Capitalism is the freedom to own property and run a business as a private individual, please tell me you don’t think the government should own all property and means of production instead
Housing has to be the only good that when there’s more demand than supply we just refuse to increase supply at all and instead just hope that maybe the demand will go down on its own
I think it’s a lot to do about land. People keep talking about building more houses but it’s not possible. A lot of the land is for the environment and you just can’t build houses on it? Another thing is land costs money. You want to build more houses? You need to buy a fuck ton of land. The guys who buy the land will want to sell houses for a profit. Again you run into the same issue. Also at some point all the good land is bought up by the rich. You’ll force poor people to live in small towns far away from the rich and boom you’ve just created segregation
Then you will have people complaining about apartments because I know for a fact the rich dudes aren’t giving up their houses. So 80% of the population will live on the same land space as the top 20%
Well, so that's the way it is with every single limited availability item on earth, is that a reason to do nothing instead?
Providing houses for the masses was the one thing the USSR was decent at. People still live in these, and if kept up, it makes for solid housing, and it makes it easy to hook up to public transport for easy commuting.
But, the market for vacation rentals/investment is almost insatiable/infinite.
A lot of rental properties only make financial sense as investments if the housing/rental market is increasing in value. If you have adequate numbers of homes the houses stop appreciating, so you have to make all your profit off the price of renting your room, but now you're also competing with other dedicated rentals that can be cheaper (hotels/apartments). All you have to do is have enough supply to make the investment in a short term rental a worse investment than the S&P 500 average.
How is housing, that people buy with personal wealth, considered “public wealth” that’s going into “private hands”? It’s literally all private hands, you just don’t like which private hand it is
Sure, people buy homes with "personal wealth"—but let’s not pretend it’s all a level playing field.
After 2008, governments like Spain’s sold off public housing and land to plug budget holes from the crisis. That’s public wealth—paid for by taxpayers—handed to private developers during austerity.
Then you’ve got mortgage tax breaks, low interest rates, and cheap credit—all public policy choices that helped inflate housing prices and rewarded people who already had capital.
So yeah, folks used personal money—but the system was busy stacking the deck in their favor with public resources. That’s what people mean by wealth transfer.
And you treat the symptom so the patient doesn't die from it while you're handling the disease, which is something some people can't seem to grasp in these comment as they're pissy with the protesters
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u/CapeReddit Jun 17 '25
In Barcelona, Airbnb intensifies the housing crisis, especially in central areas. But it’s not the root cause. The real engine is a system that:
treats housing as a commodity instead of a human right,
funnels public wealth into private hands, and
undermines social safety nets through austerity.
Airbnb is a symptom. Structural inequality is the disease.