Buying a house from a homeowner gives no money to the original builder, or the first human being to inhabit that piece of land. Do you feel guilty about getting shelter without paying the price of admission?
Good! If you bought your home as shelter nothing has changed for you.
If you bought homes as an investment, pricing out families, turning entire neighborhoods into Airbnbs, and destroying their culture you have my sympathies /S.
There is this nice empty plot of land without a house on it. I should be able to pay next to nothing for it because nobody is using it. Forget everyone else who might have been interested in the past. Forget the current owner who bought it legitimately. I deserve it because I want it and don't want to pay a fair market price for it.
I bought mine without any subsidies, grants, etc. I have no desire to give it up, nor any good reason. There's new houses being built all the time, so no one must live in mine specifically.
At the deepest level, the core problem is that people who own houses do not have real empathy for people who do not own houses. They don't understand what it feels like, and mostly they don't care either.
The investors aren't building the houses. They're not developers. They're speculators. They're the real estate equivalent of scalpers buying up all the Taylor Swift tickets and reselling at huge markups. Except they're doing it with shelter, a basic human need, rather than a luxury entertainment product.
I own because I want to live where I am, but I might eventually want to move. If someone builds something that lowers my home's value by 25%, then that's a good chunk of change that I won't be able to repay on the loan if I were to want to sell. I didn't buy because it's an investment, but it acts like one anyhow, whether I like it or not. I'd prefer it if someone else's actions don't essentially shackle me to where I am.
People are selfish; if they make a big investment and you're about to reduce its value, they will fight tooth and nail. Any conversation about 'right', 'wrong', 'moral', it all goes out the window.
It really sucks that so much of peoples' value is often tied up in a single property. It would be a gobsmackingly terrible investment decision, if you didn't need shelter to live reasonably well.
So let's be clear. These people are being incredibly selfish, and that is reprehensible. But they also don't really have a good alternative that wouldn't lose them a lot of money in a time where, if they're not in the class that owns multiple houses, they're already struggling. And that is sort of ameliorating imo.
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