An important thing to consider if we have any chance at shifting the trajectory of shelter insecurity (abolishing property would be better but we can do taxes way more easily). One thing I’d be worried about is any elderly people who wouldn’t be able to afford to pay the property tax to live in their own home. This happens all the time already, and god knows most of them don’t live in a place where property tax raises proportionately to the land value, and we should consider why that’s a problem.
The elderly are already in a massive blindspot in popular pro-socialized healthcare discourses, and even “developed” healthcare systems struggle to find support and housing for people as they age. If we start using these sorts of indirect eviction tactics as a means of transferring wealth to the younger middle class via affordable property ownership, many of those people will straight up be displaced into deadly living conditions. I can imagine how this sort of system would make us more vulnerable to the state as we ourselves aged.
Policies like these could easily be used to divert attention from other socialized programs and services that could be improved in a way that generates greater material security more generally, but whose effects would be less immediately apparent to the kinds of people who could even afford an inexpensive house.
Add the tax but use some of the money to build a shit ton of government housing like the UK did after WWII. Their housing problems only started after they stopped building subsidized housing and started relying on the market (lots of other factors, too, but there is a strong correlation on the timing here).
Yes, that is what I’m saying. When I say that this idea of a property tax that is oriented toward increased property value exclusively runs the risk of satisfying more affluent young middle-class people who are really just expressing aggrieved entitlement to the way of life that their parents and grandparents enjoyed.
A common liberal tactic to disarm broader wealth distribution and social welfare movements is to satiate an element of their criticisms for a substantially powerful group within that movement. Think about how the New Deal disproportionately benefitted white labourers and effectively dissuaded broader socialist and anticapitalist sentiments that had grown in the previous decades, or how queer marriage rights afforded security to property-owning gay men who are now the most conservative-voting queer demographic.
That there is such a risk of victimizing vulnerable elderly people, a group that has BTW been increasingly devalued since COVID started, means that if this policy satisfies enough voters specifically – which is to say suburbanites – it could effectively disarm the accompanying reforms that recognize the interlinked issues of shelter unaffordability and insecurity, healthcare services, education, and food insecurity while simultaneously normalizing policies that disproportionately harm specific groups. Programs exactly like what you referenced here were eroded by those same means, and the luxury of suburban home ownership itself was an immenseley effective tactic in disarming labour unions in the mid-twentieth-century US.
I agree that the elderly are often overlooked in this discussion since so much of the housing discourse revolves around boomers that own property and outright dismissing the fact that a large contingent of them are rolling right into infirmity with just about no retirement.
I think nursing homes are going to have to function differently in the coming years to accommodate this, and it’s not going to be easy. Breaking apart the current health"care" bureaucracy will free up a lot of medical staff to practice actual medicine rather than just push insurance paperwork, but the lack of people overall will require leveraging of technology to fill the gap. Technology that is currently being used to burn up our aging infrastructure for the benefit of the Epstein class.
The next few years are going to be filled with grueling work just to ensure we don’t have collapse of social order.
An important thing to consider if we have any chance at shifting the trajectory of shelter insecurity (abolishing property would be better but we can do taxes way more easily). One thing I’d be worried about is any elderly people who wouldn’t be able to afford to pay the property tax to live in their own home. This happens all the time already, and god knows most of them don’t live in a place where property tax raises proportionately to the land value, and we should consider why that’s a problem.
The elderly are already in a massive blindspot in popular pro-socialized healthcare discourses, and even “developed” healthcare systems struggle to find support and housing for people as they age. If we start using these sorts of indirect eviction tactics as a means of transferring wealth to the younger middle class via affordable property ownership, many of those people will straight up be displaced into deadly living conditions. I can imagine how this sort of system would make us more vulnerable to the state as we ourselves aged.
Policies like these could easily be used to divert attention from other socialized programs and services that could be improved in a way that generates greater material security more generally, but whose effects would be less immediately apparent to the kinds of people who could even afford an inexpensive house.
Add the tax but use some of the money to build a shit ton of government housing like the UK did after WWII. Their housing problems only started after they stopped building subsidized housing and started relying on the market (lots of other factors, too, but there is a strong correlation on the timing here).
Yes, that is what I’m saying. When I say that this idea of a property tax that is oriented toward increased property value exclusively runs the risk of satisfying more affluent young middle-class people who are really just expressing aggrieved entitlement to the way of life that their parents and grandparents enjoyed.
A common liberal tactic to disarm broader wealth distribution and social welfare movements is to satiate an element of their criticisms for a substantially powerful group within that movement. Think about how the New Deal disproportionately benefitted white labourers and effectively dissuaded broader socialist and anticapitalist sentiments that had grown in the previous decades, or how queer marriage rights afforded security to property-owning gay men who are now the most conservative-voting queer demographic.
That there is such a risk of victimizing vulnerable elderly people, a group that has BTW been increasingly devalued since COVID started, means that if this policy satisfies enough voters specifically – which is to say suburbanites – it could effectively disarm the accompanying reforms that recognize the interlinked issues of shelter unaffordability and insecurity, healthcare services, education, and food insecurity while simultaneously normalizing policies that disproportionately harm specific groups. Programs exactly like what you referenced here were eroded by those same means, and the luxury of suburban home ownership itself was an immenseley effective tactic in disarming labour unions in the mid-twentieth-century US.
I agree that the elderly are often overlooked in this discussion since so much of the housing discourse revolves around boomers that own property and outright dismissing the fact that a large contingent of them are rolling right into infirmity with just about no retirement.
I think nursing homes are going to have to function differently in the coming years to accommodate this, and it’s not going to be easy. Breaking apart the current health"care" bureaucracy will free up a lot of medical staff to practice actual medicine rather than just push insurance paperwork, but the lack of people overall will require leveraging of technology to fill the gap. Technology that is currently being used to burn up our aging infrastructure for the benefit of the Epstein class.
The next few years are going to be filled with grueling work just to ensure we don’t have collapse of social order.