Comment on Tesla Reportedly Has $800 Million Worth of Cybertrucks That Nobody Wants
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 days agoThat has nothing to do with what someone is willing to pay
It has to do with what one is capable of paying, which plays into willingness.
Extortion isn’t involved in free market transactions.
Extortion is an extension of monopoly pricing. If you can threaten someone’s access to a necessary good/service, then you are functionally extorting them.
That’s before you get into cartelization, vexatious litigation, and other hostile business practices
Plenty of people are willing to mortgage their future for something they want now but have no current liquid assets to purchase it with.
As an alternative to renting in a hostile rental environment sure.
But offer them a real supply of public at-cost housing, and I think you’ll discover quite a few people don’t want that mortgage after all.
Even price gouging, particularly in the field of end stage medical care, is a sort of willing payment.
If you need to threaten someone’s health or safety to extract payment, it isn’t willing.
I’m not so familiar with promotion that creates the illusion of scarcity
:-/
Okay, sure.
MangoCats@feddit.it 4 days ago
But what is the cost of housing?
Where do the materials come from to build the housing? Are those suppliers allowed to make a profit? And their suppliers?
Where does the labor come from to build the housing? Are the laborers paid by the job or by the hour?
And the land for this housing, is that obtained from the free market? Anybody price gouging there, or taking kickbacks?
Once this housing is built, it transforms from “cost” to whatever the market is willing to pay. If the land was downtown, on high bluff riverfront, “at cost” for free via eminent domain, one would assume that housing will become quite a bit more valuable than it cost to build the moment it is made available to the open market. How do we protect this housing as “at cost”? Is it first come, first served? Life estates? Transferred to children, spouses, designated heirs?
And, the opposite situation, when the public housing isn’t in a desirable area, and the residents don’t maintain the housing, who pays for the maintenance?
Easy to hand-wave a solution, harder to make it fit in the real world. At least let’s try to be minimizing:
there’s far too much of that already.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Land, labor, and materials.
Via natural deposits of resources.
Via expertise accumulated by individuals through education and practice.
No. Primary accumulation happens when individuals occupy vacant real estate or through violent expulsion of existing residents.
Again, no. That’s not how public housing is allocated or valued.
Areas become desireable through their improvement. Public housing transforms vacant real estate into a desirable place to live.
On the flip side, residents do a poor job of maintaining housing when they lack the time, the expertise, the resources, and the energy to keep it up. This is not unique to public property by any stretch. Private homes also fall into disrepair when the owners lack upkeep skills or the money and time to provide proper maintenance. State and municipal governments pay enormous sums to affect “Slum Clearance” in order to evict and renovate low-income housing into property desirable for high-income investment. And federal governments subsidize the financial wing of real estate even more heavily.
We’re happy to spend absurd GDP-buckling sums to financialize real estate to the benefit of a handful of magnets. Surely you can see the virtue in paying a fraction of these sums to mobilize a professional workforce capable of maintaining property at-cost.
It is exactly the opposite. Given the political authority and the financial resources of a major metropolitan city, providing at-cost housing and maintenance is downright trivial. But acquiring that political capital is the challenge, as you are fighting the economic propaganda of a thousand fiscal parasites who have all grown fat off privatization.
MangoCats@feddit.it 3 days ago
Not just acquiring, but maintaining that political capital. Programs like low cost housing currently cost a great deal of political capital. The majority of people seem not to vote in their own best interests, so here we are.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 days ago
They cost physical capital. They generate political capital, as they create a consistency that will support the politicians who support the program.
Social Security / Medicare are the Ur-examples. Enormous constituencies that love to punish politicians who in any way threaten their benefits.
MangoCats@feddit.it 3 days ago
As soon as you set “cost” for properties, popular / market opinion will make some properties more valuable than your fixed number, and some properties less. If the cost of acquisition of these properties doesn’t approximate the market value, you’ll have the overpriced properties abandoned and the underpriced properties fully occupied.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 days ago
What happened to price being set by individual willing to buy? How did we get back to anonymous markets again?
You can talk “market rate” or you can talk “biggest sucker”. But the wholesale rate is very different from individual sales made under false pretexts.
You’ll have the “overpriced” properties fill up after the “underpriced” properties, with some uncleared inventory unless demand exceeds supply.
But surplus housing is preferable to homelessness.
MangoCats@feddit.it 3 days ago
Your world, maybe. Not the one I want me or my children to live in.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 days ago
What other means is there for primary accumulation if you’re not finding vacant land or taking occupied property?
Are you creating new real estate from nothing?