I found out that a friend had bought a house from the bank and was renting it out, and he was complaining about having a landlord's problems. Apparently neither he nor the renters were fully aware of the condition the house was in. I remarked that he had become, like many other Chinese living in the United States, a landlord. It does disturb me that land [and housing] has been so concentrated in the hands of the few, when the right to housing (if there is such a thing as a right) must be reckoned one of the foundamental rights. The freedom to acquire land and to build a house, not the opportunity to participate in the real estate market and secure housing thereby.

If only things were different, and people did not put their excess (if it really is excess) wealth into acquiring houses.

I came across this tidbit from Kirkpatrick Sale this morning:

The simple fact is that most people in this nation are not needed in their work, are not performing any particularly useful social functions, and the sooner they found re-employment the better for them and all of us. Keynes long ago pointed out that hiring half the unemployed to dig holes and the other half to fill them up would solve the unemployment problem, and that was dismissed as a clever donnish remark, but he was righter than he knew. For that is really how much of our current economy operates right now: many millions of citizens are doing nothing of value for society, only performing the necessary function of getting a paycheck and redistributing it to the manufacturers, banks, and governments of their choice. The defense worker is almost certainly not necessary, considering that the U.S. has already stockpiled enough weaponry to blow the earth apart several hundred times over; the designers creating biannual fashion changes in clothes and the workers who make and model and sell them are clearly not necessary, their talents wasted in an enterprise remarkable for being without any socially redeeming features whatsoever, nor are advertising executives, casino dealers, pornographers, fast-food purveyors, people who make sleeping pills or Barbie dolls or annual reports or underarm deodorants or celebrity books or plastic flowers . . . but need I go on.

Figure it this way. Only 40 percent of the population is in the labor force. Of that, according to such calculators as Herman Kahn, only 2 percent is necessary for the 'primary' industries that basically keep us going, agriculture and mining. Add to that the workers tha twould be necessary for the manufacture and production of essential goods--approximately 5 percent more of the labor force, according to the calculations of Scott Burns--and we'd arrive at approximately 7 percent of all American workers, or 3 percent of the total population, that is in any sense truly necessary to keep the nation going. I should think it would behoove the other 97 percent of us to find something else to do, and the sooner the better.

(Human Scale, 326-7)

This was written in 1980, but I don't think the percentages have really changed that much. Now, this assumes that this sort of arrangement is sustainable, and I think that Mr. Sale would be among the first to agree that it is not, so that the percentage of people involved in agriculture, mining, and necessary manufacturing would need to increase. But these are questions that must be asked and resolved at the local level.