There’s a lot of talk about building more homes to address the housing crisis, even if that means more rampant clearcutting…but is a lack of housing really the root cause, or is that just a distraction to the real issue - that of wealth inequality and asset consolidation?
The problem isn’t a shortage of housing, it’s the fact that a huge portion of the housing that exists is owned by very few people who deliberately keep it vacant in order to decrease housing supply and drive up values for that which is available so that they can charge more to rent or sell.
For every one unhoused person there is in Canada there are over 6 vacant, empty homes, and in the states it’s a whopping 28 to 1 ratio. About 10% of people who own homes, or 6% of the population, own more than a third of all the housing that exists, which is massively disproportionate.
We have more than enough homes to meet everyone’s needs in society and then some by a very comfortable margin, but making it available would increase housing supply to above market demand, which would bring the value of the properties already owned by the wealthy down, and that’s a problem for them. The wealthiest of people use their wealth to purchase more assets, which are often deliberately kept vacant or used as vacation homes to drive up their value. Not only does this hyper-inflation through manufactured scarcity make it difficult for single-home owners to get by and harder for first-time home buyers to get in at all, it then justifies unnecessarily high rent prices in a rentier capitalism scheme in which the homeowners wealth is sustained by the working class simply meeting their basic needs.
No, we don’t need to log more or destroy and develop more ecosystems in order to build more overpriced ‘affordable’ housing, nor should we be normalizing second or third home ownership and vacant properties during a housing crisis. Instead, we need to address the severe wealth inequality and asset consolidation of the wealthy elite that creates artificially high housing values in the first place that are then weaponized against the average person in the working class.
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