Due to road closures we had to take a detour to my medical appointment today, down a road I had never been down before. The side of this entire road was lined with so many homeless people I couldn’t even count them all. Many were just sitting together surrounded by their possessions and tents, some were sleeping by the side of the road, there was even a homeless man in a wheelchair surrounded by his possessions.
As we carried on we went past many many empty buildings, houses, apartments and shops that have been lying empty, in some cases for years. As if that isn’t bad enough, in my town a few years ago, they desecrated a beautiful piece of open green land to build a ton of houses on it - now I could understand if these houses were being used. But they priced these houses at £800K each and no-one can afford to buy them so they’ve been sitting empty for a few years now.
The situation is clearly getting worse very quickly, as more and more building are being abandoned all the time, while more and more homeless people are appearing everywhere. Even under capitalism this seems nuts, wouldn’t the building owners rather get some money for their properties than none?
i read somewhere once years ago about how the logic of a capital asset like residential and commercial property is to not lower prices in this instance, as the expenses associated with its vacancy can be written down against tax liability and that the asset itself can be used to leverage more credit for acquiring additional assets.
i dunno how applicable the first is to the UK, but the second keeps owners from lowering the price if they’re leveraged elsewhere… which frankly, people who own £800k properties probably are.
the perverse logic of always using what one has–and doesn’t use–to grasp for even more is never more clearly fucked than in the hoarding of shelter, land, and commercial/industrial spaces.
