I’ve never met a person actually making that argument, though. I’m certainly not advocating removing building safety codes, only the NIMBY bullshit like exclusionary zoning that was literally designed to keep people of color far away from white people. Even the opening paragraphs of Wikipedia page for the YIMBY movement say it’s primarily in favor of removing things like exclusionary zoning and parking minimums:

The YIMBY movement (short for “yes in my back yard”) is a pro-housing movement[1] that focuses on encouraging new housing, opposing density limits (such as single-family zoning), and supporting public transportation. It stands in opposition to NIMBY (“not in my back yard”) tendencies, which generally oppose most forms of urban development in order to maintain the status quo.[2][3][4]

As a popular organized movement in the United States, the YIMBY movement began in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 2010s amid a housing affordability crisis and has subsequently become a potent political force in local, state, and national[5][6] politics in the United States.[7][8]

The YIMBY position supports increasing the supply of housing within cities where housing costs have escalated to unaffordable levels.[9] They have also supported infrastructure development projects like improving housing development[10] (especially for affordable housing[11] or trailer parks[12]), high-speed rail lines,[13][4] homeless shelters,[14] day cares,[15] schools, universities and colleges,[16][17] bike lanes, and pedestrian safety infrastructure.[3] YIMBYs often seek rezoning that would allow denser housing to be produced or the repurposing of obsolete buildings, such as shopping malls, into housing.[18][19][20] Cities that have adopted YIMBY policies have seen substantial increase in housing supply and reductions in rent.[21]

The YIMBY movement has supporters across the political spectrum, including left-leaning adherents who believe housing production is a social justice issue, free-market libertarian proponents who think the supply of housing should not be regulated by the government, and environmentalists who believe land use reform will slow down exurban development into natural areas.[22] Some YIMBYs also support efforts to shape growth in the public interest such as transit-oriented development,[23][24] green construction,[25] or expanding the role of public housing. YIMBYs argue cities can be made increasingly affordable and accessible by building more infill housing,[26][27][28]: 1  and that greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced by denser cities.[29]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/YIMBY

Plus, it’s just a weird argument to be making that we should be just forcefully shipping homeless people out to Bumretch, Kentucky to live in a dilapidated shed. No jobs, no opportunities.

The places where housing is needed are cities. The places with jobs and opportunities. And the cities that are most expensive are the ones with the absolute lowest vacancy rates.

Additionally, why would we actually want zero vacancies? Vacancies are good for the average person. Vacancies mean you can shop for a new home or apartment without finding someone to swap units with you. Vacancies mean your landlord has a credible threat of vacancy if they demand too much in rent. Vacancies give power to renters and buyers. Why would any left-leaning person willingly – much less gleefully – take bargaining power away from renters and give it to landlords on a silver platter?

At this point, I’m half-convinced this “vacancy truth” rhetoric the person you’re responding to is espousing is a psyop by landlords to protect their economic interests.

I only mention North America because the US and Canada are the only two countries I have lived in, and thus have the most intimate knowledge of how their urban land use policies work.

But even outside of North America, many places have some form of restrictive land use policy. In the UK, I know they have the council system, where there’s a local council that has veto power over every single development. It may not be the same form as North American zoning, but the net effect on making it de facto illegal to build enough housing.

I’m also aware of many other European countries having strict land use policies that make it extraordinarily difficult if not impossible to build denser housing, hence why many European cities (cough cough Amsterdam) have ludicrous housing crises.

Japan is perhaps the most notable exception that I’m aware of. In the 1980s and 1990s, they had the mother of all real estate bubbles burst, which devastated their economy, and the lesson they learned was they needed to make it easier to build housing to avoid a similar thing ever again occurring. They made land use policies uniform and quite permissive at the national level, allowing people to build most housing by right in most locations. The result? Tokyo, despite being the most populous metro area in the world, is actually remarkably affordable, even to minimum wage earners.

If housing is expensive where you live, and most of the land is tied up in single-family homes, what’s stopping people from just converting their homes into plexes, or straight-up selling to someone who will turn a couple single-family lots into an apartment complex that houses hundreds?

If you’re anywhere in North America, chances are it’s literally illegal to do so, because of restrictive zoning and other NIMBY land use policies that make it literally illegal to build enough housing in the places that need it most.

So the solution, then, is to make it legal and easy to build housing so people don’t have to fight over scraps.

Some squatter who bought the rights to it for two twigs and a raspberry back when they were first selling off name rights 200,000 years ago

And things like vertical bifacial solar panels can work especially amazingly on grazing land that isn’t suitable for crops.

Counter-intuitive as they may look, they actually have a number of benefits:

1. The panels face east and west, meaning they generate peak power in the morning and evening, which corresponds to peak demand => less need for energy storage to bridge the gap between the mid-day peak in production from traditional PV and the aforementioned morning and evening demand peaks.
2. The panels are vertical, which makes them easier and cheaper to maintain, as dust, snow, and rain naturally shed from their surfaces.
3. The panels get less direct energy during mid-day, keeping their surfaces cooler. Turns out cooler solar panels are more efficient at converting light energy into electrical energy.
4. The arrangement lends itself very naturally to agrivoltaics, which means you can derive more yields from a given piece of land and use less land overall than if you had segregated uses.
5. The compatibility with agrivoltaics allows farmers to diversify their incomes streams and/or become energy self-sufficient.

You might like single transferrable vote (STV), then. You have districts with several seats in them (preferably ~5), and then do a ranked-choice ballot to select the candidates who will fill those seats. Key advantages over proportional representation are that it maintains the idea of a constituency and that it maintains voting for individual candidates, not just parties.

Downside, of course, is that it’s not as proportional as proportional representation, but it still achieves pretty proportional results. That’s the tradeoff for maintaining constituencies and individual candidates.

Exactly. When the accused has paid off half the jury, you shouldn’t put much stock in the verdict.

The only thing I care about when determining whether something is a genocide is the facts of the case (which are overwhelmingly in favor of describing the Uyghur genocide as a genocide), not the outcome of a highly political vote by countries all with their own motives and interests.

Imagine if someone defended nazis with “they were calmly denying the Holocaust”. I’ve seen far too many tankies denying the Uyghur genocide every chance they get. Like you say, it doesn’t matter the tone; genocide denial is itself a line you don’t cross.

They’ll ban you for acknowledging the existence of the Uyghur genocide, for one

Edit: wording

How do so few people in this comments section see the obvious satire?? It’s clearly making fun of both landlords and absurd tipping culture.

I agree that I think worker coops elegantly solve certain problems (notably the principal-agent problem), but they also have certain drawbacks. Notably, they have more difficulty raising funds, they tend to be more risk-averse, they tend to be more growth-averse (people don’t like to dilute their own stake within the company with more people, but this means they don’t typically scale as easily or quickly to benefit economies of scale), and they tend to pay worse than hierarchical companies (counterintuitive as that may seem at first if the whole goal of market socialism is to have workers get more of their value back).

So is the solution to just throw our hands up and say, “Screw it, nothing we can do but let hierarchical organizations win”? Not quite. We still do see plenty of successful coops, notably in the form of credit unions. We also have unions and syndicalist solutions. We still have minimum wages (which are supported by most economists, as it turns out you can raise minimum wages a certain amount without raising unemployment because there’s often a non-zero amount of monopsony power in the labor market).

Further, I do think a Georgist system would empower labor much more than now. Without a housing crisis (thanks to LVT and YIMBYism), with a citizen’s dividend, with quality public education (education has positive externalities and thus deserves a Pigouvian subsidy), with more jobs (thanks to more economic growth and less rent-seeking), and with public works projects (essentially Pigouvian subsidies for things like environmental cleanup), I think labor would have much more bargaining power with employers.

For instance, the professional class right now gets good pay and generally good quality of life , despite rarely having unions or worker coops, precisely because they have high negotiating power with prospective employers.

My inclination is to strive for a more Georgist system, encourage unions, use minimum wages and government spending technocratically, and then see if more is yet needed.

But society already values flexibility as well. As a basic example, I was hired in my current job in large part because I have a relatively broad range of skills within my field, rather than being hyper-specialized in one particular thing. Sure, in an abstract world where replacing employees is frictionless and firms are all megacorps with tens of thousands of employees (or more), tremendous specialization would probably be more commonplace. But in our real world, companies value flexible employees who can respond to changing projects, requirements, conditions, etc., because just firing and hiring a new specialist costs times and money, and many companies (startups especially) can’t afford having thousands of specialists in every niche they touch upon.

Further, even specialists have to communicate and collaborate with other specialists, and they need to be able to understand each other well enough to do so. If you wanted to build robotics to pick tomatoes automatically, for instance, it would be ridiculous to hire one tomato farmer and one roboticist who know nothing about each other’s respective specializations. If neither has any flexibility or breadth of knowledge, it will be very difficult for them to communicate and collaborate to get the project working.

People live in an artificial binary where they believe communism and capitalism are the only two economic systems in the entire world.

I’ll be bold and say it outright: communism is a fundamentally broken idea and sucks balls, and so is capitalism, but both in similar-yet-different ways.

Communism is faulty economics and fails to differentiate between man-made capital and god-given land and natural resources, grouping both as “the means of production”. The problem with this is land and capital have very different properties. Where land (and natural resources) cannot be created and are zero-sum, capital must be created and is not zero-sum. Communism blatantly ignores this and has a zero-sum view on capital, meaning it suggests policies that fail to effectively produce new capital, and thus fail to effectively produce new wealth and prosperity. Further, when the state takes monopolistic control over land and capital (in addition to its existing monopoly on violence), it concentrates far too much power, which is why communist countries keep on becoming brutal dictatorships.

Capitalism, on the other hand, also fails to differentiate between land and capital, but in a different way. Instead of socializing both, it privatizes both, allowing massive rent-seeking and exploitation as a result of monopolization of land and natural resources. It also often willfully ignores that negative externalities and other market failures actually make society, on the net, poorer and less prosperous. Further, this concentration of wealth into the rent-seeking, monopolist class grants them more political power to make it even easier to rent-seek, further concentrating their own power and wealth.

What I want instead is a Georgist system that correctly identifies this distinction between land and capital, and then uses economically proven policies that respect the inherent differences between land and capital.

Yeah, I certainly don’t regret moving to Montreal, as it’s where I met my wife and now where I’m working full-time. But yeah, I got the sense that attending Rose-Hulman would have meant being in a college bubble for 4 years and never doing much outside of that bubble.

http://gameofrent.com/content/can-land-be-accurately-assessed

The key downsides of income taxes, though, are it requires tracking everyone’s income, and it’s very easy to hide income by doing under-the-table work and getting paid in cash. In contrast, it’s impossible to hide land.

Wow, even Terre Haute. Almost went there for college (Rose-Hulman), but decided against it in part because the city itself was so small and sprawling. It must’ve been 1000x livelier back in the streetcar days when things were probably more densely built and less obscenely car-centric.

Also, Trump got elected, so I was like, “Nah, I’m moving to Canada”, which is how I ended up in Montreal instead.

Similar with Montreal. A whole grid of streetcar lines just got torn up and replaced with buses. We now have a nice metro now at least, but it certainly wasn’t made from pre-existing tramways.

I think part of the problem is that what we refer to as landlording includes two separate roles: landlording and property management. The former isn’t a legitimate job, gathering its profits from economic rents borne of land and housing scarcity, while the latter is a legitimate job, earning its profits from the labor of managing and maintaining rental housing.

And so with a sufficiently high LVT, approaching the full rental value of land as Henry George proposed, and a much more YIMBY regulatory environment, I think we would likely see landlords converge towards being mere property managers.

That said, you are fully correct that the non-zero costs of moving would still give landlords a little leeway to rent-seek, and I’m curious what solutions may exist to remedy that.

Regardless of whether it 100% solves landlording, I do think LVT and YIMBYism do largely solve real estate “investment” as the meme talks about. Since LVT and abundant housing stop the “line goes up” phenomenon, and LVT in particular punishes real estate speculation, I think they would largely, if not entirely, eliminate the phenomenon of people buying up land/property just to resell later after appreciation. Because, well, housing wouldn’t appreciate under a sufficiently heavy LVT and a strong YIMBY regulatory environment.

Land value tax would fix this

And abolishing exclusionary zoning, parking minimums, and other anti-housing land use policies