London seems to manage this petty well. I think it’s quite healthy for a city to commingle folk from different income groups rather than house them in specific areas.
How is the government stealing your income or destroying the value of your property? Seems a bit hyperbolic.
And if the free market solves this, why are we in this situation in the first place? Shouldn't the free market have solved this already? Instead we have piles of empty houses/buildings and more homeless than ever before.
Because there is no free market in housing whatsoever.
Owning land doesn't give you the right to build anything. You need planning permission - which means permission from the local council, local homeowners and consultation, etc. which gives the NIMBY attitude so much power.
There aren't piles of empty houses. There aren't enough houses at all.
> And if the free market solves this, why are we in this situation in the first place? Shouldn't the free market have solved this already? Instead we have piles of empty houses/buildings and more homeless than ever before.
There is no 'situation'. Rational participants in the free market mostly have housing. The issue is that there is a widely available drug (fentanyl and meth too) that makes people behave irrationally, and thus the free market principles stop applying, since they presume a basic level of participant rationality. The fix from a government perspective is to remove the agency of those who are so drug addled that they cannot make good decisions.
The posts you are responding to said "low income", "poor" and "different income groups". The classism required to go from that to "criminals" is very disturbing.
London has sky high rents for young professionals while also taxing them exorbitant amounts that ends up subsidize social housing for "economically inactive" people. I would not call that efficient.
