The lack of housing and development is why NYC is one of the most expensive cities in the world.

If we treated housing as a right (as we should) and actually built housing then NYC wouldn’t be so expensive.

Why should someone have to commute to Manhattan just work a job that doesn’t pay them enough to live in Manhattan?

Sometime lobbies do things that are a net positive, like this.

> Imagine owning a home, getting sent on military deployment and that home just sitting empty rather than it be legal to rent it out while away.

I’m not sure I see the problem here. Besides, how many active military personnel without families also own homes?

> Imagine your children are accepted to a great college far away but they can’t go because you can’t afford to buy a second home near that college.

No one said universities can’t have dorms.

> The problem is the shortage of housing units.

The shortage of housing units is certainly a problem, but the price inflation landlording necessarily creates is also a major problem.

I understand that, my point is that unoccupied property should have a higher tax rate or an additional tax.

If a commercial space is occupied by a company, it generate tax revenue on the money it makes and the income its employees get paid. If, however, the commercial space is unoccupied it does not generate that revenue so the owner should have to pay additional taxes to make up for that.

The property tax rate you pay isn’t influenced by whether or not the property is occupied.

We need a tax on unoccupied residential and commercial spaces. If an owner can’t get a unit occupied, then it’s time to revamp and/or drop the price to get it occupied. Not just sit on it and wait for times to change.

Lol, it’s really not, they’re two totally separate things.

Lol, you’re still hung up on this? No, it’s not. It’s not antisemitic to be anti-Zionist.

> Oh yes it is

Except for the fact that it’s not.

Anti-Zionism isn’t hateful nor anti-semitic.

Then take it up with NJT. Why should NJT not providing NJ residents with the transit access they need influence NYC’s policy making?

> There are like a billion people around the world who would rather live in NYC than where they live.

No there aren’t.

Not everyone needs to live in NYC, but the city should have the infrastructure to accommodate everyone that wants to.

> not transplants.

My guy, what the fuck do you think immigration is?

I’m not ignoring the strides that have been made globally, I’m talking about the impact we have had with NAFTA and CAFTA throughout Central America over that same period.

> We definitely need to continue to pull people out of poverty globally.

So, the problem I have with this sentence is that “continue” implies we’ve been doing something to pull people out of poverty all along, but the reality is things like NAFTA and CAFTA have caused much of the economic destabilization, growing intensity of poverty, and exploitation throughout the region.

I’m not saying we can’t have new and updated immigration practices and policies (although in an ideal world there wouldn’t be a need for that because borders wouldn’t exist in the first place) I’m merely point out that if we want to address this humanely then we need to address the root causes of this mass emigration, not just sit back and say the only fix is immigration reform.

It’s not as simple as immigration reform. Mass immigration is an unsustainable symptom of global inequality, and there’s no humane way to address mass immigration without addressing the root causes of mass emigration.

> AUtHORITArIAnIsM!!1!!1!1!

Screams the one suggesting we should’ve forced children to go to school during the deadliest pandemic in US history.

> Asia has shown us how little you need for an Internet cafe.

Okay, but we’re not talking about Internet cafes, we’re talking about libraries. You know libraries throughout Asia look and function pretty similarly to libraries in America, right?

What the hell is the point you’re trying to make? South Africa had some of the most stringent policies in the world and Sweden had one of the highest death rates in the world.

The alternative was thousands of dead kids, what the fuck is your problem?

Such as?

“Tenants” are people who need housing, but aren’t lucky enough to have the wealth to buy their own house, “landlords” are people lucky enough to have excess wealth so they exploit the fact that people need housing by inflating housing values and making less wealthy people pay their mortgages all under threat of eviction.

“Capitalism” is a system of exploitation where those lucky enough to have excess wealth get to control and rig the economy in their favor by siphoning wealth from those with less to those with more.

Being for tenants and against capitalism are inherently linked, you cannot be one without also being the other. Any and every measure that is pro-tenant is also inherently anti-capital and vice-versa there’s simply no way around that.

Who said anything about a similar unit in the same neighborhood? I’m talking about a similar budget.

If you’ve got $2k/m in your budget for housing, you’ll be building more wealth by buying something within that budget rather than renting even if the house doesn’t appreciate in value.