| >Having a house to live in should be. I think their is a confusion of rights and duties occurring here. You have a right to own a house. What you are speaking about is others having a duty to provide you with a house. In particular, we need to be clear on exactly what the duty to provide housing is. For example, there is a significant difference between the government offering safe homeless shelters because society has a duty to provide some shelter, and legally being allowed to continue living in a rental unit that you stop paying for, because this constitutes a duty of the owner providing you with that particular house. Sex is a common idea that helps establish the difference between a right and a duty. Banning gay individuals from having sex is wrong because it violates their right to sex. But no one has to have sex with another person because there is no duty to provide sex. >If it deters people from buying properties for renting to others by making it not as lucrative, it keeps the prices down and makes housing affordable for many. There is also the possibility of regulatory capture. It prevents someone who happens to own two properties from being a competitor in providing rental services while companies that specialize in it and have many properties of the right value to be able to spread out the risk are not threatened by the laws. As someone looking to buy a house, I've considered the ability to rent it should I seek to move verses having to sell it, and it seems that tenant rights where I live (which are much weaker than French law) increase my risk of renting far more than it increases the risk of a company specializing in renting. Its weird to be in a position where I rent but feel there isn't enough protection while at the same time there is so much protection that it strongly impacts the logic of if I should buy. |
There must be a tradeoff there. Everyone requires the legal right to occupy the volume of their own body. It would be completely unethical to make it illegal for a person to exist. Any attempt to do so induces such a person to treat the legal structure as a mortal enemy.
So in exchange for respecting a land property right of another, those land-owners have a duty to provide those who might otherwise develop that owned land for their own purposes with a location on which they may exist. They don't even need to actually build any houses, just to allow for any type of housing to be built without attempting to prevent it. If they fail in this duty, they have abrogated the social contract that allows land property to exist, and those with no place to stand could ethically seize the land property.
The right to own land comes with a duty to supply living space to those whom you would exclude from it. Surface volume is a limited resource, and impossible to defend in large parcels without the cooperation of others.
It would be advantageous for the landowners to form a cartel, such that they could retaliate against renegades that undermine the collective property right by neglecting the duty, because the natural game-theory equilibrium is for everyone to be a NIMBY until the landless people reach a breaking point and murder all the landowners, just to take a reasonable portion for themselves.
If you don't build houses, you need to build strong walls.
Georgists have put a lot of thought into this concept, even if I don't entirely agree with their proposed solutions to the problem.