Due to road closures we had to take a detour to my medical appointment today, down a road I had never been down before. The side of this entire road was lined with so many homeless people I couldn’t even count them all. Many were just sitting together surrounded by their possessions and tents, some were sleeping by the side of the road, there was even a homeless man in a wheelchair surrounded by his possessions.
As we carried on we went past many many empty buildings, houses, apartments and shops that have been lying empty, in some cases for years. As if that isn’t bad enough, in my town a few years ago, they desecrated a beautiful piece of open green land to build a ton of houses on it - now I could understand if these houses were being used. But they priced these houses at £800K each and no-one can afford to buy them so they’ve been sitting empty for a few years now.
The situation is clearly getting worse very quickly, as more and more building are being abandoned all the time, while more and more homeless people are appearing everywhere. Even under capitalism this seems nuts, wouldn’t the building owners rather get some money for their properties than none?
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i read somewhere once years ago about how the logic of a capital asset like residential and commercial property is to not lower prices in this instance, as the expenses associated with its vacancy can be written down against tax liability and that the asset itself can be used to leverage more credit for acquiring additional assets.
i dunno how applicable the first is to the UK, but the second keeps owners from lowering the price if they’re leveraged elsewhere… which frankly, people who own £800k properties probably are.
the perverse logic of always using what one has–and doesn’t use–to grasp for even more is never more clearly fucked than in the hoarding of shelter, land, and commercial/industrial spaces.
Half of england is derelict buildings owned by private equity, the other half is fronts for money laundering. Not even a real country.
I was always hoping the speculative value of this land would crash because most of these buildings or the locations they’re in cant even be used for anything but it looks like the market is propped up on… idk what its propped up on
I dont have the links saved, but iirc somewhere in 2022-2024 there was a 12x difference in homeless people vs empty residences in the US. Even if the number of homeless folks was under counted by an order of magnitude (and you know it was under counted) there would have still been fewer homeless people than empty places they could live
I would guess the actual numbers in the US are closer to 1:1, practically speaking, because so much of the empty housing supply is in places like 50 Miles From The Nearest Grocery Store, Wyoming or Unincorporated Territory, Nebraska. The extra supply is probably a lot closer to the unmet demand in cities.
In the West they don’t consider it a Homelessness problem, they consider it a Homeless problem.
Yeah the derelict building problem is getting ridiculous
Capitalism could easily fix this by mandating discounts on housing based on how long it’s been on the market.
You start at Fair Market Value and then reduce the price by say, 10% of the current value per month.
After a year, those £800K houses would be listed at £226k.
This would be excellent, can’t see them ever doing it though.
Here in Brasil stuff is bleak too for a lot of people. It’s been a while since I visited the city of São Paulo but even then there was a huge amount of people in a homelessness situation, in a city with a shit ton of abandoned buildings and apartment complexes. Legally speaking, our constitution does not tolerate abandoned private buildings, as they have a social use that must be met. In practice speculation runs rampant and people are thrown to the street with little to no care for their well-being. There are multiple organizations that try to make the law abide by doing occupations on abandoned buildings and it’s always a struggle for them, be it because the building might be compromised or because they get harassed by the police or by right-wing fuckers.
One of the biggest and most well known of these organization is MTST (their website, wikipedia - english, wikipedia - portuguese), another one is MLB (wikipedia - portuguese), not to be confused with MBL, which are a bunch of fascists who love to harass leftists at universities then post about it online when they inevitably get punched in the mouth so they can score pity points and further the narrative that the left cannot be reasoned with.
Last year actually, two MLB occupations were heavily harassed by the police and made the news. Here’s one, here’s the other.
Imagining the much cooler timeline where professional baseball players are organizing mass occupations of unoccupied buildings.
The homelessness is the point. It’s not just that capitalism prioritizes potential profits over actual human lives, but the existence of homeless people is both a threat to workers and a potential source of their replacements. Gotta keep in line and don’t rock the boat otherwise it might be you standing by the side of the road holding a sign that says “hungry, anything helps, God bless”
As well as being part of the economic calculation for profitability. Think of all the cases of social murder alongside and resulting from this. Market forces essentially cull millions of people for upsetting balances of worker-reserve army of labor or just being elderly and unable to “contribute” (especially those who are too poor to remain as consumers after retirement)
I’m guessing that what the overall real estate asset inflation is in the US of A, it’s at least as much if not more in the UK of GB and NI.
Every owner of real estate is going to be looking to boost the value of it. The more they own, the more they will be looking to do this. Renting for higher prices demonstrates a higher land value. Depending on what their exemptions (redundancies?) are, it may be a more lucrative prospect to hold out on renting while eating the property tax as a loss.
And of course this is fueled by everybody’s ideal tenant/buyer is the transnational haute bourgeoisie, the kleptocrats of all nations who have seemingly limitless money and buy or rent up housing that they’ll never use for more than a tiny fraction of the year. They’ll exchange and circulate assets as stores of wealth, and exploit every tax loophole and write-off they can in the process. It’s like the Airbnb effect, writ large.
In the transition from a mass-market economy to a luxury (or two-tiered) economy, housing is no exception.
It’s been a while since we heard from the Autonomous Nation of Anarchist Libertarians, we need them back more than ever now.
