Anonymous asked:

No, gentrification is the result of a fight over positional goods. Giving people money doesn't help when the thing they're competing over will always be scarce.

argumate answered:

In a hypothetical society where everyone is equally wealthy, no one would be forced to leave their home due to rising rents.

In a hypothetical society where everyone is equally wealthy except for a small number of billionaires, then at most a small number of people etc.

In our current society with a great disparity of wealth levels, etc.

[mitigatedchaos]

It isn’t a 100% positional good.

You can actually build more housing units, if you’re allowed to.

Not uncoincidentally, this would also lower housing costs and the risk of gentrification in the first place, or at least lower damage associated with it.

Or we could just continue not building new housing units and simultaneously say white people leaving an area bad and also that white people moving into an area is bad.  Surely this will help the poor, somehow.

[flakmaniak]

I get really annoyed when I hear that “housing is a positional good” stuff. No, it isn’t. First off, obviously not having a house sucks. (Ok yes presumably no one is saying that “housing at all” is positional.)

But second off, no, even “nice housing” isn’t a positional good. I currently live in a nice house in a nice suburb. This would be no less of a boon to my quality of life if more people got to do so. (I can hear you guys revving up the “well it’s impractical to structure society so that everyone can live in a suburb” arguments, but that’s not my understanding of what a positional good actually is.)

Anyway, I have an actual, real, non-social-status interest in having things like “a bunch of rooms as opposed to two” and “a decent-sized kitchen” and “a nice backyard” and “a placid neighborhood that is quiet and that you can walk around at 3AM without running into anybody”. (Well ok it’s sometimes not quiet but that’s neighbors’ lawns being mowed/leafblown/whatever by presumably-poorly-paid immigrants.)

Anyway the point is, “having trees around” (I live on a hill with plenty of trees) is actually Just Nice, regardless of whether I have more trees nearby than other people.

Again, you can scream “status!” all you want when looking at pictures of my neighborhood, but that doesn’t do anything to diminish the aesthetic and practical value of living here. (And yes, I’m in walking distance of a grocery store and the town center, about a mile each, so the “can’t do anything” argument falls apart too.)

(I guess this has bled over into being annoyed at the suburb-hate; not sure if the suburb-haters just have totally alien preferences or if they’re thinking of different styles of suburb. But I can attest that the one I live in is quite nice, and the “suburbs are hell” objection always rang false to me for that reason. Maybe most of them are hell, and I lucked into one of the nice ones.)

I guess the last move in the game is to say that wanting more than 9x9 feet to live in is bourgeois, huh? Something about how it’s Inherently Evil to like taking walks under the trees on cloudy days to buy snack food at the supermarket. I guess I can’t compete with deontology.

[mitigatedchaos]

I guess the last move in the game is to say that wanting more than 9x9 feet to live in is bourgeois, huh? Something about how it’s Inherently Evil to like taking walks under the trees on cloudy days to buy snack food at the supermarket. I guess I can’t compete with deontology.

Well, logically, if one demands unlimited right of reproduction, then that could be the conclusion one comes to.

But I think it’s being driven more by other concerns.  These anons going in to Argumate’s blog seem to be totally unaware of the idea that one can build taller (which is also a way to get more square footage).

Land is a lot more limited, but it’s possible to build buildings with dozens of floors.

There’s this idea that “there’s only so many housing units to go around” and “the rich are hoarding them all” or something along those lines.  That isn’t really true, and the rich aren’t necessarily as rich (or perhaps, there aren’t as many of them) as people think there are.  There is no adequate stock of rich people houses that we can just seize and be done with it.

And quite frankly, it ignores a really, brutally obvious policy that could be applied if rich people keep building “too many” big rich people houses while poor people don’t have enough housing units - pass a luxury tax for large or expensive housing units and award that money as tax credits to developers building more affordable housing.

I’m not saying that’s an optimal policy, either.  It’s just way less dumb than not building new housing because rich people might do it.

People might object, too, that the taller buildings won’t have enough transport/etc infrastructure - so make them take out an infrastructure deposit into the municipal fund instead, again, this is a problem that can be solved.

Now, it’s true that there will still be some fighting over hot spots.  But that hurts way, way less if the rest of the housing is outrageously priced.