Jay over at MArooned has a post showing some people don’t understand the concept of private property. Here’s the jist of the story:
A group of homeless people and housing activists took over a privately owned Mission District duplex on Sunday in what served as the climax of a protest designed to promote use of San Francisco’s vacant buildings as shelters for the needy.
OK so we have a bunch of people who decided they could just take over a home for a while and protest. The police stood by and did nothing but watch and eventually left without making any arrests. But some of the things aid by those homeless individuals made me realize something. People respect the concept of private property until they don’t have property:
Because of housing speculation during the real estate boom, “a lot of tenants were evicted,” Gullicksen said. “Now a lot of those homes are sitting empty. The city should be doing something to turn vacant buildings into affordable housing.”
They may be vacant but they aren’t owned by the city you putz. But of course Mr. Give-Me-Your-Money has a solution to the city not owning the property:
Specifically, he said the city should foreclose on buildings where hefty back taxes are owed or use its powers of eminent domain to turn over long-vacant homes to nonprofit developers. The group is not advocating turning over the city’s stock of new but unsold properties to the homeless.
So the city can either steal the house by collecting on taxes that shouldn’t exist (I’m sorry but property tax isn’t a legitimate tax in my book it’s just a mechanism to ensure you don’t actually own your property) or use their power of eminent domain to outright steal the house. Now eminent domain has always troubled me since it allows somebody to steal another person’s property so long as the one doing the stealing has the government on their side. Like property tax, eminent domain is a mechanism that prevents individuals from actually owning property since ownership implies it can’t be taken without the theft being labeled a crime giving the owner recourse. Needless to say anybody who makes a suggestion based on leveraging property taxes or using eminent domain pisses me right the fuck off. Oh and I love this part:
Jose Morales, 80, lived in the San Jose Street building for 43 years before he was forced to leave in 2008 through the Ellis Act, which allows property owners to get out of the rental business.
Morales said he now lives in a small space in an office building in the Mission District.
“The city should have protected me,” he said. “It’s like they don’t see me. It’s like I’m a ghost to them.”
Guess what buddy you just learned something, you need to take your own protection into your own hands. My question is this, you rented this home for 43 years right? Why the Hell can’t you just go rent SOMEWHERE ELSE? I know what a concept huh?
In this case the city shouldn’t have protected your whiny ass. The individual who owned the house decided he no longer wanted to rent it out. Tough shit buddy. What an individual does with his own property is his business alone. Thankfully the property owner’s attorney understands the concepts I’m talking about:
Zacks said he hopes charges are filed over what he characterized as “people taking the law into their own hands and breaking into property.”
“It’s sort of ridiculous to think that a private property owner like Mr. Tehlirian would have any obligation to house the homeless,” he said. “It’s a problem we should deal with as a community, not something that should be foisted on the back of a small property owner.”
Exactly a person who owns a house should not be required to let somebody else live there. If you want to set up a charity home and let homeless people live there you have that right. But nobody should be demanding a government entity force a homeowner to house the homeless. If you want the government to steal shit from those who can afford it and give it to you who can not afford it move to a communist nation. What is being demanded is redistribution of wealth which is exactly what Karl Marx was all about.