[whittingtonaaon]

I already posted a comment on this, but forgot to answer the actual question. I don’t think it follows that it’s wrong to commoditize basic necessities. Take, for example, food: the reason just about everyone in the western world can afford food is BECAUSE it is commoditized.

I would like the barriers to home ownership to be lowered. On the other hand, I don’t think the rental market is evil. A lot of people can’t afford to buy homes, and without homes for rent would be out on the street.

[criley2]

It's worth pointing out that when you say "people can't afford to buy homes" you don't mean that they can't pay the mortgage or maintain the building ~as well as a landlord, you mean that they don't have enough credit to convince a bank to buy the house and let them pay the bank monthly instead of a landlord.

Countries like China have ~80% home ownership rate amongst millennials (US is like 40%) precisely because they understand this: just because you can't convince a bank to give you a quarter of million dollars doesn't mean you can't reliably pay a mortgage.

[axblount]

The western world gets cheap food because it exploits the labor and resources of the less fourtunate.

Real estate investment is a direct example of wealth concentration. The less wealthy pay a richer individuals rent plus a little profit on top. That person should be able to buy the dwelling directly without a middleman extracting profit.

[closedloop129]

>The western world gets cheap food because it exploits the labor and resources of the less fourtunate.

This is true for vegetables and fruits. But the core calories come from corn and grain that is cheap because of industrialization. The US don't rely on an army of slaves to export soy to China.

Equally, housing could be much cheaper if a bigger share of construction would be industrialized.

[carom]

Let's say you can build a rental unit for 300k. Third parties can't do this now. So individuals can come together, form a collective (LLC), and fund the development of a building they will live in.

Let's say they need 10% down only to do that construction. 30k each. What is the stat, 50% of people have less than 5k in the bank?

It took me 1 year of working with no college debt to save up 20k for a house. That was fast. Where do I live until I have 30k to build? My family? I was working on the other side of the country. What if you don't have family? You are homeless until you can afford to build?

[dleslie]

Housing used to be cheap for the same reasons food was. General contractors and laborers didn't make much, and were subject to serious risk of bodily injury.

Nowadays they're paid well, and that is reflected in the cost to build.

Folks wanting to go back to cheap housing are arguing to reduce the compensation for builders.

[dazc]

Food is commoditized to the point where a lot of it involves slavery (Southern Europe) or exploitation of the state welfare system (UK), etc. So not quite the same.

Without homes to rent there would only be homes to buy and live in, taking all the rent seekers out the market would have a positive effect for most regular people because prices would fall to a level of basic affordability as we had had before 'buy to rent' became a bandwagon that everyone was jumping upon.

You can't introduce such wholescale inefficiency into a market without a lot of people suffering the consequences.

My parents bought their first house for about the same as the same house will fetch per month rental nowadays. That can't be right?

[patentatt]

Do you really envision a world where every person who now rents is homeless, and every rental unit is sitting empty? Is that realistic in any way? The answer is that the market would adjust, prices would come down, different types of mortgages may be created to serve different markets, etc. It seems untenable that a huge percentage of people would be homeless while also having a similarly huge percentage of housing sitting empty and idle. Both things happen now, but if you're talking all renters, that's an order of magnitude more.

[YetAnotherNick]

You are talking about different kind of commoditization. Food processing is commotized, not the food itself. In fact food is naturally immune to have a speculative market as it could only be stored for short term.

[HEmanZ]

Food has one of the biggest speculative markets in the world, with insane amounts of leverage: commodity futures.

[YetAnotherNick]

Speculative market can't change the price of food that has short expiry and long manufacturing time.