“The most generic definition of a commodity is something of value that’s bought and sold. A not insignificant segment of the left uses this generic definition when they say we should “decommodify” housing—it should not be something that’s bought and sold like a normal product.
Hear Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) decry the “privatization” of real estate development at a recent event promoting her Homes Act. That bill, jointly authored with Sen. Tina Smith (D–Minn.), would get the federal government back into the business of building and operating public housing units.
Their debate remarks notwithstanding, there’s no indication that Vance and Walz want to go so far as to completely end private housing markets.
Rather, they want to stop certain types of people from buying and selling housing—corporate speculators in Walz’s case, illegal immigrants in Vance’s. (In past remarks, Vance has also said we should squeeze corporate investors out of the housing market.) Once we get rid of the demand of Wall Street and illegal immigrants for housing, there’ll be more left for normal, decent Americans, the thinking goes.
As I wrote on Tuesday, that’s a mistaken attitude. There’s plenty of evidence that corporate investors and immigrants lower the cost of housing. The former provides the capital, the latter the labor, to get needed housing built.
There’s also no reason to think that a free market would transmute rising demand into ever higher prices. There’s not some fixed number of housing units. Increased demand might raise prices in the short run. But higher prices also encourage more homebuilding. That brings prices back down.
If it was profitable for developers to sell homes at $300,000 a unit and then more immigrants or speculators swoop in and buy houses, pushing the price up to $400,000, developers will respond by building more housing until the price falls back down to $300,000. If they were making money producing homes at that price, there’s no reason they’d suddenly stop just because demand increased.
Over time, capitalist innovation will lower production costs such that more and more housing is available at a lower price. This is what it actually means to make something into a “commodity” and we see examples of it everywhere in the economy.
There are more people and more demand than ever. Yet, somehow the price of common commodities and mass-produced consumer products keeps falling.
Real prices falling in the face of ever-rising demand is what it actually means to “commodify” something.”
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“With zoning codes limiting how much new housing can be built at one time, the size of home-building firms has fallen, reducing economies of scale and construction productivity. Building codes dictating how homes have to be built has further helped to close off innovative construction methods.
Those regulatory restrictions on new supply never went away, with the result being that the price of housing has risen in tandem with rising demand. Additionally, new technology that promised to automate construction tasks has repeatedly failed to take off.
Rather than becoming a commodity, home-building has stayed a cottage industry (no pun intended). Real prices continue to rise and housing affordability has become an issue of national concern debated by candidates for federal office.
In this context, Walz and Vance have decided to double down on the zero-sum nature of the housing market. They say we need to decommodify housing by preventing the wrong people from buying a fixed stock of housing.
This is exactly backwards. Housing supply is fixed by regulation, not nature. If we stripped away regulations on homebuilding, supply would rise and prices would fall.
We’ve failed to make housing a commodity and that’s exactly the problem.”
https://reason.com/2024/10/03/contra-j-d-vance-and-tim-walz-housing-should-be-a-commodity/
“GSA is the target of a new Republican-sponsored bill that would declare “classical architecture” to be the “default” style for new federal buildings in Washington, and classical and traditional architecture to be the “preferred” style for most government buildings across the country.”https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/07/07/trump-conservative-federal-building-architecture-00104985
“In Turkey and Syria, the high concentration of old, inflexible, concrete buildings, the lack of construction oversight, the Syrian civil war, and an ongoing cholera outbreak have left the region vulnerable to devastation. “You already had areas where people were displaced and living in temporary shelters,” said Traub. “In many ways, they’re already really compromised going into the disaster, and now they’re doubly displaced, and don’t have their support mechanisms.”
This is what happens when you end up on the wrong side of the disaster divide, which explains how unequal losses experienced by certain communities and countries following a natural disaster are chiefly due to the discrepancy of wealth and resources, limiting the ability to invest in the very things — strong buildings, weather prediction, rapid humanitarian response — that would prevent deaths. There’s a reason that 90 percent of disaster deaths between 1996 and 2015 occurred in low and middle-income nations, the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction found. It’s not that rich countries are somehow exempt from extreme weather and geological events. It’s that the lack of wealth, and everything it can buy, is what makes a quake or a hurricane or a tornado disastrous, more than the sheer strength of a storm or how high a quake scores on the Richter scale.”
“Turkey sits along two major fault lines, and after a deadly 1999 earthquake, the country passed stricter building codes, but they were not consistently enforced. And that goes beyond builders and contractors cutting corners or using inferior materials. There are also likely inspectors and municipal and state officials who issued permits when they shouldn’t have, or who looked the other way. There are those who lobbied for (and the politicians who backed) amnesty laws for buildings, essentially overriding ordinances in the name of quick construction and profit.
“Earthquakes are a natural phenomenon. Yes, it happens. But the consequences of the earthquake are quite, I would say, governmental and political and administrative,” said Hişyar Özsoy, a deputy chair of the Peoples’ Democratic Party and an opposition member of Parliament representing Diyarbakır, a city near the quake’s devastation.
All of this happened under the rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who, along with his Justice and Development Party (AKP), has been in power for about two decades. Erdoğan made a construction boom the centerpiece of Turkey’s economic growth. At the same time, he has consolidated his power over institutions, the press, and the judiciary. This rapid economic growth, happening alongside democratic erosion, created layers of corruption and government mismanagement that allowed contractors to construct the buildings the way that they did.
“This is very much about the entire system that Erdoğan built — not just the politics of it, but also the economies behind it,” said Sebnem Gumuscu, a professor of political science at Middlebury College who has studied democracy and authoritarianism in Turkey. “The entire system is built around these corrupt networks, crony networks, and it is all levels: local level, national level, local branches of the party, local construction, developers — they’re all in this together.””
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“Construction was also a source of political power for Erdoğan and the AKP, as major Turkish construction companies enriched themselves with government contracts and cozied up to the regime. That construction boom, which fueled other sectors of the economy, helped make Erdoğan and the AKP popular; that in turn allowed him to bolster his own authority, and helped put AKP into power at all levels of government, including state and municipal offices — often the ones tasked with overseeing permits or enforcing construction codes.
Politicians had incentives to approve things like amnesty laws. People enriched themselves through this ecosystem of cronyism, so there was no incentive to make sure earthquake-safe standards were applied. And the institutions that might hold these players and politicians accountable — the press, the civil service, the courts — were being hollowed out and eroded by Erdoğan’s increasingly authoritarian bent.
So, yes, developers and contractors likely were negligent, constructing buildings with cheap materials or designs that could not withstand a 7.8-magnitude quake. But these shortcuts couldn’t happen without the complicity or encouragement of government institutions, all of which knew the country’s vulnerabilities and pushed ahead anyway.”