can see what reliance on exports is doing to rural communities RIGHT NOW, have you not heard how fukked over farmers are by Trump's trade wars?

How can you see that America's population grows but think smaller farmland is going to compete against global competition without government tariffs.

How to make family farmers livable again is a multifaceted conversation and you aren't even handling the basics yet. First off, the biggest threat to family farms is NOT overseas competition, not even close. If you actually paid attention to the issue, the biggest issue by far is unfair competition from large domestic players, who get massive government subsidies which allow them to undercut prices, push through laws that intentionally make life difficult for smaller farms, engage in corruption that puts smaller farms in danger, and then buys out their land at discount prices once they've driven them into the red.

You really need to read some of the threads I posted to see how purposeful that shyt has been.

America's population has always grown? That has nothing to do with lifestyle changes. Again. You are simply focusing on putting people in homes and not the lifestyle that supports.

Yes, America's population has grown which kills your idea that there aren't enough people to populate rural regions. As for the claim that I'm not focusing on lifestyle, you don't seem to understand what I already explained to you on that front.

The reason we had those cities spread out so far was for economic reason. Cities popped up around where commodities were being mined or farmed. As we move away from oil and mining for a healthier lifestyle, why would we keep building cities in those same areas? The sprawl came from people moving further out and travel back to those economic hubs.

Oil, as I pointed out to you before, is a quite recent commodity and wasn't responsible for many meaningfully long-lived communities anyway. Mining can rightfully be marginalized to a degree but the need will likely never go away, just look at how much mining needs to be undertaken to support current technology.

This is about health. Returning the land to a forest or making room for more farmland. Instead of having 15 smaller cities around a metropolitan area. We have enough room to shrink it down to 10. Just keep letting homes go abandoned cause well, there was a city here is non-sense and a health issue.

That's simply false, moving people into larger, denser cities is worse for health AND less environmentally sustainable. I already pointed that out to you in a couple links. A larger breakdown would force you to see how urban concentrations often require longer supply chains rather than shorter, how moving people away from natural areas tends to cause their health to degrade (due to worse air, more sedentary lifestyles, and in some cases worse diet), and most importantly how moving people away from land tends to lead to worse uses of that land rather than better. One of the primary reasons I argue for a more diverse rural future is because it has been demonstrated over and over that the more people you move out of the land and the more mechanized agribusiness you replace them with, the WORSE the land is treated. Reducing labor almost inevitably leads to increased use of machines and chemicals - more soil loss, more petrochemical burning and air pollution, more pesticide, herbicide, and fertilizer use, and less efficient use of land.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

You are making wish dreams again. The government in no way forced people from a farming lifestyle into cities. The jobs paid more and were less strenuous.

People aren't just going to out in large numbers and pick up a shovel and make farmland anymore than we are going in mass back to making better quality jeans and t-shirts in factories. People throw away shirts when a button pops off.

This conversation is very frustrating because YES, the government did play a large role in incentivizing the rural-to-urban transition. (As did many other shytty factors, like the stealing of 90% of Black land, evil racist sharecropping conditions, corrupt subsidies, the purposeful bankrupting of small landowners in order to get their land, and many other factors.)

I'm almost interested to know why you think people throw away shirts when buttons pop off rather than simply spending 90 seconds to fix the button like they used to. Yet I'm afraid you're likely just going to repeat logic that could have come straight out of 1950s corporate advertizing campaigns, and yet believe that your logic is actually logically and not just corporate boilerplate meant to get us to spend more in order to prop up their necessary constant-growth model.

You keep saying things as if you're so certain that you're right, so I have to ask a serious question. How did you learn about the history of the rural-urban transition that has been occurring for the last 130+ years in the USA and various longer and shorter times elsewhere? How many books have you read on the issue? How many farmers and historians have you heard speak on the issue? How do you know whether your opinion on the issue is something that actually reflects the last 130 years of reality, or is simply the exact shyt that corporate bodies and the politicians they corrupted wanted you to believe so that you might follow their agenda?

If you haven't studied the issue in depth, do you listen to those who have, and keep your mind open to the possibility that your preconceived notions about how all this shyt went down may be wrong?

 

[Json]

This conversation is very frustrating because YES, the government did play a large role in incentivizing the rural-to-urban transition. (As did many other shytty factors, like the stealing of 90% of Black land, evil racist sharecropping conditions, corrupt subsidies, the purposeful bankrupting of small landowners in order to get their land, and many other factors.)

I'm not saying the government didn't help. I'm saying the reason it started wasn't some government cabal to destroy small farms.

Historically the move from hunter-gather to small cities is what started civilization's progress.

Just like with moving west. It started with just smaller bands of people heading west for gold and commodities then the government started to pay/propagandist people to come west to settle the land.

Socities give up on certain ways of life. That's natural.

I'm almost interested to know why you think people throw away shirts when buttons pop off rather than simply spending 90 seconds to fix the button like they used to. Yet I'm afraid you're likely just going to repeat logic that could have come straight out of 1950s corporate advertizing campaigns, and yet believe that your logic is actually logically and not just corporate boilerplate meant to get us to spend more in order to prop up their necessary constant-growth model.

I worked for a company that worked in recycling clothing for manufacturers overseas. Most of the clothing wasn't in bad shape. Easily fixable.

You have no idea how much baby clothes are destroyed simply cause it was outgrown. Cause your grandmother probably hand-made her baby clothes and keep passing them down.

Again, just like trades, home-economics were life skills that used to be taught in schools. The reason adults don't know how to cook or eat out at a higher rate isn't just a fault of having more disposable income and fast food or the big bad government.

You keep saying things as if you're so certain that you're right, so I have to ask a serious question. How did you learn about the history of the rural-urban transition that has been occurring for the last 130+ years in the USA and various longer and shorter times elsewhere? How many books have you read on the issue? How many farmers and historians have you heard speak on the issue? How do you know whether your opinion on the issue is something that actually reflects the last 130 years of reality, or is simply the exact shyt that corporate bodies and the politicians they corrupted wanted you to believe so that you might follow their agenda?

If you haven't studied the issue in depth, do you listen to those who have, and keep your mind open to the possibility that your preconceived notions about how all this shyt went down may be wrong?

I'm not going to pretend like i know 100% on the rural-urban divide anymore than you can.

I do know that that there are more economic forces in the US over 130(like the destruction of public transit) years than urban sprawl that have nothing to do with government and isn't going to be reversed by taking on BigAg.

 

[Json]

In Inglewood we led a grassroots effort to keep Walmart out of our city. Walmart spent over a million dollars on the special election, over $100 per voter. We were getting glossies from them in the mail literally every day. The opposition spent virtually nothing, all we had was word of mouth and personal relationships. And we WIPED them. By a 2-to-1 margin we kept them out of the city.

Inglewood is a fukking disorganized, somewhat corrupt, and not very politically active city. If we could do that, then many others could do a lot more. Federal legislation especially could make small businesses far more competitive than they currently are - fukk, simple enforcing business, labor, and anti-corruption laws currently on the books would probably drive Walmart out of business. Don't give up on the shyt that needs to happen just because you're cynical.

I could say a lot more but I'll just sum it up in a different message.

Inglewood is in California. While it's difficult, you have options that other parts of the country don't.

Your locational bias is clouding your judgement. You have no idea what it's like to live in the middle of nowhere. Where you don't have any kind of public transit in any nearby city. Without those Wal-Marts, unfortunately many place you're advocating for would die on their own.

The reason segregation held on so long in the South was because those small mom-and-pops white owned establishments were your only options. The box stores, at least originally(80s/90s), freed people in certain areas from discrimination and gave options.

 

[Json]

Things aren't a way just because you say so. There's literally zero reason to insist that is any sort of rule. You can see what reliance on exports is doing to rural communities RIGHT NOW, have you not heard how fukked over farmers are by Trump's trade wars?

I didn't say anything about reliance. I said they'll have to compete. You can adjust how much we export or import but we have to import/export.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

I'm not saying the government didn't help. I'm saying the reason it started wasn't some government cabal to destroy small farms.

Historically the move from hunter-gather to small cities is what started civilization's progress.

Just like with moving west. It started with just smaller bands of people heading west for gold and commodities then the government started to pay/propagandist people to come west to settle the land.

Socities give up on certain ways of life. That's natural.

It's not "natural", in fact it is literally destroying both the natural environment and us.

I worked for a company that worked in recycling clothing for manufacturers overseas. Most of the clothing wasn't in bad shape. Easily fixable.

Again, just like trades, home-economics were life skills that used to be taught in schools. The reason adults don't know how to cook or eat out at a higher rate isn't just a fault of having more disposable income and fast food.

You've got the order backwards though. The use of home economics largely went away BEFORE the skills went away. People didn't just suddenly forget their skills, they stopped employing them due to major advertizing and corporate/societal pressure to turn those portions of our life over to products. The problem with home economics is that if someone is fixing their clothes, making their shelves, cooking their food, that's less shyt you can sell them. There was an enormous corporate push to convince people to stop doing that shyt (combined with other societal trends like wage stagnation and the perceived need for two-income households) that created the problem. The skills were only lost later BECAUSE they weren't being used anymore.

I'm not going to pretend like i know 100% on the rural-urban divide anymore than you can.

I do know that that there are more economic forces in the US over 130(like the destruction of public transit) years than urban sprawl that have nothing to do with government and isn't going to be reversed by taking on BigAg.

And I don't think government is the only or even main factor. I think corporate power is the primary factor, aided by corporate influence on government, aided by other government agendas, aided by white supremacy in the South, aided by technological advances that increased corporate power, aided by cultural changes that prioritized city life, almost all of which were driven by a loans-at-interest based economic system that required the economy to expand constantly or it would die.

I'm not trying to say that government is the "only" factor. I'm saying that if you're blind to how government has helped to create this situation, then you won't see how government used correctly could also help to wind it back. Because it really is an existential issue.