This reminds me that both India and China are building a huge number of cities all wired up to collect data on everything, so that they can be micromanaged and studied.
Modi promised to build 100 "Smart Cities" - a lot of it with foreign and private investment dollars.
I interviewed once at a company helping to build "smart cities" in India and in Malaysia. The idea sounded really cool, and I'd love to do statistics for something other than making people buy stuff online.
They actually just wanted a white guy with a Ph.D. to schmooze with clients, and were willing to pay 8 lac/month for it. It was unclear what "smart city" meant to them - the best I could tell it was just spinning up a hadoop cluster to big data the traffic light control systems. (Smart traffic light controls already exist and run perfectly fine on a laptop.)
There is some uncertainty about what the concept means to some people still, but basically it's an Orwellian Neoliberals dream.
AFAICT the idea is that Smart Cities wire up as much as they can to central decision making capabilities - this would include human intelligence about the residents living in the city including how happy they are, how much waste they produce, electricity they consume, where they go to collect mass traffic patterns, etc.
The idea here is that the cities will be able to response to emergencies and opportunities better because they can act as one city immediately. Smart cities presumably can capture individual innovation, but also collective data for collective decision making, and machine/computer information.
The difficulty here lies in the fact that it is supposed to then be owned and operated by private individuals. There is not really a mention of a vote - smart cities are independent of governance structure. The pitfall is that modern senses of the importance of 'efficiency' may lure some into thinking that having the intelligence/data and a well greased economy are enough to understand the underlying population's preferences (on the whole, behavioral economics has proven this false).
That's not to say getting some real and real-time data about an entire city isn't an exciting prospect.
Maximize tax/fee revenue while minimizing operating expenses to reduce the standard of living of all residents as low as possible in an individualized detailed manner just barely above rebellion or property abandonment, at least in practice. Then sell it to the rubes as being a social or cultural change where you can ignore all the tech its going to be the first city on the planet where human nature took a day off and we'll all live together in perfect peace and harmony. Sell the financial benefits "rich get richer" and all that to the leaders, sell a line of BS about human nature changing to the rubes. Its basically an atheist cult in the sense that it operates as a traditional cult WRT somewhat extreme exploitation of the participants, but subtract the higher metaphysical beings marketing message that cults have, or insert big data / big government itself as the higher metaphysical being.
Its like the dichotomy of internet of things. What you ship is a fridge where corporate sends a special packet to make the compressor burn out when quarterly sales are below their target while selling all formerly private personal data gathered to every corporation on the planet for whatever you can get. What you sell to the rubes is fuzzy bunnies of the corporation caring about your organic nutritional needs by ordering orange juice from peapod automatically when it detects a low level or monitoring for expired food or the "wrong" beverages stored inside.
The similarity is the message has nothing to do with the purpose or operation, at a level of dissonance never before seen on the consumer markets.
If it were anything like what you describe, I'd probably have given a lot more consideration to joining. Your proposed policy is likely to be superior to democracy - democracies like Detroit can't even maintain standard of living high enough to avoid abandonment. Plus you can avoid a lot of rent seeking - if consumer surplus can be created by a massive increase in housing (ala SF, Mumbai), locals don't get to vote for rent seeking policies.
In reality they didn't have anything remotely so coherent. It was just a variant of "lets hadoop all 200mb of our big data into the NoSQL for business intelligence insights".
For a working class person with no black income (unaccounted/un-taxed), home buying experience has deteriorated in this housing boom. Builders often don't sell you directly. They forward you to a middleman/broker. You are shown the least desirable units as "available" & the rest all sold out (a lie). You are expected to pay a sizable portion of the price as black money (could be as high as 60%). The promised completion date drags on for years. The whole real estate boom is targeted & fueled by black money owners.
Edit: And there are umpteen number of violations of regulations for earthquake, fire safety, building laws. Almost all builders double sell you the common land in the name of "reserved parking", clearly considered illegal by the court.
It is completely true. Actually, most of the problems in India can be traced back to previous generation (current old generation). They:
1) Did the most corruption. It wasn't that bad before it.
2) Created all the draconian laws to 'correct' Indian culture.
3) Put pressure on current generation to 'own a house' at the age of 25-30, while they themselves like all the people before them got their house at the ripe age of 50-60.
4) Themselves a product and participant of socialist government with anti-private business attitude, they increased the age of retirement for government jobs. You meet one government employee and tell him/her that you work for some IT company and they will mock you for 'getting undeserved salaries' and 'being ignorant of bureaucracy', whether it is for getting a passport or driving license.
Maybe BJP and Congress are the groups you label "secret societies". It is not unheard of for parties to cater to the political views of their most active constituencies.
Cities like Bangalore are worse (relatively speaking) than Silicon valley. Bad infrastructure, horrible traffic, pollution...and yet, home prices are sky high and out of reach for most Indians. A lot of Indians blame software people for this, and they are partly right. With all the multinationals moving in, the salaries went high and with it the real estate prices. Today, it is so bad that even software people can't afford, unless they are ridiculously highly paid.
That said, outside of the big cities there are still lots of places that are cheap to live - if you don't mind cows, electricity problems, internet problems etc.
>> Bad infrastructure, horrible traffic, pollution...and yet, home prices are sky high and out of reach for most Indians. A lot of Indians blame software people for this, and they are partly right.
Not entirely true. I was born and raised in Bangalore. A long before software boom happened here, rents were still considered high for those times, this is because of the economic opportunity this city offers. I'm sure this is true for other cities too. This isn't Bangalore or any other city, as long as there are jobs in a particular city people move in to make a living. This reduces the supply of houses for living, and drives the prices high.
>>That said, outside of the big cities there are still lots of places that are cheap to live - if you don't mind cows, electricity problems, internet problems etc.
Sorry to break out the bad news to you. In most satellite districts to Bangalore like Mysore, Tumkur etc. The prices are almost on par as Bangalore.
This is very true. I have known tenants who adversely possess the property and make owners fight for decades before they are evicted. Generally as long as the tenant is paying rent there are very few grounds on which he can get evicted.
Most of laws favour the tenants(in one sense it is right) but it is not uncommon for them to take undue advantage. And people who rent without a contract of some sorts usually pay the price. Most of them though would rather prefer to keep it vacant than put it in any danger of dispute.
>>Generally as long as the tenant is paying rent there are very few grounds on which he can get evicted.
Not exactly, Most people make the tenants sign a 12-18 months rental agreements these days, with a very heavy deposit amount in cities in Bangalore. Those agreements are pretty serious legal documents.
>Those agreements are pretty serious legal documents.
I agree :) what I am saying is, my observation has been that many people don't do agreements. If you have an agreement with an express expiry date (12-18 months as you say) it is all good. Most people don't. For many people the problem is lack of knowledge. For something as ordinary as renting they don't even consider the need for going to a lawyer/agent and getting a contract done.
What you say about Banglore is opposite to my observation and it makes me happy that people there are smart enough to enter into a contract before renting their house. It is good both for the tenant as well as the landlord.
Noida is also a pretty popular IT city and people renting out their homes make no contract. Even in my own city (gurgaon) letting without a contract is pretty common. Mostly there are no disputes. But when there are they are long and bitter.
Are they counting the vacant half-built chawls in neighborhoods like Chinchpokli or the dockyards? I'd never seen so many half-completed and abandoned housing projects until I moved to Mumbai.
Investments in property is booming in India . Don't know if it's a bubble or not . But I cannot afford one right now (not even as investment ) , reason its too expensive and loan is not my cup of tea and I think investing same money in your own startup will be worth more ( as experience)
Cost gap across needs vs wants in India seems very much inverted as of today.
I've seen so many people living out of real bad conditions , working hard for earning just enough.
But surprisingly they all seem to have good & new smartphones, commute long distances for work and unable to afford a decent sized house![0]
Am not saying its bad for them to own new phones, its atleast a good emotional distraction for them,but reality is only getting tougher for them, day-by-day.
Predatory lending,in india had gotten off fast the last decade .Lots of people have more lots of unpaid credit-card bills.Banks started reporting lots of non-profitable assets.Some of the top private-lenders in india are loosing money by the day.[1]
Value is being eroded of Real estate with both corruption and extortion involved even in remote rural areas!
Though there is not much of stats in public domain for above, but [2] is indicative.
"I think investing same money in ... startup will be worth more"
You are correct on a micro-level but there are also macro-level issues when capital and rent (rent of money) are tied up in non-productive assets. An individual who buys a $1M house cannot put that $1M into a startup, but also on a societal level a bank that loans $100M of mortgages cannot loan that $100M to build infrastructure or a new manufacturing plant or a (large) school. So high price of non-productive assets hurt the macro scale as much or more than it hurts micro scale. Its very bad for the economy when the best thing to do with a pile of money is buy something that doesn't produce anything or grow anything. Its as bad economically as stuffing the money into a mattress.
> on a societal level a bank that loans $100M of mortgages cannot loan that $100M to build infrastructure or a new manufacturing plant or a (large) school
As a technicality, the whole point of modern banking is that banks can loan out the same money over, and over, and over again.
There are limits to that of course. Aside from that, I don't think it changes the bigger pix that "everything" involved in making a non-productive capital investment is unavailable for productive investments. Can't build a rail line thru there, can't that wood and stone into an office building. All that energy and labor invested, you're never going to get a return on that.
I'm not saying a world devoid of art and fun is a good goal, but am saying that going way overboard to one extreme is going to result in blowback.
That is also because the inflation is at 6 - 9%, if they have a US average 2 - 4%, the loan principle will lose its value at 4% - 7% a year. That would straight away mean loss to banks.
Plus real estate is growing at a stellar rate, and probably will till the next 100 years. For India's rate of population and room for economic growth this is anything but inevitable. Heck there are even people who own 2-3 houses in the US. Doing this is Indian is hardly surprising.
Investments in property is booming in India . Don't know if it's a bubble or not . But I cannot afford one right now (not even as investment ) , reason its too expensive and loan is not my cup of tea and I think investing same money in your own startup will be worth more ( as experience)
That's not what the parent was proposing and I think you know it, choosing instead to go to an illogical extreme for some reason. Squatting and a more efficient use of undesired or inefficiently-used property is not incompatible with private property ownership.
It is incompatible. Just because a property is vacant doesn't mean it is "undesired" or "inefficiently-used".
As long as governments continue to rob their citizens via taxes, people will do their best to not be robbed, resulting in "black money" (which is actually "white money" since none of it went to fund wars and murderous statist schemes, as opposed to the "red money" which is tax paid and so did help fund wars and statist aggression against peaceful citizens).
This "white money" will then find a place to be invested where it receives some ROI, unlike the banks and bonds and stocks that have been completely destroyed by government meddling in the economy. That is real estate or precious metals and that's where the "white money" will go.
The entire "problem" (if it is one at all) is created by statist violation of property rights through taxation, in the first place. Further statist property rights violations will only distort things even further. Let's say you introduce squatting "rights". Well now you know what happens? Nobody's buying real estate in your country any more. All the "white money" flows to alternate investments and real estate in other countries that don't have squatting "rights".
It's basic human action. People don't want to be enslaved and robbed from. And they will do everything in their power to avoid it.
Some foundational theories of private property (very influential in the British Empire and the US) would have had a hard time dealing with the concept of vacant homes as legitimate property. Occupying or putting property to productive use is part of some definitions of property.
They might class perpetually vacant properties as abandoned and therefore returned to the common. When New world land was doled out in square mile allotments (The US, Australia..), improving the land was a prerequisite to your claim. This is often thought of historically as a deal: 'you improve this land and we'll give it to you.' But the justifications at the time was more philosophical: you improve this land and you own it, by definition.'
The land was granted to new settlers in exchange for promist to cultivate it. I suppose that the builders did not build their houses in exchange for anything beside money, and have no additional limiting clauses, and are free to do with their buildings what they will.
If they do, though, it's high time to check if these additional clauses are honored.
I think you are putting your finger on a relevant subtlety. When we look back at those policies now we think of it s a deal, quid quo pro. I think it probably did function that way at the time too. But in terms of the philosophical argument underpinning the policy, its was based on the idea that by applying your labour you take appropriate property from the common, or you "make" property or whatnot.
This was based in ideas trying to explain what property is, why one person was rights to it and another doesn't. A wild forest is not property. A farm is. Hence labour, habitation, productive use etc. make something property. It's the kind of philosophy that gets very theological, with precise definitions and arguments between theorists that seem very arcane an pointless in retrospect.
I'm not promoting the theory. It just seemed relevant in the context of a liberal/libertarian quip. These ideas are foundational to ideas of private property, later economic freedom etc. It's part of the history of ideas related to right leaning politics today.
In practice, I'm not sue if this is workable. But if it is, I don't think an abstract sanctity of private property is necessarily a barrier. That unused property makes fro a weaker claim is justifiable by common sensibilities, right or left wing philosophy.
Is squatting totally incompatible with property rights? Until several years ago, I believe the Netherlands had quite strong squatting rights in addition to basic property rights.
Property rights in most countries are mitigated by a variety of competing communal rights such as eminent domain, zoning, and environmental laws. I think squatting rights could potentially protect communal rights in a similar way.
Squatting definitely limits your property rights. Imagine that if your backpack is vacant for some time, and someone put tacitly someting into it, you'd be legally obliged to carry it around.
I suspect that squatting rights only affect obviously neglected property. I suppose the empty houses and apartments are reasonably guarded and are not as neglected as a closed and half-dismantled building. Also, squatting does damage the property, hopefully in minor ways. Imagine that your empty backpack was loaded with pizza slices: totally benign, but you'll have to clean the backpack thoroughly.
> Well, let's just throw out the whole private property concept while we're at it, why not?
Why not? Argument "scope creep" :)
As others pointed out, squatting can be used to keep private property owners (especially of such basic necessities like housing), from hording/speculating.
This level of reporting is really silly. I'm always surprised how common it is to print a bunch of facts and/or speculations/opinions loosely wrangled together with two-bit economics. It's really insulting to the reader.
Even psychology doesn't get this kind of abuse. Can you imagine an article that lists off divorce rate, some happiness survey, psychiatric drug statistics and ties it all together narratively with a single-sentence theory about 21st century loneliness, stressful work lives, the trouble with living online social lives or anything else that an average tabloid reader might suggest as a reason.
Here we have some suggestion that tax evasion is involved, some stats about housing shortages, slum housing and no information relevant to the obvious question: why do people buy flats and them leave them empty?
>Can you imagine an article that lists off divorce rate, some happiness survey, psychiatric drug statistics and ties it all together narratively with a single-sentence theory about 21st century loneliness, stressful work lives, the trouble with living online social lives or anything else that an average tabloid reader might suggest as a reason.
Yes, that's pretty normal actually. People even think it's quite intellectual.
1) It isn't the same situation. The level of corruption and absolute poverty levels are not comparable.
2) Where there are similarities in "first world" countries (e.g. empty housing stock), eyes are very definitely batted. At least in the UK.
3) I would argue that 10 million empty homes in India, where there is significant slum situation, which is basically accepted and regarded as "normal", even in the capital city, is more eyebrow-raising than an empty home situation a "first world" country. I don't actually see anyone losing their minds though.
Similar situation (apart from the corruption and poverty) in Vancouver. Average detached 2-storey home price is $1.27M, average condo is $506k. It's completely unaffordable by the average working person. Lots of condos are purchased by overseas investors and left empty.
Also, I'm not entirely sure why 10 million empty homes in a country with 1 billion people is a big deal. That's just 4% of the housing stock (assuming average of 4 people per home). There seems to be an assumption that you can just put the slum dwellers into the empty condos, which doesn't necessarily seem realistic. (I'm not saying that they shouldn't get decent housing, but I think it will need to be done in a different way).
I'm sure a significant contribution to this are NRI's purchasing from abroad where their earnings abroad give them greater power back home than in the local market. Whilst some people may rent out these properties thus serving that part of the market, others want to hang onto a new build / never lived in property. Some might say this is a form of insurance should they wish to move back, but its most likely just an investment that doesn't serve society.
And yes, this is very similar to investments made in London/New York/San Fran, but wealthy individuals trying to offshore their wealth, although these properties are typically rented out.
As a logic experiment for people in well off countries have a think about what would happen if people built 10 million mansions and left them empty.
Firstly it wouldn't happen even with black money. There's no point having assets you can't use. You're better off just paying the tax and collecting rent.
There'd be a lot of jobs building them.
And the housing market would become cheaper since they have to be sold at some point.
This is a pretty awful BBC, quoting some sort of site, that quotes a Managing Director of a large property constant.
The firm doesn't seem to have produced a report, it seems to be based off an interview, or just a comment of some sort.
It helps to think of these "vessels" that conduit black money not as Houses in the strict sense. From a policy planning perspective it helps to remove the errant variable (in this case excess of homes).
The main reason is that renting out these houses is not safe at all. Many middle class people fear that the renter will occupy the house and not move out. It happens all too often apparently and given the entirely corrupt law enforcement officials and idiotic laws home owners would rather lock it up than renting.
This largely because these are high rising apartments on the outskirts of cities, purchased with an intent of renting them out for side income. The net result is there are too many of them. And since they are far away from schools/hospitals/markets and other amenities, nobody really opts for rent in these places. Eventually as the cities grow this may change, but note as time goes your apartment ages too(and so does its value). There is a huge debate whether as to buying an apartment is a better idea or a buying a plot given these circumstances. Every one wants a rent income, very few want the struggle of buying the land, protecting it from encroachers and build it later[which is an circus in itself], most want a ready made flat. Both have their own advantages and disadvantages. Like in all cases good investments are a lot of hardwork and stressful.
Inside the cities houses are always in epic demand. The situation there is totally different.
68 comments
[ 211 ms ] story [ 2609 ms ] threadModi promised to build 100 "Smart Cities" - a lot of it with foreign and private investment dollars.
They actually just wanted a white guy with a Ph.D. to schmooze with clients, and were willing to pay 8 lac/month for it. It was unclear what "smart city" meant to them - the best I could tell it was just spinning up a hadoop cluster to big data the traffic light control systems. (Smart traffic light controls already exist and run perfectly fine on a laptop.)
There is some uncertainty about what the concept means to some people still, but basically it's an Orwellian Neoliberals dream.
AFAICT the idea is that Smart Cities wire up as much as they can to central decision making capabilities - this would include human intelligence about the residents living in the city including how happy they are, how much waste they produce, electricity they consume, where they go to collect mass traffic patterns, etc.
The idea here is that the cities will be able to response to emergencies and opportunities better because they can act as one city immediately. Smart cities presumably can capture individual innovation, but also collective data for collective decision making, and machine/computer information.
The difficulty here lies in the fact that it is supposed to then be owned and operated by private individuals. There is not really a mention of a vote - smart cities are independent of governance structure. The pitfall is that modern senses of the importance of 'efficiency' may lure some into thinking that having the intelligence/data and a well greased economy are enough to understand the underlying population's preferences (on the whole, behavioral economics has proven this false).
That's not to say getting some real and real-time data about an entire city isn't an exciting prospect.
Maximize tax/fee revenue while minimizing operating expenses to reduce the standard of living of all residents as low as possible in an individualized detailed manner just barely above rebellion or property abandonment, at least in practice. Then sell it to the rubes as being a social or cultural change where you can ignore all the tech its going to be the first city on the planet where human nature took a day off and we'll all live together in perfect peace and harmony. Sell the financial benefits "rich get richer" and all that to the leaders, sell a line of BS about human nature changing to the rubes. Its basically an atheist cult in the sense that it operates as a traditional cult WRT somewhat extreme exploitation of the participants, but subtract the higher metaphysical beings marketing message that cults have, or insert big data / big government itself as the higher metaphysical being.
Its like the dichotomy of internet of things. What you ship is a fridge where corporate sends a special packet to make the compressor burn out when quarterly sales are below their target while selling all formerly private personal data gathered to every corporation on the planet for whatever you can get. What you sell to the rubes is fuzzy bunnies of the corporation caring about your organic nutritional needs by ordering orange juice from peapod automatically when it detects a low level or monitoring for expired food or the "wrong" beverages stored inside.
The similarity is the message has nothing to do with the purpose or operation, at a level of dissonance never before seen on the consumer markets.
In reality they didn't have anything remotely so coherent. It was just a variant of "lets hadoop all 200mb of our big data into the NoSQL for business intelligence insights".
Edit: And there are umpteen number of violations of regulations for earthquake, fire safety, building laws. Almost all builders double sell you the common land in the name of "reserved parking", clearly considered illegal by the court.
1) Did the most corruption. It wasn't that bad before it.
2) Created all the draconian laws to 'correct' Indian culture.
3) Put pressure on current generation to 'own a house' at the age of 25-30, while they themselves like all the people before them got their house at the ripe age of 50-60.
4) Themselves a product and participant of socialist government with anti-private business attitude, they increased the age of retirement for government jobs. You meet one government employee and tell him/her that you work for some IT company and they will mock you for 'getting undeserved salaries' and 'being ignorant of bureaucracy', whether it is for getting a passport or driving license.
That said, outside of the big cities there are still lots of places that are cheap to live - if you don't mind cows, electricity problems, internet problems etc.
Not entirely true. I was born and raised in Bangalore. A long before software boom happened here, rents were still considered high for those times, this is because of the economic opportunity this city offers. I'm sure this is true for other cities too. This isn't Bangalore or any other city, as long as there are jobs in a particular city people move in to make a living. This reduces the supply of houses for living, and drives the prices high.
>>That said, outside of the big cities there are still lots of places that are cheap to live - if you don't mind cows, electricity problems, internet problems etc.
Sorry to break out the bad news to you. In most satellite districts to Bangalore like Mysore, Tumkur etc. The prices are almost on par as Bangalore.
The laws are so lax that folks often buy property with clean money, and just keep it locked up rather than realizing the rent potential.
The growth in prices has so far ensure that even then, buying and locking up property is lucrative.
Most of laws favour the tenants(in one sense it is right) but it is not uncommon for them to take undue advantage. And people who rent without a contract of some sorts usually pay the price. Most of them though would rather prefer to keep it vacant than put it in any danger of dispute.
Not exactly, Most people make the tenants sign a 12-18 months rental agreements these days, with a very heavy deposit amount in cities in Bangalore. Those agreements are pretty serious legal documents.
I agree :) what I am saying is, my observation has been that many people don't do agreements. If you have an agreement with an express expiry date (12-18 months as you say) it is all good. Most people don't. For many people the problem is lack of knowledge. For something as ordinary as renting they don't even consider the need for going to a lawyer/agent and getting a contract done.
What you say about Banglore is opposite to my observation and it makes me happy that people there are smart enough to enter into a contract before renting their house. It is good both for the tenant as well as the landlord.
Noida is also a pretty popular IT city and people renting out their homes make no contract. Even in my own city (gurgaon) letting without a contract is pretty common. Mostly there are no disputes. But when there are they are long and bitter.
Cost gap across needs vs wants in India seems very much inverted as of today.
I've seen so many people living out of real bad conditions , working hard for earning just enough. But surprisingly they all seem to have good & new smartphones, commute long distances for work and unable to afford a decent sized house![0]
Am not saying its bad for them to own new phones, its atleast a good emotional distraction for them,but reality is only getting tougher for them, day-by-day.
Predatory lending,in india had gotten off fast the last decade .Lots of people have more lots of unpaid credit-card bills.Banks started reporting lots of non-profitable assets.Some of the top private-lenders in india are loosing money by the day.[1]
Value is being eroded of Real estate with both corruption and extortion involved even in remote rural areas! Though there is not much of stats in public domain for above, but [2] is indicative.
[0]:http://www.statista.com/statistics/257048/smartphone-user-pe... [1]:http://dbie.rbi.org.in/OpenDocument/publicOpenDocument.jsp?i... [2]:http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/file-detailed-re...
You are correct on a micro-level but there are also macro-level issues when capital and rent (rent of money) are tied up in non-productive assets. An individual who buys a $1M house cannot put that $1M into a startup, but also on a societal level a bank that loans $100M of mortgages cannot loan that $100M to build infrastructure or a new manufacturing plant or a (large) school. So high price of non-productive assets hurt the macro scale as much or more than it hurts micro scale. Its very bad for the economy when the best thing to do with a pile of money is buy something that doesn't produce anything or grow anything. Its as bad economically as stuffing the money into a mattress.
As a technicality, the whole point of modern banking is that banks can loan out the same money over, and over, and over again.
So in fact you can eat your cake and have it too.
I'm not saying a world devoid of art and fun is a good goal, but am saying that going way overboard to one extreme is going to result in blowback.
Plus real estate is growing at a stellar rate, and probably will till the next 100 years. For India's rate of population and room for economic growth this is anything but inevitable. Heck there are even people who own 2-3 houses in the US. Doing this is Indian is hardly surprising.
So why? BBC basically answers with the following: because some people earn more money this way. Tell me something new BBC.
Let me posit another reason: because squatting these empty houses is not allowed.
If squatting these long-term empty places was allowed they would be:
1. sold/rented at a more fair market price,
2. squatted (in which case they are also not empty anymore).
As long as governments continue to rob their citizens via taxes, people will do their best to not be robbed, resulting in "black money" (which is actually "white money" since none of it went to fund wars and murderous statist schemes, as opposed to the "red money" which is tax paid and so did help fund wars and statist aggression against peaceful citizens).
This "white money" will then find a place to be invested where it receives some ROI, unlike the banks and bonds and stocks that have been completely destroyed by government meddling in the economy. That is real estate or precious metals and that's where the "white money" will go.
The entire "problem" (if it is one at all) is created by statist violation of property rights through taxation, in the first place. Further statist property rights violations will only distort things even further. Let's say you introduce squatting "rights". Well now you know what happens? Nobody's buying real estate in your country any more. All the "white money" flows to alternate investments and real estate in other countries that don't have squatting "rights".
It's basic human action. People don't want to be enslaved and robbed from. And they will do everything in their power to avoid it.
They might class perpetually vacant properties as abandoned and therefore returned to the common. When New world land was doled out in square mile allotments (The US, Australia..), improving the land was a prerequisite to your claim. This is often thought of historically as a deal: 'you improve this land and we'll give it to you.' But the justifications at the time was more philosophical: you improve this land and you own it, by definition.'
If they do, though, it's high time to check if these additional clauses are honored.
This was based in ideas trying to explain what property is, why one person was rights to it and another doesn't. A wild forest is not property. A farm is. Hence labour, habitation, productive use etc. make something property. It's the kind of philosophy that gets very theological, with precise definitions and arguments between theorists that seem very arcane an pointless in retrospect.
I'm not promoting the theory. It just seemed relevant in the context of a liberal/libertarian quip. These ideas are foundational to ideas of private property, later economic freedom etc. It's part of the history of ideas related to right leaning politics today.
In practice, I'm not sue if this is workable. But if it is, I don't think an abstract sanctity of private property is necessarily a barrier. That unused property makes fro a weaker claim is justifiable by common sensibilities, right or left wing philosophy.
Property rights in most countries are mitigated by a variety of competing communal rights such as eminent domain, zoning, and environmental laws. I think squatting rights could potentially protect communal rights in a similar way.
I suspect that squatting rights only affect obviously neglected property. I suppose the empty houses and apartments are reasonably guarded and are not as neglected as a closed and half-dismantled building. Also, squatting does damage the property, hopefully in minor ways. Imagine that your empty backpack was loaded with pizza slices: totally benign, but you'll have to clean the backpack thoroughly.
Why not? Argument "scope creep" :)
As others pointed out, squatting can be used to keep private property owners (especially of such basic necessities like housing), from hording/speculating.
In some areas even national park and bird sanctuaries have been illegally constructed upon and then the government was bribed.
Even psychology doesn't get this kind of abuse. Can you imagine an article that lists off divorce rate, some happiness survey, psychiatric drug statistics and ties it all together narratively with a single-sentence theory about 21st century loneliness, stressful work lives, the trouble with living online social lives or anything else that an average tabloid reader might suggest as a reason.
Here we have some suggestion that tax evasion is involved, some stats about housing shortages, slum housing and no information relevant to the obvious question: why do people buy flats and them leave them empty?
Come on BBC.
Yes, that's pretty normal actually. People even think it's quite intellectual.
1) It isn't the same situation. The level of corruption and absolute poverty levels are not comparable.
2) Where there are similarities in "first world" countries (e.g. empty housing stock), eyes are very definitely batted. At least in the UK.
3) I would argue that 10 million empty homes in India, where there is significant slum situation, which is basically accepted and regarded as "normal", even in the capital city, is more eyebrow-raising than an empty home situation a "first world" country. I don't actually see anyone losing their minds though.
Also, I'm not entirely sure why 10 million empty homes in a country with 1 billion people is a big deal. That's just 4% of the housing stock (assuming average of 4 people per home). There seems to be an assumption that you can just put the slum dwellers into the empty condos, which doesn't necessarily seem realistic. (I'm not saying that they shouldn't get decent housing, but I think it will need to be done in a different way).
And yes, this is very similar to investments made in London/New York/San Fran, but wealthy individuals trying to offshore their wealth, although these properties are typically rented out.
Firstly it wouldn't happen even with black money. There's no point having assets you can't use. You're better off just paying the tax and collecting rent.
There'd be a lot of jobs building them.
And the housing market would become cheaper since they have to be sold at some point.
This is a pretty awful BBC, quoting some sort of site, that quotes a Managing Director of a large property constant.
The firm doesn't seem to have produced a report, it seems to be based off an interview, or just a comment of some sort.
https://twitter.com/cbreasia/status/593669907172237312
So the US has about 13 Million vacant homes (with 1/4th the population of India). [1]
China has anywhere from 69 to 85 million vacant homes (approx. same population as India)
EU has about 11 Million vacant homes (with 40% of the population of India). [3]
I would say a lot more fine grained analysis is required to say if this is a problem or not.
[1] http://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/qtr113/q113press.pdf
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/feb/23/europe-11m-em...
I am not sure I understand this calculation. India's population is more than a billion
Inside the cities houses are always in epic demand. The situation there is totally different.