| Every able-bodied human has the capacity to provide their own housing, given enough land area on which to build. But in most places on Earth, the local legal regime has been constructed in such a way as to provide for a means of land ownership, where other people may be lawfully excluded from using the land, or even just being present on it. 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. |