this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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You know what's worse than "becoming a slave to [your] house"? Having to work as to not become homeless.
It intrigues me now, how you would "fix" this and make it so that people don't have to work to have housing?
I mean as I said in a different comment, we already have social housing in my country.
We have universal healthcare, we have a bunch of social programs for people in need and we have automatic unemployment paid from social insurance. People on disability don't work, people's pension is covered by the state.
What measures should we add to make it so you don't have to work for your home?
I mean I am all for banning private residences being owned by companies, that is something we need to address and if the election goes my preferred parties way, it will be fixed in the next cycle.
However all these things are being paid for, concrete doesn't pour itself, steel doesn't manufacture itself, building don't build themselves, so how do you propose we make it so that we don't have to pay for our homes?
If I an able bodied person refuse to work I will lose my home and become homeless is that so unfair?
First things first: there are already a bunch of people who don't have to work for their housing. A big part of those may have to work for an income so that they can pay for upkeep. But get rich enough and that can get payed by dividends. Or they're landlords who get enough income from rent. Those rich people don't have to work at all for their housing.
That's cool for the people who get it. But I'd be surprised if your home country has no homeless people and vacant housing at the same time.
Do those people on social programs actually have a comfortable life, though? Or is it rather "too little to live, too much to die"? I'm quite sure that landlords still make a lot of profit from rent in that country.
Introduce a usufruct model of owning, where the people who live in a home actually own it (either as a family home, or multiple homes owned by a coop). The important bit is that rent-seeking is abolished in housing. Then you might still need to work for upkeep, but that's a diminishino part of what people need to pay for rent, nowadays.
If your country is capitalist, I highly doubt that they will implement this. Profits are still required by capitalist states.
I said "work as to not go homeless". You're bringing "paying" into it. There's already a lot of place to live. Ideally, I'd see a communist society where this kind of stuff is planned on the basis of needs, rather than being speculated on in markets for profit
That sounds like an assumption and you know what they say about that.
Who decides who owns the house though? Is it first come first serve? How is that not capitalism just with extra steps? If my family lucks into a place that becomes a highly desirable location how is that fair to generations coming after?
Also who paid for this house in the first place and how if not with the fruits of their labor, aka work ?
You didn't answer the simple question of how you achieve this magical utopia where people don't have to work to avoid being homeless, you just said a bunch of nice theoretical ideas with no realistic way to implement them?
Okay, do you know what "need" is? Who decides what a need is? Do you need to live in the city you live in currently or do you want to live there? Because if it's centrally planned enjoy packing your stuff, you are going to bumfuck nowhere if you are not needed where you are, it's only fair.
Or imagine this, you live in this magic house that you got for free for 30 years, your kids move out and shit hits the fan, your spouse dies, well all of a sudden you don't really need that house do you? All those memories you have from there, well sorry, someone else needs that house more, time to move out to a housing you actually need.
You see simply disallowing companies from owning private residences and limit the amount of private residences you can own to the number of your "families" ( you + your spouse is 1 then each children you have is 1) would fix most of the housing crisis. I know in the US you also have to take care of the missing middle and the stupid and racist single family home zoning laws, but this issue would absolutely solve itself for the most part without having to centrally micromanage everything.
I'd be happy to hear which country isn't currently capitalist. And the other thing is less of an assumption and more of a rule.
... the people who live there own it. Capitalism would require the ability to keep others from using the house while you don't use it. You wouldn't be able to sell the house/appartment.
Your family requires a place to live, doesn't it? You're describing capitalism, btw. Why should your family be thrown out if they still need the house?
The community built it. Or it was already there (houses already exist, you know). I should have specified that I have a problem with wage slavery in order to pay some landlord in order to live somewhere. That's completely different than investing resources and labour to build a house.
Give people places to live and let the community build housing based on need, rather than profit. Nothing magical about that. I'll specify again: I don't want to abolish doing mental/manual labour, but working for a boss so that they pay you a wage based on the profit they made on your labour: Wage slavery. And the answer isn't simple. Otherwise, we'd be living in this world already.
The people do. I think doing so in consumer councils would be a good idea, but I'm not the arbiter of how to achieve this. Do you think that human needs are unknowable?
Who saidanything about central planning?
Well, who says that I'd want to live in that place that's way too big for me now where everything reminds me of my dead spouse? Maybe I'd like to live with my kids, or they move in and I get a place in an outhouse. I'm sure the community and I'll reach a mutual understanding where they'll understand my needs/wishes and we'll reach some form of solution, beneficial to everybody. Is that so much of a stretch, given that I'm part of a community?
But you said no one should have to work to not be homeless, but in order for the house to be built, someone has to work, don't they?
Except human behavior? Finite resources? Finite Land?
How large is this community? are you familiar with in-groups and out-groups? so because you happened to be born around a certain place, you and your family are entitled to live there forever? is it your ancestral land?
You should then formulate your ideas better, because what you said is no-one should have to work to not become homeless, which is a stupid premise, somebody has to or had to work for you to not be homeless...
but you know you don't have to right? you can work for a co-op, you can start a co-op, you can be self-employed. I mean you call it wage slavery like an edgy teen, what do you think people did in the past? they didn't have to labour? You do know I come from behind the Iron Curtain and people here still worked in the past? In fact they did much shittier work than my cushy 9 to 5 office job that has AC. If you think running your own business is so much better than being a wage-slave, why don't you just go ahead and do it? I think you will be surprised how much more work it is. And you are also aware that you can live below your means and free yourself from this wage-slavery quite easily right?
So if I forcibly remove you or you go on a vacation and I move in, does it mean it's now my house?
man you have some interesting ideas....
Housing is a human right. We already have gigantic amounts of housing that sits empty, new building projects are not the priority.
The government should be in charge of constructing new housing developments to meet the needs of the community. People can also pool resources together to build those things, in the absence of rent and mortgages people would have substantially higher incomes. Over time this would balance out, but would still be doable in the long term.
No one should be homeless. Even if you are able bodied and refuse to work. The amount of people who are able bodied and refuse to work is microscopic. You have been misled by conservative propaganda to believe that welfare recipients are lazy. Welfare recipients are people who for one reason or another are unable to work. This is almost exclusively people with disabilities.
But yes, I think even if you decide to do literally nothing just cause you dont want to, you should still have shelter. Shelter is a human right; housing is a human right. It is a crime against humanity to deny people housing. And if youre that contrarian, to literally be like har har I wanna make a point about how dumb free housing is so ill do literally nothing, you probably have some problems you should sort through in therapy.
You should probably look into a bit of game theory, specifically the Free Rider's Dilemma
And the government gets the money for this from where? Does it fall from the money tree? You know that's not free right? It's just people who work pay for it, which I am completely fine with for people who NEED it, voluntarily unemployed don't need it, they made their decision.
Ah yes, those well known free resources.
Says you... I can say it's more close to half the population, we both pulled that info from our asses, didn't we though.
It would balance out really fucking quickly not over time, take a fucking econ 101 class and look at some basic supply-demand charts...
Unless we reach a post scarcity world ala Star Trek what you are describing is a fever dream.
I had a nice long response typed up, but I genuinely do not have the energy to pick through what a thoroughly ridiculous comment this is. You're not actually here to have a meaningful conversation on this subject either, you are only here to propagandize for capitalists. So I'll save myself the time and energy.
Yep, I am being paid by Jeff Bezos personally, lmao.🤣
What kind of childish ass logic is that? Almost everyone has to work to not become homeless... even if you own 100% of your home and don't have a mortgage you know you pay property taxes, electricity, water, gas, sewage, trash. those things don't just magically appear in your house and disappear from them.
That's true. Let's fix that.
And still: Do you pay 30 to 50% of your income in your own home for that?
Between the mortgages and everything? Yeah I do.
Go ahead
How to 'fix' that? Someone has to do the work to build and maintain housing? Should they do it for free?
You could get rid of housing being a means for landlords to profit from and hold housing in a usufruct property relation, and/or in common. Building and maintaining housing can be managed by the community (or be payed for by the community).
Who pays the upfront costs? Big taxes?
In a capitalist system, the government could print the money to give out a loan and destroy that money once the loan gets payed back to soften inflation.
But ideally, building housing shouldn't be done for profit, either. But I guess that would require capitalism to be abolished. Which would be - again - ideal.
Who takes out this loan? The person who wants to live in the home? What if they can't afford to pay it back? Isn't paying interest on the loan the same as paying rent, except now you're stuck without being able to move, and no one else is there to fix your roof when it needs it?
Yup. Or coops.
What if someone can't afford rent? I'd rather see the government eat the risk than see people go homeless.
No, because if you pay rent, your rent becomes someone else's capital. If you pay off the debt, you invest in your own property.
Who says you can't transfer the home to someone who buys in? That's an advantage of coops.
Landlords usually don't do that. They hire handymen to do this, so why can't that be done by the person who lives there?
If a co-op takes the loan, aren't they just becoming a landlord? And who does the work to organize it - are they paid? Isn't that just like a landlord taking profit?
If you look at the government as just a collective of the people, then there's no magical entity 'eating the risk' - it just means the people get screwed over and/or someone doesn't get paid for their work.
Yes, you can use a handyman to fix your roof, but you have to pay them. And if you can't afford to, you what - take more loan from the government which endlessly prints money?
No, because the people living in these places own a share in the coop. It's distributing the load of repaying the loan on several shoulders and once it's payed off, the rent becomes basically only the upkeep (rather than a source of income for the owners... because the owners are the ones who pay the "rent").
Depends on how the coop manages it. But they could theoretically use part of the rent as payment for someone who manages the co-op.
No, cause that's not profit. That's part of upkeep. Do you know what "profit" is (i.e the difference between profit and income)?
I don't agree with that abstraction, but ok.
What are you talking about? Institutions aren't "magic". Risk of loss gets easier to manage if more people chip in. That's the whole reason why insurances exist. And why diversifying a financial portfolio is the best strategy for banks. Yes, some will not be able to pay back their loans. But you can buffer that with interest by the ones that do pay them back.
And your alternative is that these people who can't afford a handyman (or fix the roof themselves) can afford rent? Do you think paying rent every month is cheaper than hiring handymen? And evensif it were like that: how would the landlord afford the handyman? Why would they rent out their property, if rent was lower than the cost of upkeep? Your scenario doesn't add up.
dude, people like this don't think those things exist, because they have never had to pay for them.
they also don't understand what a payroll tax is. because if they don't pay it, it must not exist and is just some made up thing!