No the rich and powerful have choices of how to act, while the poor have very little. Additionally, the rich and powerful are the ones who have structured the system in such a way that the proletariat have very little choice in the matter.
Only very recently and many haven't even raised all the way. But I agree that it's not going to solve the problem, only a maximum income can solve that.
>My guess is that while your anecdote may infuriate you, the effect of investors who don’t rent out their homes is negligible on housing prices.
No that's actually a large part of housing problems. Like a third of Manhattan real estate is empty. And Manhattan is already super dense but still has homeless people.
I'm sure the parent commenter meant to use "please" in that manner, as the stats are being used in a deliberately misleading manner.
Even your source shows it... that's 30 percent of a small (presumably affluent) section of the city, not of the whole city. There are some 2.5 million apartments in the city, and this is talking about just 5k.
There are other sources that cite the actual percentage as 11% [1]. That's still high, unfair to residents, and worth discussing, but you can't win arguments by putting up fake stats.
That's in the tiny fraction of real estate that is luxury housing owned by the unfathomably wealthy.
The article itself says
> Among all of the 845,000 apartments and houses in Manhattan, 102,000 were identified as vacant in the 2005-9 American Community Survey.
The numbers are a bit muddied, because the article hints but doesn't ivestigate the seasonal bias in vacancy:
> Of those, about 33,000 — or about 1 in every 25 Manhattan homes — had an owner or renter who lived there less than two months of the year.
It's also possible Bloomberg's sources are lying to them. It's not unwarranted for intelligence agencies to leak things to the press deliberately to create a story.
I doubt they're trying to prop up a single tech journalist. If I had to speculate on intelligence agency motivations I'd speculate that they're trying to attack SuperMicro.