Housing should not be a speculative asset in the first place. Houses are for living in- and before you tell me about how they are a valuable store of wealth, you shouldn’t need to do that either to get by. Your net worth and therefore your class standing should not be a factor in whether you can have access to the basics of life. That’s why it’s called capital-ism, because everything revolves around capital. It’s designed to self-perpetuate by exploiting the inequalities it produces. There are other ways of life, and they aren’t as pie-in-the-sky as they would seem. You just have to get out of the capitalist frame of mind to understand how they work and what exactly is holding us back from achieving them.
I agree with everything you wrote up to the point of claiming all the US housing problems are inherent to capitalism. Japan is a capitalist country, but Japanese houses are for living in, and Japanese houses depreciate like cars - which is way more sustainable than the US train wreck. There are other ways of housing even without leaving capitalism.
Housing should not be a speculative asset in the first place. Houses are for living in- and before you tell me about how they are a valuable store of wealth, you shouldn’t need to do that either to get by. Your net worth and therefore your class standing should not be a factor in whether you can have access to the basics of life. That’s why it’s called capital-ism, because everything revolves around capital. It’s designed to self-perpetuate by exploiting the inequalities it produces. There are other ways of life, and they aren’t as pie-in-the-sky as they would seem. You just have to get out of the capitalist frame of mind to understand how they work and what exactly is holding us back from achieving them.
I agree with everything you wrote up to the point of claiming all the US housing problems are inherent to capitalism. Japan is a capitalist country, but Japanese houses are for living in, and Japanese houses depreciate like cars - which is way more sustainable than the US train wreck. There are other ways of housing even without leaving capitalism.