And the vast majority of people who do buy a home sell it before they've paid off the mortgage, and do so at a financial loss once the middlemen are paid (a loss disguised by the fact that much of the apparent appreciation of real estate is just keeping up with inflation)
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Replying to @arthur_affect
@arthur_affect what are you trying to prove by saying this? That people with investments in real estate are just as economically vulnerable as the people who they would evict? Who are you trying to protect by arguing semantics with people who believe housing is a human right?1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @AstronomyBeck
I'm not some huge fan of landlords but "Everyone should just own their own home" is an obviously unworkable idea The realistic option to replace private landlords is public housing or housing co-ops, both of which take effort to set up
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Replying to @arthur_affect @AstronomyBeck
"Everyone deserves a home that can't be taken away" being an "obviously unworkable" idea seems like a pretty strong statement against any current system... When the pragmatic choices means vulnerable people still die, you can see how people end up radicalized.
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Replying to @decoy_orange @AstronomyBeck
A social right to housing in the abstract is a distinct concept from everyone being the private owner of a homestead
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I mean, look, having an absolute right to *one specific house* doesn't actually get you very much, if you live in a society where you have to have a job, and if the jobs around where your house is all disappear
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This is an actual issue in, say, China, which did theoretically guarantee your right to live in your registered homestead (hukou) during the Mao era, but this law became a dead letter when huge numbers of people migrated to the cities in the 80s for jobs
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So you have millions of homeless people who *in theory* have guaranteed housing thousands of miles away, but this does them no good in their current situation - the equivalent of undocumented immigrants within their own country
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Replying to @arthur_affect @AstronomyBeck
I get what you're saying, but I'm hearing: "I'm sorry, it's impossible to add this feature without rewriting the product." In China's example, you have an argument against jobs and allowing for trading of homes... It's possible to dream bigger, though it might not be easy
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"Houses are a human right" "Oh, we can't do that because of jobs" "Why do we need jobs again?" I think people become radicalized when they try to fix things and keep finding it propped up by the surrounding problems. Replacing the whole thing starts to look very tempting.
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I am in favor of housing as a human right but I don't think universal home ownership is a good model for it, if only because I also think of migration as a human right
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And I feel like a lot of the sloppy way people talk about this is covering over some pretty big philosophical/cultural splits among the left (is your image of the utopian lifestyle a settled village or a wandering tribe)
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In any case, though, if you're saying "Let's abolish jobs!" then that's a bigger thing than abolishing landlords and the shape of whatever you do with housing or food or all the rest of it depends on what that looks like
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