Rent Forever and Love It
10th October 2022
Joel Kotkin reveals that he is a socialist after all.
The implications of the current land grab are profound, threatening the future of democratic institutions and the middle class. These trends are distressingly common across the higher income countries. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reported in Under Pressure: The Squeezed Middle-Class that the future of the middle-class is threatened by house prices that have been growing “three times faster than household median income over the last two decades.” The pandemic drove prices even further, and, in the U.S., housing affordability is at the lowest level since 1989.
The use of the smear ‘land grab’ is illuminating. Apparently, buying land that you can afford and that other people are willing to sell you (without coercion) is a ‘grab’. Purer class-warfare sentiments are hard to imagine.
There is nothing about rich people owning land that ‘threatens the future of democratic institutions’; the right to vote, last time I looked, did not depend on land ownership. Whether or not the ‘middle class’ it threatened by it is an assertion for which neither evidence nor argument is presented–he just says it as if it were an Obviously Bad Thing, a traditional progressive practice. (Ask Dave Ramsay some time about the typical ‘middle class’ 30-year mortgage … and Stand Back.)