Private economy vs landlords

>>1792034
Eventually people will be priced out and will move somewhere else. Also land lords must compete for tenants. Land can be mismanaged to the point where it's a liability to possess it.

in an entirely free market economy, people probably would not bother owning land. renting would be incredibly cheap. People would move from place to place looking for opportunities.

Like what mcdonalds did with fast food, wherever consumers go will have similar housing opportunities at a similar price.

>>1792034
You can make hoarding vast swats of land unprofitable by taxing it, that's the whole point of a land value tax
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax#Economic_effects

>>1792042
>Eventually people will be priced out and will move somewhere else
Today immigration is hard and expensive, it's not the 19th century; if people can't afford their own place they will just live with their parents most likely

>>1792048
Renting would probably be more common but just because owning land would be to expensive for most people... land would still be the ideal investment in a pure free market... it has a fixed supply and is always in demand

>>1792034
>Does "the market" have a way to correct for land hoarding
It kinda does with opportunity costs. Every piece of empty land, every vacancy is lost money. And the market is fractioned heavily, generally there's nobody with any kind of real market power, nobody who owns more than even just 5% of all the buildings in a city. So if one landlord decides to let his property sit empty, every other landlord is profiting off of this situation. So what's the incentive to do it?

It's very hard to analyse these kinds of things on a theoretical level. We don't really have any empirical data about perfect rental markets - they're all regulated in some way or another. There is a case that a lot of hoarding/deliberate vacancies are due to over-regulation. If you can't make a profit due to rent control, why bother? If you can't terminate tenants, but you want to renovate the building in 5 years, you have to phase out the old tenants gradually. The same if you plan to sell anytime soon.

But there is for sure an impetus to throw out low-income tenants, improve the classiness and rent to better-off tenants. And while this hikes prices and drives off poor people, it's perfectly in line with market behaviour. So land hoarding is nonsensical, but gentrification is not.

>Land owners do little for their money
Don't look at it like a job. Look at it from the perspective of an investment. And compared to virtually all other forms of investing (ETFs, stocks, bonds, gold, art, wine, etc) being a landlord is a gigantic pain in the ass demanding a lot of inconvenient work (chasing after money, dealing with shithead tenants, overseeing construction work, noise complaints, fixing emergencies, arbiting neighbourhood squabbles, etc). Yes, it's very good money for a meager few hours per month per unit compared to a regular job. But I didn't have to pay an entry fee of $150k on my job. I might be biased since I'm a landlord myself, but I honestly think the money isn't very good.

>>1792061
>Every piece of empty land, every vacancy is lost money
It doesn't cost anything to just let land sit there and allow it to increase in value by itself but it does to construct something on it and take a potential risk... if it's profitable to just sit on land people will and that's why they do
>if one landlord decides to let his property sit empty, every other landlord is profiting off of this situation
And that's what they collectively want, it's not like they want more competition
>There is a case that a lot of hoarding/deliberate vacancies are due to over-regulation
Regulations can make it more or less profitable to be a landlord but as long as sitting on unused land is profitable people will hoard it and not sell it off to someone who wants to take the risks

>>1792081
Opportunity cost. Leaving land unused, to just sit there to grow homeless encampments on it, so you pay taxes on it isn't profitable.

>>1792098
Land generally goes up in value, so ya just letting it sit there is generally profitable while there's many costs associated with trying to develop it
And police will just remove squatters

>>1792081
>It doesn't cost anything to just let land sit there and allow it to increase in value by itself
Maybe consider the statement you're quoting in light of the senctence directly preceeding it? But letting it sit also has actual costs (like taxes), making you bleed cashflow with no immediate return. The appreciation of the land is just a profit on paper. It's virtual money until the land is actually sold.

>And that's what they collectively want, it's not like they want more competition
So by making it more profitable for everyone else, they *decrease* competition??? That makes no sense at all from an economic point of view. We have to assume on a basic level that every investor wants to make a proft. Leaving their land unused and thereby increasing the profits of *others* is a completely counter-intuitive idea. Why do you believe this is a rational approach? If anything, the more profitable a type of business becomes, the more competition will rise up. If you wanted to squeeze out competition, you'd *lower* prices, not increase prices.

>but as long as sitting on unused land is profitable people will hoard it and not sell it off to someone who wants to take the risks
Sure, but the "more or less profitable to be a landlord" you just mentioned is exactly the compensation for taking those risks, the so-called risk premium. If you decrease the risk premium by regulation, less people are willing to take the risk, because it's not worth the troubles.
I'll grant you that there will always be very risk-averse or very lazy people who'll just sit on their land no matter what. Yes, when people start to act this irrationally, the market cannot force them to use their land. But the market punishes them via opportunity cost.

>>1792112
I don't think you have any idea what the concept of opportunity cost actually means.

If you have 100 bucks and can invest in either of two savings accounts, one with 2% interest and one with 4% interest. Yes, you can choose the 2% account, and yes, strictly speaking it's a profitable investment. But since you had the opportunity of 4% profit you didn't take, you've actually *lost* 2%, the opportunity cost.

If you say the land appreciates - well, so it does with a building on top. But the building on top also generates additional revenue. If renting out wasn't profitable by itself, nobody would do it. But in fact, it's so profitable, it's even worth buying land at horrendous prices, because in the long run the landlord profits cover both the cost of the building *and* the cost of land.

So letting land sit there unused is consting you money you could have otherwise had. It's not a rational decision.