I'm still in favour of social housing along with private ownership. Ie, I think any neighbourhood within municipal limits should be a mix of privately owned and publicly owned housing, with publicly owned housing being made available to anyone who is homeless on a sliding scale - if you actually can afford rent, you pay some, if you can't, you don't. At least in this country, I'd read that we had more homes standing empty than homeless families to fill them, so it seems pretty stupid that we instead allow more than half a million Americans to have to stay on the streets while so many houses sit empty.

and Marx himself distinguished between personal and private property.

Agree that getting the people into the open structures is the key issue

it goes into a public trust to be used for housing.

Anyway I thought the article was interesting and thought outside the box.

the banks will simply start 'selling' properties back and forth at minimal amounts to avoid losing them or paying any real taxes.

My own suggestion, a year or two back, on another forum, was that taxes assessed on unoccupied properties should grow the longer a property sits empty, which would have a similar effect over time, when the banks would get to the point where they might as well sell cheap, or simply lose it to back taxes. But I'm sure there's a way for the banks to 'work around' that as well.

how artificial scarcity keeps upward pressure on both rents and home prices.

Nowhere is the fraudulent and criminal “oligarch recovery” more on display than in my hometown of New York City. Despite benefitting more than any other community from an enormous taxpayer bailout of the industry that destroyed the economy, financial services, the vast majority of the wealth has been allocated to a handful of oligarchs.

To make matters even worse, American public policy, if you can even call it that, has been to encourage overseas oligarchs to park billions of dollars in U.S. real estate that largely sits uninhabited. Manhattan is a perfect example of this unproductive behavior and misallocation of capital. I covered this theme last year in the piece, Introducing Ghost Skyscrapers – NYC Real Estate Goes Full Retard, where it was noted that:


The Census Bureau estimates that 30 percent of all apartments in the quadrant from 49th to 70th Streets between Fifth and Park are vacant at least ten months a year.

New York City has never been known for its affordability, but a new crop of mega-luxury buildings in Manhattan are redefining sky-high prices. One 57 is the 1,000-foot high building looming over Central Park where an apartment has closed for as much as $90 million.

Jonathan Miller appraises the units at One 57. He said if you were to walk by at night the skyscraper would be largely dark because a majority of the units’ owners are international and don’t live here. They are using the apartments strictly as investments.

So as Manhattan builds eight figure luxury apartment units merely to serve as bank accounts for international oligarchs, New York City’s homeless population soars to a new record high. It’s the ultimate manifestation of how criminal and crony this so-called “recovery” has been.

From the New York Daily News:

The homeless population has risen to an all-time high, forcing the de Blasio administration to house desperate families in decrepit tenements red-flagged by the city’s own inspectors as hazardous.

Since he arrived at City Hall pledging to turn things around, Mayor de Blasio has struggled to confront a long-intractable problem that has only gotten worse.

By mid-December, the homeless census reached a record 59,068 — nearly the population of Utica, city records show. The Coalition for the Homeless says it peaked even higher at 60,352.

The homeless count, according to the city and the coalition, includes 25,000 children. And it represents a 10% jump from the 53,615 in shelters on de Blasio’s Inauguration Day.

So the S&P 500 and New York City homelessness increased 10% over the same timeframe. USA! USA!


http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2015/02/02/the-face-of-the-oligarch-recovery-luxury-skyscrapers-stay-empty-as-nyc-homeless-population-hits-record-high/

Marx knew exactly what he was talking about!

Isn't it obvious comrade! Marx laid the foundation of the glorious movement of socialism!

I feel that she's the most likely dem POTUS cantidate, and if she's elected we won't have to be exposed to any right Wong filth as we fight for our glorious movement comrade!