It’s not scalping to hold onto something for years. That’s the opposite of scalping, which is taking advantage of surges in demand for quick profit.
Owning land is not a necessity.
GPU scalping isn’t technically scalping either by some definitions, but the layman usage of the word is “buying up a product and selling it back at an inflated price”. Someone is still a GPU scalper even if it takes them 2 years to resell some stock.
By this definition, housing scalpers are scalpers too. I’m not in the business of prescribing how people should speak, so if you have some academic issue with the word “scalping” I can choose a different one. We’ll call it “yeegstrafing”, but my contention is still the same despite what you call it.
People correctly have an issue with GPU yeegstrafers, because they’re not providing any value, they’re just hoarding excess goods and reselling to make a profit. Housing/land yeegstrafers are doing the same thing with necessities.
You may claim that housing or land more generally (you need land for housing/shelter) is not a necessity, but larger society disagrees. People generally regard shelter+food+water as the basic necessities. If someone successfully hoarded all the land, nobody would have access to shelter.
The correct term for buying a thing at a lower value than you sell it for after a period of time is “investing”
What you need isn’t stealing from people, it’s changing zoning laws.
You can call it scalping, yeegstrafing, investing, whatever. I recognize that depending on what you call it, people will have different emotional responses to it. If you call it scalping, it’ll be negative. Investing it’ll be positive. Yeegstrafing, probably just confusion.
But playing with words isn’t the game I’m trying to play, I have a contention with the action, not the word choice. People shouldn’t be allowed to invest in certain things, you can agree. Like you shouldn’t be able to buy up humans at a low value and sell them at a higher value later. Even if you called it investing, it’d still be impermissible.
Similarly, restricting access to land/shelter, driving up prices by reducing supply, and then later selling your hoarded supply at an excess due to said price driving is problematic. It’s restricting cheap access to housing so some people can “make” money.
Using “scalping” as the word to describe this highlights its parasitic nature, they’re siphoning value out of the economy and restricting access to shelter/land while doing it.
Using “investing” instead ignores the negative societal ramifications, and only focuses on the positive personal outcomes (generating money for yourself).
