agree with you, how would it work otherwise? if rent still works, who are we paying rent to that's not paying into all the negative stuff you mentioned?
Of course not everyone should own a house, but 90% owner occupied/10% rented it the right mix.
Housing in most western economies today is a ponzi scheme - a deeply immoral ponzi scheme, perpetrated by politicians with large housing portfolios who stand to benefit from the immoral corruption of the ponzi.
The first thing to do is point the finger at the landlords who are buying up houses and who think of themselves as good people and let them know they are the toxic perpetrators of the ruin of the fabric of our society. Every houses a landlord owns in a house that a young family will never own. When you own houses you own families like serfs.
> The goal of society should be 90% owner occupied.
Why 90%? Why not 85%? Why not 95%? Why not 70%? Why not 99.21237%? Where'd 90% come from?
What if 11% of the households genuinely want to rent? Have rental prices skyrocket forcing people into the complications of buying, holding, maintaining, and selling real estate?
I could not ask their sons to fight and die for the properties of the wealthy.
Lee Kuan-Yew, the former Prime Minister of Singapore said:
“Soon after separation, I resolved to enable every household to own its own home. If we were going to get the people to take National Service seriously, I could not ask their sons to fight and die for the properties of the wealthy. We worked out a personal savings scheme that allowed them to own an apartment painlessly through installments over 20 years. We sold the apartments to them at below cost to enhance their assets. Today, 95 per cent of Singaporean households are homeowners. It has immeasurably increased their wealth and our social stability. Without home ownership, we would have become like Tokyo, Seoul or Hong Kong, where the voters in the cities are disaffected because they pay a large proportion of their salaries in rents.”
Yes, most people own their home. But those homes are small flats in giant shared blocks. Your laundry hangs out the window and there are hawker markets on the ground level where everybody eats because there’s so little room to cook upstairs.
How many Americans, or British, or Australians would settle for that? It ain’t 90%.
Of course Singapore is an outlier, geographically. It’s a tiny island-nation-state. And by the way those ground-floor hawker markets are terrific; when you do go, make sure you visit a few. They’re a highlight. (Take cash!)
Edit: “But at least”, you might say, “the private housing market in Singapore must be sane thanks to this incredibly high level of pseudo-public housing?”. To which I respond, lol, and invite you to browse listings for real estate.
We have friends who live there and a nice (like, nice) house is currently renting for ~$25k/month.
So it's whatever number you're going to pull out of the air at any given moment. Thanks for being honest about it. Because the owner occupied percentage of Singapore isn't 95%. That's just the rate of ownership of citizens. There are these people called "immigrants" who might also participate in the housing markets. They might have a different owner/rental housing dynamic.
You really should have just stuck with your 90% number, because that's really closer to the owner occupied rate in Singapore. But hey thanks for really showing you're just making things up as you go instead of actually thinking things through.
It's sad too because I generally agree the ownership rate in most US cities isn't great and would prefer to see more owner occupied housing units to be built, but people spewing nonsense and making things up as they go really do a disservice to persuading people. Pulling numbers out of the air and blindly assuming that number should be a target probably does more to harm your arguments than helps.
> The first thing to do is point the finger at the landlords who are buying up houses and who think of themselves as good people and let them know they are the toxic perpetrators of the ruin of the fabric of our society. Every houses a landlord owns in a house that a young family will never own. When you own houses you own families like serfs.
Let’s point instead the fingers at leftists and collectivist who have deceived you and tricked you into believing this. This shows you don’t understand economics whatsoever, like zero. You are driven by Envy and anger which is a deep source of evil. The real evil is in spreading such hatred and nonsense.
how do i have shelter in your system?