You can’t tell someone they’re being pseudo-scientific and then accuse them of being adversarial as if you’re not.
I wasn’t using circular reasoning, I was citing data. 90,000 rent controlled housing units in NYC are left vacant (this number has been rising). As we both understand, “individual” (either actually an individual or a corporation) capitalists act in their own best interests. They’re not leaving these apartments vacant for years just because they want to fuck over poor people, they’re doing it because they make more money off their other supply if these units are kept off the market.
If you don’t want to feel like you’re spouting alt-right talking points, stop using verbatim the talking points that capitalists use to defend housing scalpers. At best, your entire point is “housing scalpers aren’t as big of a deal as this other problem”, and at worst you’re ignoring the real problem so capitalists can keep exploiting the housing market.
You haven’t made a case in favor of housing scalpers, and for good reason, there’s literally no case to be made for them. The capitalist position is that scalping houses isn’t a big enough problem to have an effect on supply. Even if that were true (which would require 16 million housing units being vacant having no impact on housing supply), it doesn’t mean that it couldnt be true in the future. What if the number rose to 30 million vacant units with the same population? Or 100 million? Or a billion? At some point it gets ridiculous. To me that’s pretty clearly when you’re at “we have 30x as many vacant houses as homeless people”, but maybe your tolerance is much higher because homeless people aren’t economically valuable to capitalists (except as a reserve army of labor).
