Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
Bezos isn't going to miss a chance to dick people over. Because apparently he's not rich enough yet.
Imagine what the world would be like if we treated sociopathy as the vividly destructive mental illness it so obviously is, rather than rewarding sociopaths with wealth and power.
Can we finally focus on real estate reform now?
This latest housing crisis has made it abundantly clear that allowing wealthy individuals and corporations to own single family homes is destructive to society as a whole.
The priority should be owner occupied homes. People need housing security. If even the middle class with career jobs can't afford a modest house in their peak working years, the system is broken.
We can attack this runaway housing inflation by doing the following:
Ban companies (including hedge funds, etc) from owning condos and houses. Apartment complexes are still fair game, because society needs high occupancy buildings which require more capital to build and run.
Limit individual ownership to 3 (as an example, number doesn't matter) dwellings. This will curb the rampant "buy for short term rental, parlay into next purchase for short term rental" scheme. We still need rental properties, and small local landowners should be the priority.
Heavy penalties for selling in under 2 (as an example) years. This will also curb the short term rentals due to added risk, as well as curbing the flippers relisting at 30%+ (and I've seen 100%) markups after 3 months.
Each of these wouldn't be outright bans which would potentially too big of a disruption. But in phases, using increasing tax penalties as the stick.
We need to stop treating homes as a commodity. They are a basic essential.
I still don't understand how this hasn't been a bigger priority in government. I wouldn't expect Republicans to care about it at all, but it feels like nobody is giving it any attention at the State or National level. These out-of-control rents and housing prices are insane. I've got a relatively ok salary and I'm barely staying on top of things, but I don't know how the hell anybody else is still holding it together.
Lobbying and self interest.
These reforms may result in housing prices decreasing or holding steady. Which is a plus for anyone entering or laterally moving to occupy. It's a negative for people using housing as an investment.
It's not a stretch to assume that a lot of politicians are in the multiple land ownership territory. And thus, would "hurt" them personally.
Same with WFH endangering commercial real estate. Lobbies and personal interest. Plenty of business owners in politics.
It’s not a stretch to assume that a lot of politicians are in the multiple land ownership territory. And thus, would “hurt” them personally.
More to the point, it will cost them any support among suburban homeowners, which is how we got here in the first place. That's a massive bloc of voters and very few homeowners don't see their homes as an investment
Yes, the "fuck you, I got mine" is the core American voter demographic, unfortunately.
I would add a progressively higher tax rate for each property beyond 2-3.
Probably a controversial opinion but companies should not be able to own residential real estate at all, the reason most people cant get a house is because big companies are buying them up with limitless sums of money so they can rent them out infinitely, its not a free market when the big company will pay 20% over your entire life savings just to make sure you don't own anything.
Not just limitless sums, companies are borrowing at very low interest rates and skyrocketing real estate prices with free money. Consequelty also causing mass inflation. So you're paying for them owning houses.
Absolutely nothing controversial about the truth. In fact, I'd say it's the exact opposite of controversial, at least in this case.
Controversial would be, "if the government won't stop corporations from buying up single family homes, we should do it ourselves by any means necessary." That's controversial.
Not controversial at all. The world would be a better place if residential real estate “investment” didn’t exist.
residential property should not be able to be bought by corporations, there is no benefit in allowing that to happen at all
It's sure beneficial for the rich fucks behind these companies. Everyone else gets fucked.
100% tax over a billion dollars.
Yeah all the $40k/yr MAGAts gonna haaaaaate that
It will not stop. The government won't step in, because they are all in on it. Their money comes first, above all else. The way they treat me homeless people today is how you will be treated tomorrow.
There is only one way to stop the runaway cancer of greed, and it's not by writing angry notes.
I feel like the answer is a tax strike. Most of what taxes do today is move money from the poor to the rich, while occasionally moving some from the middle class to the poor (and constantly threatening to take that away). A tax strike could break all of this pretty quickly, or at least force them to attack and show what they're really about.
A tax strike could take care of a number of problems, like this and the complete unwillingness to address climate change.
Literally straight up evil
How the fuck does anyone even afford to buy a house now? Billionaires keep buying them all out just to rent them out, to buy more houses. It's almost as bad as me trying to use a hula hoop.
This right here is the modern slavery and politicians are condoning this predatory behaviour.
The richer the rich get, the less the rest of us look like the middle and lower classes and the more we look like peasants. Serfs.
The more wealth inequality widens that gap, the more modern capitalism starts to look like techno-feudalism.
And that's really what they want without saying it, isn't it? They don't want us to own anything of our own...work their fields and factories, pay them to live in housing they own, and convert all other possessions into subscription services, all in an effort to create a system where the rest of us only exist as a source of labor and wealth for them, where even what they pay their serfs comes right back to them.
Why should anyone own a home when they can rent them from the capital class?
Fuck this fucking fucker
You're not rich if you own a home. You're rich when you own everybody else's home
So is this guy, like, the Devil? Every headline I see with him is like "Emperor Palpatine is buying single family homes" where I just assume it's for some nefarious purpose that's gonna benefit his regime and dick over a looooot of people.
He wants quarters for his wage slaves, duh.
Waiting for Amazon to pay their employees in “digiscrip” that they can only use at Amazon-owned businesses.
Pay your rent on your AmazonHousing account.
Buy groceries from AmazonFresh.
Health insurance from AmazonHealth.
Welcome back to the coal mining towns of yore.
Lol a big fuck you to all middle class and that includes you too Ryan. Carrying an iPhone and driving a Mercedes on a loan doesn't make you rich if you still have to be in the office mon-fri and slave 9-5.
so sick of this neofeudal bullshit
Boy, he's really trickling it down on all those families' heads...
Burn it to the ground. I would rather burn my whole neighborhood down than have Bezos own it.
disgusting.
Well this isn't creepy as fuck.....
Yeah it’s the human condition. Power corrupts. It always does. It would corrupt me. It would corrupt you. What’s it like to live real life in god mode? I know what you do when the cheats get turned on, because I’ve done the same. But what happens when there is no option to restart the game? Or to play something else? You return to the game. It’s all you have. You become determined to make it progressively worse because you’re average. You have no imagination. You suck. You’re not a leader. You’re a regular dude for the most part and not cut out for this shit. You fuck it up. If we’re in a simulation, it’s the worst kind. One controlled by the simulated.
I used console commands to help play Half Life 2 when I was younger. God was super boring, obviously, and I only used the refill ammo/health thing when I really needed it. I even restricted myself to only using weapons that I had earned access to even though the ammo command gave me all of them. Also, Dolly Parton uses her wealth to buy books for kids.
Bezos is just a really shitty person. Power doesn’t corrupt every time, but it sure attracts bad people at a much greater rate than it does good people. Luckily many good people are also out there fighting to make sure that it’s not only bad people with all the cards.
Time to reintroduce the "guillotine" mod pack.
Meanwhile the republicans want to remove the estate tax