[HN Gopher] Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year
___________________________________________________________________
Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year
Author : ParksNet
Score : 401 points
Date : 2022-08-23 18:14 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pewtrusts.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pewtrusts.org)
| cammikebrown wrote:
| Pretty hilarious to see "Why is Rent Skyrocketing?" as the
| article directly under this one on the front page.
| staindk wrote:
| Hilarious sure, but also sad and concerning. I'm tentatively
| alright with the idea of renting forever and never owning
| property... but with rent increasing and investors buying up
| more and more property, it looks like things will get uglier
| and uglier.
|
| I am not alright with paying absurdly high rent.
| moneywoes wrote:
| As someone who's had his elderly parents renovicted, it
| really makes me think about owning one day.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| In a competitive market (I'd say even the biggest investors
| own <10% of the markets they operate in), rents are bounded
| by competition. The bigger reason rents are going up is there
| is not enough supply for people to live in. Things like
| environmental reviews, zoning policy, mandatory low income
| units, and "historical" buildings make it very unappealing or
| impossible to develop new housing.
|
| At the very least, replacing all SFH with townhouses would
| give 2x density increase. Removing the height limit on new
| construction and allowing rebuilds of old apartment buildings
| without excessive permitting would probably give another 3x
| increase.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > I am not alright with paying absurd rent.
|
| Then you should either:
|
| 1) Buy a house to live in
|
| 2) Buy a house to hedge against rents going bananas
|
| The 30-year fixed rate mortgage at negative real rates is the
| biggest handout the world has ever seen.
| staindk wrote:
| Yeah this probably is the best bet. Will be keeping in mind
| as I save up money and figure out where I want to settle
| down.
| chollida1 wrote:
| Yep Millennials, Gen X and Boomers have all been handed a
| once in a lifetime gift here. Each of those generations
| made out like bandits with low housing prices until the
| last few years and low interest rates.
|
| Gen Z and the generations to come have a real reason to be
| pissed at the rest of us.
| wizofaus wrote:
| In Australia at least there's a substantial gap between
| affordability for millennials and us Gen X'ers, reflected
| in homeownership rates. The trend only seemed to have
| been getting worse throughout covid (governments threw a
| lot of money into economic recovery, combined with super
| low interest rates, driving up house prices despite near
| zero immigration and absence of foreign students etc.,
| though they're coming down now). Was that not true in the
| US? Gen Z are just coming into house- buying age now,
| though my own son is likely 8-10 years off from being a
| good position to afford anything at all, and without my
| help (or a lottery win), it's not going to be a house or
| even apartment anywhere close to where I live. But a lot
| could change in that time.
| chollida1 wrote:
| No idea about the US, I'm in Canada and housing has only
| gone off the rails in the past 4-5 years. So those 3
| generations all had legit chances to buy a home at a
| reasonable price.
|
| I'd assume every country is its own special mess:)
|
| In Canada last year we had a stat released that said 1 in
| 5 Millennials that own property own more than one. This
| was inline with both GenX and Boomer stats.
|
| Millennials are just as much a part of the problem as any
| other generation, assuming you think speculators are part
| of the problem.
| wizofaus wrote:
| "Speculators" sure, but most people who own multiple
| properties I wouldn't think fall into that category. We
| own a rental property - it's very much a long term
| investment, and we charge rent below market rate (it's
| still positively geared!). I don't believe our purchase
| locked out any first home buyers, it's a tiny 1BR flat,
| and priced at a point those just getting onto the
| property ladder could've afforded it (and outbid us). If
| we do sell the property it'll be to help my Gen-Z son buy
| a house. Having had assistance from my own parents (a
| smallish interest free loan that I paid back within 5
| years) that seems fair enough.
| chollida1 wrote:
| > I don't believe our purchase locked out any first home
| buyers, it's a tiny 1BR flat
|
| I mean, by definition that property would have sold to
| either a new home buyer or another speculator like
| yourself.
|
| And by definition, if you own a property you rent out,
| you are a speculator:)
|
| i have no problem with you being a speculator:)
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| ...and you are absolutely right that we're pissed.
| Hopefully y'all will be willing to help out with
| reasonable public policy at least.
| sleepdreamy wrote:
| What gift would that be? Genuine question - I don't see
| what gift I received that is comparible to my in-laws
| purchasing their first home for 30k and flipping it for
| 100k not long after. I haven't had a gift close to that.
| 3qz wrote:
| > purchasing their first home for 30k and flipping it for
| 100k not long after
|
| In a lot of markets here (I'm Canadian) average people
| who bought average homes in the mid 2010's (millennials)
| have already made over a million dollars. Most home
| owners make way more money from their home than their
| job. This will never happen to my generation.
| cammikebrown wrote:
| Being able to afford 20% down on a mortgage is something
| affordable to less people every year. With rates
| increasingly quickly, it's not going to be much cheaper if
| prices fall too.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| So buy at 3.5% down.
|
| The more leverage you have - the more you're taking
| advantage of The Federal Reserve mandate that prices go
| up at least 2% per year.
|
| 2%x33 = 66% return GUARANTEED by yours truly, the Federal
| Reserve.
| matwood wrote:
| > The 30-year fixed rate mortgage at negative real rates is
| the biggest handout the world has ever seen.
|
| Agree. I bought a house around a decade ago. Refied into a
| sub 3% rate. The house next door now rents for 2.5x my
| mortgage. That's 10s of thousands of dollars/year extra I
| have in my pocket.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Paying a mortgage is in essence paying yourself.
| sleepdreamy wrote:
| Can you elaborate on your last sentence a bit more? Just
| trying to get a more thorough explanation. I just got my
| first 30 year mortgage so, trying to make myself feel
| better I guess.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| If you just bought, you don't have a negative real
| interest rate.
|
| Your interest rate is probably 5% or so?
|
| The real interest rate is probably 3% or so. That means
| your REAL interest rate is 2%.
|
| When you inevitably get the chance to refinance at below
| 3% - your REAL interest rate will be negative.
|
| The 30-year fixed mortgage is a product that would not
| exist without a government guarantee on Fannie &
| Freddie's debt. Even if you have a jumbo loan - it's only
| because of the MBS market created by Fannie & Freddie.
|
| In essence, the tax payer is paying you for you to have a
| mortgage on your house - regardless of whether Fannie
| securitized your mortgage.
| mikestew wrote:
| I'll take a whack at it. You have your mortgage, and
| let's say the hypothetical payment is $1000/month. That
| is all you'll ever be obligated to pay each month in
| order to live in your house (we'll ignore property taxes
| for the moment). Whereas your neighbor rents her house
| for $1000/month. But next year her rent is $1050/month,
| and so on. In ten years, she'll pay on the order of 50%
| more to stay in that house. But you'll still be paying
| $1000/month, and will continue to do so for 30 more
| years.
|
| But that's just how mortgages work, right? Lock into a
| rate, and have that for 30 years? Only in the U. S.,
| AFAICT. Canadians will correct my details, but as one
| example in Canada one gets a mortgage for, say, five
| years at x%. After five years, go renegotiate? (Help me
| out here, Canucks; as soon as I went to write it out, I
| knew I had it wrong.) Anyway, point is, the "lock it in
| at 2.5% for 30 years" seems to be unique to the U. S.,
| and assuming that your wages increase, after a period of
| years you will keep more money in your pocket than the
| neighbor that rents.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| the insane mortgage rates we saw in the last few years
| really are going to be a generational redistribution of
| wealth that we'll talk about for the next century, I think.
| That might have been the last train out of town for the
| middle class to widely own housing in a lot of cases.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| People have been making this argument since 1990.
|
| The Federal Reserve MANDATES that consumer prices go up
| 2% per year. If house prices ever go down, they'll be
| there - waiting - to pump them up.
|
| Prices will rarely ever go down substantially for a long
| period of time unless the Fed completely changes (I doubt
| it).
|
| You can either:
|
| 1) try to time the market (difficult in housing, I'd
| argue not as impossible as equitities)
|
| 2) buy into the bubble
|
| 3) hope that the US basically turns into a different
| country
|
| 4) be ruined financially by missing out on the biggest
| handout in the history of the world (the 30-year fixed
| negative real interest rate mortgage)
|
| Pick your poison.
| notch656a wrote:
| Housing prices exploded to compensate for the negative
| real interest rates. The people who got the handouts were
| rich people who owned multiple houses and sold them off.
| For the most part others didn't get that hot of a deal.
| In effect it was a regressive tax that the poor paid for
| the rich by paying in inflation the cost to make multi-
| home owners rich.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > For the most part others didn't get that hot of a deal.
|
| How? Dollars are worth $0.5 in 1990. Yet your mortgage
| payment is unchanged. Your house payment is much less.
|
| Rents are much higher.
|
| You won.
| notch656a wrote:
| >Housing prices exploded to compensate for the negative
| real interest rates.
|
| They didn't "win." They broke even. The people that sold
| them won. The people with no house but inflated away
| cash/salary lost.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| If your payment is massively lower than your rent would
| be - you won.
|
| Someone else is allowed to win, too.
|
| It's a zero sum game, and the only losers have been
| renters.
|
| That can change if there's a massive, sustained housing
| crash. But I won't hold my breath for that.
|
| I'm willing to bet, like always, house prices won't
| decline. The value of the dollar will decline instead
| (because the Fed can just easily QE until the only people
| that lose are renters).
| kasey_junk wrote:
| No idea about if it's the last train out of town but home
| ownership in the US is extremely high[0] (it ought to be
| we subsidize it like crazy).
|
| If you go back to 1900 you see home ownership rates in
| the US at less than half of households[1]
|
| The interesting thing to me is how conflated home
| ownership has become with housing affordability. As we've
| doubled the numbers of home owners we've dramatically
| removed the options for housing.
|
| [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
|
| [1] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-
| series/dec/coh-owner...
| 1autodev wrote:
| "I'm tentatively alright with the idea of renting forever and
| never owning property"
|
| This sounds akin to feudal peonage.
| plonk wrote:
| Renting for life isn't the same thing as being indebted for
| life. You can move out at any time and the landlord doesn't
| have any hold over you. Doesn't sound much like peonage to
| me.
| asdff wrote:
| Only if you are renting month to month
| staindk wrote:
| Currently I'm unsure where I will/want to settle down.
|
| I also manage to save some money monthly, which I invest in
| diverse markets. So my thinking is that at there isn't (or
| "shouldn't be") any rush for me to buy property.
|
| But news like this obviously goes against that and will
| have me revisit the idea.
| asdff wrote:
| Other people are playing the "enrich themselves at the
| expensive of the collective" game, so you should too. The
| move in this situation is to seek out rent control. That will
| cap rent increases for you at like 5% a year in most places.
| If you are able to swing a few promotions at work while
| staying in this same place, you might come out well ahead of
| any potential rent increases and manage to start actually
| saving and investing money. This is the route to property
| ownership a lot of people I know in southern california are
| taking.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| have you considered moving?
|
| My wife and I were able to buy a house in Baltimore City
| while both attending graduate school
| geodel wrote:
| Well, the idea that owner will be saddled with serious repair
| and maintenance whereas renter on virtue of being a renter
| will just move out to house on next street risk free seems
| unsustainable to me.
|
| Increasing rents are a kind of distributing risks of costly
| maintenance that renters doesn't want to care about.
| yardstick wrote:
| Not all renters are renting because they want to. For some
| of us it's the only option. I would have bought a home
| years earlier than I did if house prices were more
| affordable.
| geodel wrote:
| I mean you make fair point. But that's in general story
| of life. I also do not want expensive day care, expensive
| home therapies for my sick kid that insurance does not
| pay for, or exhausting commute to work with no option to
| work remote. Still here I am doing things I do not want
| to.
| staindk wrote:
| If I leave this apartment in a worse state (besides fair
| wear and tear) than it was when I started renting it, the
| cost of repair will be on me via a portion of my rental
| deposit that I won't get back.
|
| Sure fair wear and tear does cost something to
| service/repair over time, but generally things seem to
| last.
| Test0129 wrote:
| I have no data for this but I'd imagine rents have
| increased substantially to make up for the eviction
| moratoriums. Several friends of mine who own an extra house
| (usually their parents) ran into the problem of being
| unable to evict a tenant, and also having the tenant refuse
| to pay (because the government told them it was ok). The
| only solution here is to raise rents to compensate and
| unfortunately this drives out would-be good tenants.
|
| But yeah in general rents being more expensive than
| mortgages is a function of risk. Renting is generally less
| risky for renters are more and more risky for the owners,
| so it's only fair that the owners be compensated for the
| risk. The question is where do you draw the line on fair
| risk compensation vs outright usury. In states like
| California and New York it's getting to be insane. Even in
| the low CoL area I am in I have no idea how people pay
| $1000 for a shoebox studio.
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| I'd love to buy a house and take care of annoying/costly
| maintenance myself, but the cost of entry is 7 figures for
| a garbage home in my area. Sometimes I dream of fixing a
| fucked up pipe or replacing drywall, y'know?
| carom wrote:
| It is because it is incredibly difficult to build new housing.
| Zoning is the supply constraint.
| asdff wrote:
| LA for example is built into the 90% range of its zoned
| capacity today of 4.3 million people with a population of
| just under 4 million by official counts (higher in actually
| no doubt). Meanwhile, in the 1960s when homes in LA were
| actually affordable, the population was 2.5 million, with a
| zoned capacity of 10 million. That means if we want to make
| LA as affordable as it was in the 1960s, then we should zone
| the city for at least 16 million people, instead of 4.3
| million people as it is zoned today.
|
| https://la.curbed.com/2015/4/8/9972362/everything-wrong-
| with...
| siliconc0w wrote:
| It's interesting to play armchair city planner and think what
| kind of tax structure to encourage more equitable housing. I
| imagine you'd want something like:
|
| Owner occupier < owner landlord < owner vacation home < owner
| investor(vacant)
|
| But I think you should also encourage density, like if you have a
| 5000 sqft house for two people, that should come with a sort of
| extra property tax than a 5000 sqft house for a large extended
| family or multifamily building.
| keewee7 wrote:
| In Denmark housing built before 1992 cannot be rented out for
| profit. The owner can only demand enough rent to cover for upkeep
| and maintenance. However it's still a lucrative business to
| invest in old housing in the bigger towns and cities because the
| price is only trending upwards.
| wil421 wrote:
| What if someone or some company just bought a lot of property,
| kept it empty, and then waited for the price to go up? Or
| bought housing to rebuild it?
| keewee7 wrote:
| Real estate investors are legally required to rent out their
| units.
| leafmeal wrote:
| A great solution is a land value tax as per Henry George
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
| chmorgan wrote:
| This isn't caused by investors, they simply see the value in
| owning and renting to those that aren't interested or capable of
| outright ownership.
|
| The price increases seen in the market are driven by the rising
| cost of energy, materials, and the lowering value of the dollar
| through inflation.
|
| If governments, state and local, were receptive to construction,
| you'd see the market compensate for higher prices with increased
| supply. With building heavily regulated in many areas you've got
| government driving prices up through their limits on supply.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| What constitutes an 'Investor' in this article? If I see a
| distressed home for sale in my neighborhood and decide to buy it,
| fix it up, and rent it out; this article seems to put me in the
| same category as institutional investors who come in and buy or
| build entire communities of homes.
| ddevault wrote:
| Correct. Landlords are reprehensible, including small ones.
| carom wrote:
| There is huge value in subdividing land and building,
| creating housing for people who cannot afford to buy and
| build. You're stuck in a suburbia mindset.
|
| Not everyone can afford a SFH, there isn't enough land. Not
| everyone can afford to build. Not everyone wants to have
| massive switching costs when they need to move.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| I think most people who are against the rentier economy
| would agree that there _is_ great value in all of those
| things, but that they shouldn 't be a for-profit
| enterprise. One way to obtain that value without landlords
| is for the state to buy land, subdivide it, and build dense
| housing units available to citizens who live in them at a
| reasonable, or even subsidized, cost.
| carom wrote:
| My issue with this solution is we do not even allow
| private entities to build dense housing. So we are
| breaking a market and then saying the state is the
| solution. I interact with the government regularly and I
| do not have faith in their capabilities to get anything
| done.
| pickovven wrote:
| There's a difference between building housing and being a
| landlord.
| carom wrote:
| I disagree. Someone is funding the construction in the
| same way that someone is paying for the land and keeping
| it subdivided (rental units) and available.
|
| Tenants are more than welcome to form LLCs and
| collectively purchase land and build or buy existing
| housing. This is called Tenant in Common. Maybe that is a
| business (non profit) idea for you, make TiC easier.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| >Only people who have good enough credit for a mortgage and
| can afford to buy deserve a place to live
|
| Sounds worse when you put it that way though.
| ddevault wrote:
| There are more than two options.
| xur17 wrote:
| I rent an apartment, and am pretty happy with the
| arrangement. Obviously I wish I was paying less, but at the
| end of the day, I chose to live here, and enjoy the
| flexibility it allows me. (For a few thousand dollars and a
| moving truck, I can move across the country on a whim. I can
| go on vacation for months at a time by just locking my door
| and walking away. My landlord is responsible if any major
| repairs are necessary.)
|
| My point here is that a blanket statement such as "landlords
| bad" doesn't match the experience of everyone out there.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Yes, let's ban rentals altogether.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Seems everyone that bought a home for anything other than
| living in it. In the article they even mention:
|
| > The CoreLogic data shows that what it calls "mega" investors,
| with a thousand or more homes, bought 3% of houses last year
| and in 2022, compared with about 1% in previous years, with the
| bulk of investor purchases made by smaller groups.
|
| So most of the percentage increase is done by mom-and-pop
| investors rather than groups like Blackrock, Vanguard, etc.
| With that said the article definitely tries to paint the
| picture that all of these investors are institutional ones, and
| burying that important lede.
|
| I get the hate against institutional investors going in and
| buying up entire neighborhoods. But the sentiment that we
| should just abolish landlords is rather dumb IMO. There's a
| massive gap between someone being able to afford $1200 in rent
| and being able to afford a home with all of the added costs.
| dqv wrote:
| >I get the hate against institutional investors going in and
| buying up entire neighborhoods. But the sentiment that we
| should just abolish landlords is rather dumb IMO. There's a
| massive gap between someone being able to afford $1200 in
| rent and being able to afford a home with all of the added
| costs.
|
| As opposed to... being able to afford the rent with the same
| added costs? Take my area for example: rent in my
| neighborhood has increased to $2000/month. My mortgage
| remains at $1500/month (taxes, insurance, HOA included). What
| added costs amount to _$500 extra /month_? It's not water,
| sewage, trash, electricity, or gas! Those costs exist for
| renters just as much as owners. It's not basic maintenance...
| that has not cost me anywhere near $6000/year. So what are
| the added costs that landlords are "saving" renters from?
| [deleted]
| xienze wrote:
| > So what are the added costs that landlords are "saving"
| renters from?
|
| Utilities will generally cost a bit more. But the real
| killers with home ownership tend to be large expenses that
| come due all at once. Roof needs to be replaced, AC unit
| needs to be replaced, major appliance replacement,
| foundation problems, any number of expensive things can and
| will come up.
| dqv wrote:
| I already addressed this: all these costs are already
| factored into the monthly rent.
|
| In my case I had to replace the dishwasher. I wanted a
| quiet one, so it ran about $1200. I bought it on credit
| and got 0% financing. So my housing price increases by
| $100 for the next year.
|
| Now if I were renting? $2000/month. The landlord gets the
| absolute cheapest dishwasher they can find. It maybe runs
| them $300. So the landlord would be saving me ... $-475.
|
| Paying $5700 extra a year to avoid a $300 added cost
| makes no sense. Paying $6000 a year in perpetuity for a
| one-time expense that lasts the next 20 years also makes
| no sense.
|
| The point is that the tenant is _not_ being protected
| from any added costs, they are paying _way above market
| value_ for them.
| jjav wrote:
| > But the real killers with home ownership tend to be
| large expenses that come due all at once.
|
| All these expenses (plus a profit margin) are built into
| the rent, of course.
|
| Two ways the owner handles them: Either they have enough
| money saved that they can absorb the spikes in cost, or,
| they contract some maintenance plan they have to pay
| every month but smooths out the costs to avoid surprises.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _There 's a massive gap between someone being able to
| afford $1200 in rent and being able to afford a home with all
| of the added costs._
|
| Having recently bought a home, I think there _isn 't_ so much
| of a gap and in many cases the gap is inverted: it's cheaper
| to buy than to rent.
| xienze wrote:
| Key phrase here being "recently bought." Get back to us
| after you've had to replace the roof, had a water main
| burst, or something of that nature that requires you to
| cough up $10K+ all at once. The mortgage is the _minimum_
| monthly payment, not the maximum.
| jjav wrote:
| > Get back to us after you've had to replace the roof,
| had a water main burst, or something of that nature
|
| By that time their fixed mortgage will be far below local
| rent, so the money they save vs. renting every month will
| easily cover those repair costs.
| rob-olmos wrote:
| Homeowners insurance covers a lot of that stuff
| jiveturkey wrote:
| GP is pointing to the economy of scale that comes with
| apartments in denser urban and surrounding areas. there's a
| floor price for home ownership.
| hardtke wrote:
| The details of what constitutes an investor are unclear. It's
| possible they made the mistake of labeling purchases by trusts
| as investor purposes when many individuals buy houses directly
| into their trusts for estate planning purposes. I've seen that
| error made in these analyses, either inadvertently or
| deliberately for purposes of embellishing the problem.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Are you not an investor in that situation? The person who wants
| to own a house to actually live in is the only one not being an
| investor.
| itake wrote:
| I think the concern is local investors keep the money in the
| local economy, whereas 'foreign' investors are extracting
| value from the local community.
| __derek__ wrote:
| Small-scale investors are not necessarily local. It's
| anecdata, but I know quite a few Seattle-area folks who
| bought rental houses in LCOL/MCOL areas over the last
| several years because the local market was too expensive.
| They still pay property taxes, though, and most property
| managers are local-ish.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| I think the concern is that rents are being controlled (and
| increased) by investors unfairly. There is always a market
| for rental properties (who wants to own when they know they
| will move in less than a couple years?); but there is
| concern that investors wield too much power.
|
| I think this is only possible when large scale investors
| 'corner the market' by buying up a large percentage of
| homes in a given area. They can then control the rents
| because there is little competition.
|
| On the other hand, if nearly every rental home is owned by
| a separate investor then each owner is competing with all
| the other small investors for tenants. They have
| competition and might be forced to keep the rents lower.
| carom wrote:
| I disagree, landlords are price takers. There is not much
| I can do to drive my rents up if no one wants to pay it.
| If my rents are below market, I can get them up to
| market. But pushing it beyond that is competitive based
| on location and how nice the unit is.
|
| Honesty the best thing I can do is to build more units on
| the land I own. That is challenging though so it takes
| time and capital.
|
| You can thank single family home zoning and how difficult
| the city makes it to build for the rising rents. The
| landlords I know are very pro building. 14 units is more
| income than 4.
| pwinnski wrote:
| Imagine going one step further and having each home owned
| by a separate owner, not just each second home.
|
| Rents are being affected by every investor, including
| those that own only two houses. Perhaps more explicitly
| by large companies with hundreds or thousands of
| properties, perhaps not. I've certainly spent enough time
| on threads in which people who own only a single rental
| property in addition to their own home compare notes on
| how to raise rents for more income in their pockets.
| forthiscommen wrote:
| nickff wrote:
| How are foreigners giving money to local construction
| companies and others in the community "extracting value"?
| Those foreign investors are capitalizing the community.
| metamet wrote:
| And they're taking out much more via rent.
|
| If the owner of the property lives in the community, the
| rent that is being paid to that owner is much more likely
| to be circulated locally. If the rent goes to a foreign
| company, it's removed entirely.
|
| Upkeep and maintenance would also occur regardless of who
| the owner of the property is, so it's not like they're
| creating "new jobs" because it's foreignly owned.
| nickff wrote:
| If the extraction of rent over the long term is an issue,
| do you also consider the extraction of mortgage interest
| by out-of-state entities to be a similar problem? This is
| how investments work, people inject money in now, in the
| hopes of returns later; the hope is that in the meantime,
| the locals benefit, and are able to create the
| foundations of longer-term success.
| [deleted]
| inetknght wrote:
| > _If I see a distressed home for sale in my neighborhood and
| decide to buy it, fix it up, and rent it out_
|
| Buying something to rent it out is clearly investing.
|
| Buying something to fix it and re-sell it is usually also seen
| as investing.
|
| Buying something to use it (live in it) could also be an
| investment but usually isn't seen as such because it's assumed
| that you only live in one place.
| noasaservice wrote:
| If its my primary residence, then it's a place to live.
|
| If it appreciates, cool. I can make more money when I move
| somewhere else and use that to leverage my next house WHICH I
| LIVE IN.. If it goes down, bummer, but I can still use that
| to leverage my next house WHICH I LIVE IN.
|
| I bought the house to live there, not as a financial
| instrument. The financial thing is secondary.
| pickovven wrote:
| Oh so you'll always sell your house for the same price you
| bought it for and never do anything wild like take out a
| home equity loan?
| noasaservice wrote:
| Did I _not_ say that the primary thing should be TO LIVE
| IN?
|
| If the market goes up or down, I cant do shit about that.
|
| But you pick on the fact that I'm talking about a primary
| (and in my case, sole) residence, and this article is
| talking about parasites that buy hundreds or thousands of
| homes to then turn back around and gatekeep living
| spaces.
|
| Id say tax those vultures out of a company. They do
| nothing good, and cause boundless suffering.
| pwinnski wrote:
| If you see a distressed home for sale and decide to buy it, fix
| it up, and rent it out, you _are_ an investor.
| colechristensen wrote:
| You are, just as much, competing against someone who wants to
| buy that home for themselves thus raising the price of it.
| googlryas wrote:
| So what? That person who wants it for themselves is competing
| against all the renters that would like to rent the home that
| OP fixes up, but who aren't privileged enough to be able to
| put together a down payment to buy a house. So that
| aspirational home buyer is driving up the price for renters.
| Should we be angry at the home buyer as well then?
|
| It's not like OP is going to buy the home and let it sit
| vacant.
| colechristensen wrote:
| OP buying reduces the hosing supply for owners and raises
| the price to become an owner pushing more people out of the
| "privileged" owners bracket. At the same time doing it to
| the most accessible to own property and making money in the
| process.
| googlryas wrote:
| Likewise, the person who buys the house and lives in it
| takes it off the market for renters, thereby increasing
| costs to the "unprivileged" renters bracket.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| indeed. this is why rent control, when coupled with
| artificial supply constraints, is a net negative
| dominotw wrote:
| > this article seems to put me in the same category as
| institutional investors
|
| as they should.
| coryfklein wrote:
| Key piece of information from the article:
|
| > The CoreLogic data shows that what it calls "mega" investors,
| with a thousand or more homes, bought 3% of houses last year and
| in 2022, compared with about 1% in previous years, with the bulk
| of investor purchases made by smaller groups.
|
| So the mega investors only make up 3% of that 25%. I'd love to
| see data on what the remaining 22% are, but my guess is:
|
| * flippers
|
| * middle class individuals buying a second property as an
| investment
|
| * small time property management firms run by local businesses
|
| Also the Inside Economics podcast's recent episode Cooling
| Inflation and Confounding Housing Riddles[0] adds even more
| interesting color to the dialog. They explain that a lot of this
| is driven by _demand_ for single-family home rentals. Roughly
| half of Americans will want /need to rent a single-family home at
| some point in their lives! Many people want to live in a home on
| a short-term basis, like when a family with kids moves to a new
| city and wants to familiarize with the area before committing to
| a full mortgage. And COVID combined with the changing
| demographics has caused a huge surge in demand, so _surprise_
| prices have also gone up.
|
| [0] https://moodys-talks-inside-
| economics.simplecast.com/episode...
| ssalka wrote:
| Don't forget the "kilo" investors, who may only own a few dozen
| or hundreds of homes ;)
|
| Being curious about what those numbers actually look like, I
| found a CoreLogic report[1] from earlier this year which
| states:
|
| > Figure 3 shows different investor classes have maintained
| their shares through Q1 2022. Small investors (those who own
| fewer than 10 properties) were responsible for nearly half
| (48%) of all investor purchases during the first quarter of the
| year. Medium investors (those with 11 - 100 properties)
| purchased 31% of investor properties, large investors (those
| with 101 - 1,000 properties) accounted for 9% of home purchases
| and mega investors (those with over 1,000 properties)
| represented 12% of all purchases.
|
| So it sounds like roughly half of investor purchases (not quite
| that) are from those owning at most 10 properties. Would be
| interesting to see how well these numbers extrapolate out over
| time; from this limited Q1 perspective it sounds like the
| majority of purchases are by medium/large/mega investors.
|
| [1] https://www.corelogic.com/intelligence/single-family-
| investo...
| jimbob45 wrote:
| This is why I can't take the "we just need more supply!" crowd
| seriously. Building more supply is just sacrificing more stock to
| the investor class.
| pwinnski wrote:
| Is anybody saying "just" in that sentence?
|
| We _do_ need more supply. We _also_ need changes to existing
| policy to prevent what this article describes.
|
| Both and, not either or.
| carom wrote:
| I'll take the supply position. So much of LA is zoned for
| SFHs. Now they can have an ADU but that doesn't do much. We
| need density. We need to make it easier to build. That slows
| down climbing rents. LA housing is at a massive deficit.
| haroldl wrote:
| A large enough increase in supply could cause property values
| to level off while also increasing the vacancy rate for rental
| properties. I think the idea is that those circumstances would
| make real estate no longer attractive as an investment.
| infogulch wrote:
| _Housing is at the root of many of the rich world's problems
| (2020)_ | 379 points | 6 days ago | 794 comments |
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32493549
|
| On this post I wrote:
|
| > A couple ideas for how to fix some real estate problems:
|
| > 1. A zoning rule that requires home owners to live in the owned
| home. ...
|
| And the general response?
|
| > The mega reit buying residential properties is also overblown.
| 70% of rental properties are owned by individual investors.
|
| > None of this would have much impact.
|
| > This would reduce the housing stock.
| crisdux wrote:
| The high rate of rentals owned by individual investors is bad
| too if our goal is to maximize the number of home owners. I
| know a lot of people in my cohort who bought and moved into a
| new home, but kept their previous home as a rental. IMO this
| option is only accessible to large amount of people during this
| unique time because of government policy, ultra low interests
| rates, and societal trends. I think a large part of it is a
| government incentivized system that rewards incumbents in a
| disproportional manner. I think this disparity is contributing
| to overall feelings of resentment and will contribute to social
| issues and political turmoil.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| It will be interesting to see how that plays out now that
| interest rates are rising. Honestly it feels a lot like 08
| all over again. Somebody decided to go and get another home
| as an investment property, they leveraged themselves but took
| advantage of the low interest rates and a 20 year mortgage,
| it was a smart idea at the time, prices kept going up, they
| could just keep bumping rent because where would anyone else
| go, everywhere was getting more expensive.
|
| Interest rates go up, there are problems with people
| affording the rent, suddenly their unit is sitting vacant for
| a month, or two, or three. They drop prices to increase
| interest, it isn't enough. Suddenly they need to flip the
| house, but because interest rates have gone up demand has
| gone down, everyone who was getting on the rental property
| gravy train suddenly isn't so interested when they're paying
| 8% instead of 2%, so the house is underwater. The bank
| forecloses and sells the property for cheap they don't want
| houses they want money, this means demand for other houses
| that are now overpriced becomes even lower, the dominoes keep
| falling. Suddenly tons of people that looked to the RE gravy
| train find themselves in over their head for taking out debts
| that seemed like a good idea at the time.
| danem wrote:
| These are just bandaid solutions that do little to solve the
| underlaying problem and well established fact that we simply
| haven't been building enough homes over the last 50 years.
| Proposals that don't address this, or remove capital from the
| market should be met with skepticism imo.
| causi wrote:
| Owning homes you can't live in is as perverse as claiming domain
| over a patch of the ocean or a chunk of the sky. The very concept
| ought to be attacked with every legal method.
| welder wrote:
| Do you own the home you live in or are you renting? Renting is
| enabled by doing just that, someone owning a home they don't
| live in. So you want to outlaw renting?
| pwinnski wrote:
| There is a large and growing number of people who support the
| idea of outlawing renting from anyone other than the
| government (public housing).
|
| I don't think I agree, at least under current conditions, but
| then, I own my house.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| > There is a large and growing number of people who support
| the idea of outlawing renting from anyone other than the
| government (public housing).
|
| Yes I love the idea, the only thing that will be more
| efficient and effective than the mega corp, property
| management companies that cause most of the problems, due
| to size and bureaucracy will be the federal government. I
| love this idea, they are always a paragon of efficiency of
| virtue, they never succumb to politicians and bureaucrats
| selling out those they serve for political reasons, and of
| course who could object to the government having ownership
| of every non-occupied home in America, I see no problem
| with that. Especially giving the government the implicit
| right to then dictate all future housing that will be
| built.
|
| I can see it now optimized for efficiency, compactness, and
| equality everyone lives in "the pod". Of course since you
| may move pods and it would be difficult to move your stuff
| you can't really have anything, but the American Housing
| Bureau would love to lease you everything you need for a
| much better price because they don't have to worry about
| "profit". It will be great we'll own nothing, we'll live in
| a pod, and of course at that point meat is going to be
| untenable so we can get protein from alternative sources
| like insects.
|
| I can't wait for it, I'll live in a wonderful pod, I'll own
| absolutely nothing, I'll eat bugs and I am going to be so
| HAPPY!
| causi wrote:
| I own mine. The costs are significantly lower than the rent I
| was paying until last year.
|
| _So you want to outlaw renting?_
|
| You could make an argument against private renting.
| Personally I think the right step at this point in time is a
| relaxation of anti-construction laws such as zoning or
| parking requirements combined with charging sky-high taxes
| for unoccupied units. I also think owning single-family
| dwellings you don't spend at least three months a year in
| should be taxed so outrageously it's effectively illegal.
| marsven_422 wrote:
| You will own nothing and you will be happy...
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| "but many Republican lawmakers oppose such controls." -- I'm not
| American and not in in the US, so I'm wondering, why in many
| articles I read, "Doing Good Things For People(tm)" tend to be
| opposed by Republicans?
|
| 1. Are there a scheme to vilify them? Bcoz it's not even
| mentioned _why_ they oppose (maybe they see Bad Things(tm) far
| ahead).
|
| 2. Are they not elected by the people?
| asdff wrote:
| Republican lawmakers by and large represent corporate business
| interests and the wealthy. They use social issues as their
| drumbeat to rally their base who won't benefit from these
| handouts to the wealthy. Many people don't understand economics
| but are happy to vote along social issues. Single issue voting
| is common for such issues.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Paraphrasing Lawrence Lessig: "To even stand in the general
| election, you first have to win the 'money election'."
|
| That's his take on how campaign finance influences which
| candidates run or are "taken seriously" by the media -
| presidential primaries or congressional candidates alike.
|
| The republic is unfortunately not "dependent on the people
| alone" if money has a too tight grip on who gets to run for
| election.
| triyambakam wrote:
| Both sides oppose good things for people. It's a false
| dichotomy and meant to divide.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| Because many spend so much time moral grandstanding and
| signaling their virtue they cannot conceive of anyone with a
| contrary opinion to them having any valid reason for
| disagreeing, and therefore the only reason for them doing what
| they are doing must be because they are morally deficient and
| evil.
|
| This then gets reinforced by a media-industrial complex that is
| happy to continue to feed you points you agree with to get you
| to keep clicking.
|
| Disclaimer: I am not saying I support the Republican party or
| that I agree with them, but that doesn't change that tons of
| people cannot possibly conceive of someone having a different
| viewpoint than them being anything other than morally
| deficient.
| robk wrote:
| Media is mostly run by the left so easy to vilify the other
| side.
| asdff wrote:
| The media is centrist. There is no left represented in
| political discourse in the U.S. The democratic party is the
| centrist party.
| idontpost wrote:
| Because they are religious fascists, barely one step removed
| from Daesh.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| In Capital and Ideology, Piketty does a review of modern
| democracies, there's a two party system of left and right in
| every one except Poland where there was at the time of writing
| a far right and right wing party competing for dominance.
| Conservative parties typically rely on rural voting bloc, less
| educated and much older people, it's almost universal somehow,
| that doesn't make their opinion wrong off the bat, it's just
| demographics of voting. There's also actually a component of
| "harming these people I disagree with" that drives the vote for
| reactionary groups and is an active part of Murdoch sponsored
| media, there's not really a thoughtful process about how it
| could harm themselves.
|
| For example, there was the irony of multiple cases of people
| voting for Trump because immigrants are bad, and then having
| their spouse deported for some visa violation. Or one can look
| at the people who have opposition to abortion voting for
| Republicans. Then someone who cannot consent is raped or
| someone has a non viable pregnancy and neither is eligible for
| an abortion, which has happened since Roe v Wade was re
| decided. In the USA, the Senate is decidedly unrepresentative
| of the people of the United States as a whole, the House less
| so with the limit to 435 members, but not as bad in some ways.
|
| You can also look to Brexit post vote interviews where people
| who voted in favor of it said they didn't care if it hurt the
| UK, they wanted it to happen.
|
| An older example in the USA, the Reagan administration
| characterized AIDs as the "gay plague" and played down the
| effects and had no official response to the health crisis other
| than to joke about it, delaying an effective national strategy.
| Today there is still a gay faction of the the GOP called the
| Log Cabin Republicans that is barred from some party events but
| still back the GOP, Peter Thiel has become a big GOP backer in
| spite of most state party platforms calling gay people abnormal
| and most subsequent federal GOP administrations sending and
| supporting people in Africa to criminalize gay sex.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| It tends to be that way because the Republican party line is to
| wring hands over how much _any_ social program will cost, even
| if it 's free school lunches for children who live in
| impoverished households, while over half of the government's
| yearly budget is a black box of untouchable military funds.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| Now, it's about 25%. In the future it will be 50%, the 100% - the
| trend is going in that direction. Millennials and the generations
| after will look at era of home ownership like the "good old days"
| while coughing up 75% of their income for rent.
|
| There is so much to be said for this problem, but...its
| exhausting. I give up.
| pickovven wrote:
| If only there was a way to reduce the return to landlords...
| game_the0ry wrote:
| The landlords pay congress in order to not worry about that.
| i1856511 wrote:
| It should be illegal to own more than two homes.
| jjcm wrote:
| Nearly impossible to regulate, and too rigid to boot.
|
| Does a duplex count as two? If so that means triplexs higher
| MUDs are illegal, which will harm low income housing options.
|
| Can companies own property? If so then the problem is easily
| escapable with a simple LLC. If not, then either existing ones
| have to be grandfathered, or the housing market is going to be
| flooded with corporate housing.
|
| The better approach is to increase taxes for non-primary
| residences. Address the root of the problem rather than
| legislating it away - if mass-investment of housing is
| unprofitable, the problem addresses itself.
| NSMutableSet wrote:
| >Nearly impossible to regulate, and too rigid to boot.
|
| No it isn't.
|
| >Does a duplex count as two? If so that means triplexs higher
| MUDs are illegal..
|
| Why would it count as more than one? You can own a duplex or
| triplex or whatever as your primary home, and then you have
| the option of renting out portions to generate additional
| income, or fully occupying the entire thing. If you have no
| plans to rent out units, it would make more sense to convert
| it.
|
| >which will harm low income housing options.
|
| It will harm landlords who depend on the current system. Low
| income housing won't be necessary when homes are affordable
| for everyone.
|
| >Can companies own property?
|
| Not homes.
|
| >or the housing market is going to be flooded with corporate
| housing.
|
| Good.
| rngname22 wrote:
| I really hope that battery technology, EV technology, and self-
| driving technology lead to a tremendous boom in full-time RV /
| vanlife popularity and make it a better quality of life than
| traditional fixed housing and all the people who bought up
| housing as an investment vehicle see their money go poof.
|
| It's like using potable water or the air we breathe as an
| investment vehicle.
| dogman144 wrote:
| I think it's a legitimate counterpoint that could force some
| changes, but other aspects would have to go into it like
| intentional communities around this technology such that kids
| can go to schools, taxes are tenable, etc.
|
| interesting to consider. I think tax status assumptions and
| making van life work for a 2-child family are the main
| blockers. Starts sounding a lot like a high-end trailer park
| idea too.
| rngname22 wrote:
| The self-driving bit is what makes it tenable. All it takes
| is some people to offer parking a couple hours outside the
| city and for your home to drive itself out there when you go
| to sleep and drive you back to the city as you are getting
| close to waking up.
|
| Government prevents parking like that? Then just have the
| vehicle drive around aimlessly while you sleep or hang out,
| like a limousine. If energy were cheap enough, there'd be
| almost nothin you could to do stop it.
| jollyllama wrote:
| You'd be surprised at how powerful squatters' rights are in
| most states.
| sillystuff wrote:
| > It's like using potable water or the air we breathe as an
| investment vehicle.
|
| This is already a very profitable investment. Of course, it can
| be made more profitable through monopoly through the process of
| enclosure (conversion of commons to private ownership). The
| private water companies have even had legislation passed that
| gives them exclusive rights to the rain falling on your roof so
| you cannot collect rain water to avoid paying parasitic rents.
|
| > ...a law was passed that appeared to give a monopoly to Aguas
| del Tunari over all water resources, including water used for
| irrigation, communal water systems and even rainwater collected
| on roofs.[68] Upon taking control the company raised water
| tariffs by 35%.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_privatization
| mulmen wrote:
| Full time van life is unsustainable and selfish. The
| infrastructure does not and should not exist to make this
| feasible.
| rngname22 wrote:
| This is a thread about the wealthy investor class buying the
| literal land and shelter and hoarding it so they can profit
| off those they lease to. What was that you were saying about
| unsustainable and selfish?
|
| Fight selfish with selfish.
| mulmen wrote:
| Van life isn't a scalable alternative to permanent housing.
| The reasons for this are many. One of the obvious ones is
| that if a wealthy investor class can buy up houses and
| extract rent they can certainly buy up vans and extract
| rent. So it isn't even resistant to the very problem you
| suggest it can solve.
|
| Take a look at how much a 1980s VW Westfalia is these days.
| It's as absurd as house prices.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Living in a van is only possible if a small percentage of
| people do it. The infrastructure for sewage, parking, trash
| disposal, utilities, etc are all designed to handle a bunch of
| houses that stay in one place.
| rngname22 wrote:
| These are all solvable problems.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| Would that really be a solution? We live in the "you will own
| nothing and be happy" timeline. I know I've read articles in
| the past that car manufacturers are considering turning to
| leasing agreements instead of purchases. That might be hard to
| get started in the US, but with the way every market turns to
| renterism, I would not be surprised if vehicles and RVs get
| swept up in the usury craze.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Houston, we have a problem.
| anon291 wrote:
| How about we just make 20% down the minimum on home loans?
| That'll pull the price down pretty fast. We can slowly increase
| the minimum until we're at a reasonable point above 50%. And also
| reduce the maximum allowable term to below 30 years (should be
| 10-15). If done over a long enough time period, we can still give
| some appreciation to home owners (at least to match inflation),
| while also making the market saner in the long term. Otherwise,
| we're just encouraging rampant price growth and making
| homeownership exceedingly difficult for normal people.
|
| Soon, banks will prefer to give a 100 year loan for $3 million
| for a modest home to an investor than the same loan to an
| individual (because who can pay a 100 year loan, or make the
| monthly payment on so high a principal).
| jfengel wrote:
| I wonder how those investors are doing, what with the bubble
| appearing to be somewhat deflating.
| Handmadegold wrote:
| aprdm wrote:
| This has to stop yesterday... worldwide.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Cause and effect are often hard to disentangle.
|
| In this case I'm convinced that constantly rising housing values
| is the _reason_ investors buy up housing, not the other way
| around.
|
| Surely it makes sense that investors buy assets that continue to
| appreciate more than other investment types?
| jeffbee wrote:
| If this bothers you there is an extremely simple way to kick
| these guys in the teeth: approve new housing developments in your
| town! Housing investors fear nothing more greatly than they fear
| competition.
| sillystuff wrote:
| In 2012 I was looking at investing in REITs. One REIT's pitch was
| that they owned such a large percentage of the rental housing in
| Tampa Florida, that even though vacancy rates were high, and
| rents were going down throughout the nation and other areas in
| the state of Florida, they were able to keep rents high in Tampa.
|
| Disgusted, I realized the harm that REITs and private equity are
| doing to housing markets, and wanted nothing to do with it.
|
| We need legislation that discourages housing as investment if we
| are to maintain housing as shelter. Unlikely, as wealthy folks
| who make money with the status quo run things.
| aeternum wrote:
| There are so many housing incentives (tax-breaks, etc.)
| designed to encourage home ownership a very simple solve would
| be to ensure those only apply to owner-occupied housing and
| limited to a single home per household.
| BeetleB wrote:
| As another commenter pointed out - most tax incentives for
| living in a home you own do not apply to investors. Investors
| get those benefits "for free" because they are a business and
| all the costs of running a business are deductible. The
| incentives you speak of actually puts regular folks on a more
| even footing as corporate folks.
|
| Stuff like bonus depreciation - yeah, let's get rid of that.
| Or 1031 exchanges. Regular folks cannot benefit from it.
| [deleted]
| sokoloff wrote:
| Companies are charged taxes on their profits. The interest on
| money borrowed in furtherance of a business is just like any
| other business expense: deductible.
|
| The owner-occupied mortgage interest deduction serves to put
| owner-occupants onto the same footing as businesses; it's not
| an incentive that gives them preference, but rather (closer
| to) equal footing.
| themitigating wrote:
| Then people would decry socialism, big government, or
| excessive regulation.
| safety1st wrote:
| Who are "people?" Is this where we hate for a few minutes
| on libertarians? Republicans? The unwashed American
| majority? Emmanuel Goldstein?
| ISL wrote:
| One REIT's margin is another REIT's opportunity.
| xxpor wrote:
| This is less true in a world where zoning and other process
| roadblocks prevent you from building new housing, i.e.
| competing.
| djbebs wrote:
| Sounds like the problem is the roadblocks...
| slg wrote:
| We have spent decades telling American families that
| homeownership is the safest investment. We then spent decades
| enacting policies to ensure this is true. Do we think investors
| were going to just sit that out and ignore a safe and
| government protected investment?
|
| Of course the more attractive we make home ownership as an
| investment, the more investors will flock to the market. We
| need policies specifically benefiting owner occupied homes or
| we need to stop treating the basic human need for shelter as an
| avenue for investment.
|
| Neither seems likely to happen because we have already waited
| so long that the moneyed interests now have too much to lose
| and won't allow what needs to be done to happen.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > We have spent decades telling American families that
| homeownership is the safest investment. We then spent decades
| enacting policies to ensure this is true. Do we think
| investors were going to just sit that out and ignore a safe
| and government protected investment?
|
| So one group wants to maintain a financial investment that
| was sold to them as a sure-fire way to make money with little
| work and little risk, and another group wants...shelter. If
| it truly is the case that the desires of these two groups are
| butting up against each other and are mutually exclusive, is
| it really hard to decide which group should get what they
| want?
| davidw wrote:
| Show up at any kind of planning commission or city council
| meeting and you will hear people absolutely UP IN ARMS that
| building some, say, apartments or townhomes or whatever
| will "destroy their property values". Even in markets when
| said property has like doubled in price over the last 10
| years with no work from the owner-occupants.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| YIMBY organization is the answer, but we have a long way
| to go.
| davidw wrote:
| Doing some of this work locally is one of the more
| rewarding things I've ever done. "DC level politics" tend
| to be long, drawn out fights, but a few people can make a
| big difference locally. I've seen homes get built that I
| showed up to say 'yes!' to. These are both great groups:
|
| * https://yimbyaction.org/
|
| * https://welcomingneighbors.us/
| bombcar wrote:
| This is entirely possible and worthwhile; few people who
| are happy with how things are going bother to show up at
| all, so the only people who do are the people with a
| gripe or a grudge.
|
| Even just a note to the city council saying "thanks" when
| you notice a new development is way more than most will
| ever do.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Yes, I understand the desires of that group and the
| desires of the other group. I'm suggesting that, if we
| truly must choose only one group to satisfy, it's not
| very difficult to decide.
| undersuit wrote:
| I think we'll choose both! An expansion of Section 5 HUD
| policies to grant housing to the renters and investment
| returns to the rich.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| No, it's not hard: investment = getting paid to take risks.
| That's the whole point. Profits come with responsibility.
|
| Of course, if responsibility suddenly means losses instead
| of effort-free gains, investors will try to squirm out of
| their responsibilities. Morally, though, the situation is
| crystal clear.
| survirtual wrote:
| I sold my houses in a booming market for a $70,000 loss
| intentionally. It has a nice effect of lowering the value of
| all my neighbors homes and housed a deserving family.
|
| Little did I know when I went to claim the loss on my taxes:
| I could not claim the loss at all. Since it was an owner
| occupied house and not a house owned by a corporation, it did
| not count as a loss I could deduct from my income nor from my
| capital gains.
|
| Houses are meant to trap and enslave common people. It
| decreases their mobility and roots them in areas they
| otherwise would want to leave. When you gain money from a
| house, there are all kinds of benefits. When you lose money
| as an owner, there are no protections for you.
|
| The system is a racket designed to continuously inflate home
| prices.
|
| Everyone participating in it should be ashamed for making
| their children serfs & homeless while they live in castles.
| bombcar wrote:
| Was it a paper loss or an actual loss?
|
| I.e, did you buy for $200k and sell for $130, or had you
| bought for $200k and sold for $330 which was $70k under the
| current market value?
|
| The latter isn't a loss; and likely wouldn't be even for a
| corporation. You'd have to sell at full value and donate
| the $70k or something to get it to "work".
|
| Amusingly enough, if one of the 87k IRS agents hears about
| it, they could go after the deserving family for taxes on
| the $70k windfall they got (though this one is really hard
| to prove, they will do it on forgiven loans).
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Little did I know when I went to claim the loss on my
| taxes: I could not claim the loss at all. Since it was an
| owner occupied house and not a house owned by a
| corporation, it did not count as a loss I could deduct from
| my income nor from my capital gains.
|
| It cuts both ways. Had you had a gain, you would not have
| had to pay taxes on the gains. If you had it as an
| investment, you would.
|
| > Houses are meant to trap and enslave common people. It
| decreases their mobility and roots them in areas they
| otherwise would want to leave. When you gain money from a
| house, there are all kinds of benefits. When you lose money
| as an owner, there are no protections for you.
|
| Hyperbole. For the majority of folks, home ownership
| outweighs the costs. Often significantly.
| davidw wrote:
| This article, speaking to your point, is pretty convincing in
| terms of the data:
|
| https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/22524829/wall-street-
| housin...
|
| > The role of institutional investors is still being studied,
| but the popularity of the narrative strikes at something
| dangerous: People want a convenient boogeyman and when they
| get it, they often ignore the structural problems that are
| harder to combat. Housing undersupply is the result of
| decades of locals opposing new home building. It's not
| something that can be blamed on Wall Street greed and the
| nefarious tinkering of a private equity firm. And that's a
| much harder truth to stomach.
|
| I'm involved with a local YIMBY group, and what I see over
| and over again is _my neighbors_ stopping homes from being
| built. No wonder investors think it 's a great place to put
| some money - other people do the dirty work for them!
| giantg2 wrote:
| So that's only one side of the equation. The other side is
| distribution. Perhaps we could have policies that create
| jobs in areas with shrinking populations or abundant cheap
| land and lax zoning. Nobody seems to talk about this.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it
| drink. Job poor areas in the US have no shortage of
| incentives or policies designed to lure companies there,
| but have had little success over the past few decades.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'm wondering why that is. I would think that with the
| growing movement against NIMBYism that there would be
| enough people fed up with those sorts of policies to
| start moving out of the areas they don't agree with.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| * people find the stability of the known more compelling
| than the danger of the hypothetical. Employers want to be
| where their clients and employees will be, residents want
| to be in a place with decent shops and services. This
| kind of chicken/egg problem is usually the failure of
| most planned towns, and the only successful ones are
| usually a new capital or something because the government
| doesn't care as much. And even then that isn't
| guaranteed; Sejong is supposed to be the capital of South
| Korea but employees still hate it because even with cost
| of living issues and long commutes Seoul is more
| compelling.
|
| * cheap land is usually cheap for a reason. Land in the
| middle of the desert West probably doesn't have the
| required water rights to support habitation. Land in the
| middle of nowhere in general has few services and high
| logistics costs. Former industrial land requires
| environmental remediation. Foreclosed land may require
| paying outstanding tax bills. And those are the
| relatively straightforward problems, to say nothing of
| places with high crime, bad schools or other complex
| societal issues.
|
| * a lot of these places are going to turn NIMBY if a
| bunch of outsiders come, buy up housing and export their
| cost of living crisis to their community. It doesn't take
| that many people to tighten up the housing market in a
| town of 10,000.
| kritiko wrote:
| And move where? Most of the cities that are growing have
| a housing crisis. Most of the cities that are shrinking
| can have major safety issues - see @pontifier's
| misadventure in Pine Bluff, AR[1] for a particularly
| extreme anecdote.
|
| 1. https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-man-who-bought-
| pine-bluff...
| slg wrote:
| Yes, the investors are the symptom and not the cause. They
| are going where the money leads them. However a big problem
| with institutional investors is that they also
| institutionalize NIMBYism. They won't just block housing in
| a select neighborhood, they will block housing everywhere
| and they put more pressure on the federal government to
| ensure that housing is protected as an investment class.
| Both will contribute to worsening the issue.
|
| Plus even at low levels NIMBYism is often about investment.
| Sure, many object to new housing for reasons like "it will
| change the character of the neighborhood". But many others
| object because they are worried about the value of their
| own home going down. They are treating their home primarily
| as an investment because that is what they have been told
| to do their whole life. If I could snap my fingers and
| magically realign our political goals to maintaining stable
| home values instead of having them ever-increasing, many
| NIMBY objections would fade away.
| davidw wrote:
| Investors do not at all have the votes or weight at a
| local city level in most cases, especially large ones
| from out of town.
|
| Go to a planning meeting about some housing that people
| are pissed off about because reasons (
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32569768 ) and
| you'll find a whole bunch of your neighbors. It's not
| institutional investors blocking this stuff, by and
| large.
|
| > they are worried about the value of their own home
| going down. They are treating their home primarily as an
| investment because that is what they have been told to do
| their whole lives
|
| Yes, that's much closer to what I've observed in person
| fighting these fights.
| slg wrote:
| >Investors do not at all have the votes or weight at a
| local city level in most cases, especially large ones
| from out of town.
|
| Yes, the institutional investors aren't going to be in
| your local council meeting. They will be meeting with
| your state assembly members. They will be meeting with
| your Congresspeople. They won't be literal NIMBYs
| focusing on anyone's "backyard". However they will be
| working towards the same goals at NIMBYs, just at a
| larger scale.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Likely under the guise of safety, environment, etc like
| building codes and conservation zoning.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >safety, environment,
|
| It's amazing the power those subjects have to turn
| "YIMBY" into "regulate me harder daddy".
|
| The cognitive dissonance required to enable this about
| face is a bad thing and seems to be becoming more and
| more prevalent and accepted in all sorts of public policy
| contexts.
| koolba wrote:
| How would they vote at all? I'm not aware of any local
| council that grants votes based upon tax dollars paid or
| acreage. It's one person one vote for actual residents.
|
| Now lobby dollars are another story. But renters can fix
| that by actually voting.
| mhuffman wrote:
| >How would they vote at all? I'm not aware of any local
| council that grants votes based upon tax dollars paid or
| acreage. It's one person one vote for actual residents.
|
| I don't know of any local councils that grant local votes
| to anyone -- they vote themselves. This should spark an
| idea of how rich people's dollars outweigh poor people's
| input. They only have to convince half of the council to
| vote one way. This can be done through wining and dining,
| sending "experts" to make presentations, making promises,
| and so on.
| lostapathy wrote:
| They can run/fund NIMBY groups that encourage people to
| vote their way.
|
| Local to me, we've had a few causes pop up with
| surprisingly well-run NIMBY efforts opposing them in
| recent years. The amount of money raised and the signs
| and slogans are way too good to be the product of the
| actual locals who speak out on behalf of these groups -
| somebody else is clearly funding them and doing some
| marketing.
| asdff wrote:
| Of course they do, they can just buy advertising to
| convince locals to vote against their own interests.
| Works quite well. See uber and Prop 22.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Sure, many object to new housing for reasons like "it
| will change the character of the neighborhood". But many
| others object because they are worried about the value of
| their own home going down."
|
| At least in my area, it's all about people wanting the
| area to remain semi-rural. They generally aren't opposing
| low density SFH in independent builds. The people in my
| area are against many development and medium density
| homes.
| alexb_ wrote:
| A lot of what I've seen is people worried about "low
| quality tenants" (read: people who don't look just like
| me)
| mikestew wrote:
| The two tenants within a few houses of us in either
| direction would fit my definition (and likely that of
| many other folks) of "low quality tenant": don't bother
| picking up the beer can out of their yard, don't mow (at
| _all_ ), loud-ass exhaust on their shitty cars, etc. More
| of an eyesore than a contribution to the local community,
| and causing me to realize why HOAs come about.
|
| But, yeah, it's all because they have brown skin. Oh,
| wait, the tenants in question are whiter than I am.
| notch656a wrote:
| As a renter I've found the neighbors dump the beer cans,
| their shitty trailers, and whatever other bad habits they
| have in my yard because they know the landlord is off in
| another state and everybody who lives here for 2 years
| and then moves on has no rapport with the authorities so
| it can only hurt us if we try and do something about it.
| The landlord is an old man who basically does 0
| maintenance to the house, so the house is slowly turning
| into a pile of garbage that an unmown lawn actually look
| more fitting with.
|
| If you want to know why we don't bother, it's because the
| owners of the surrounding houses use our place as dumping
| grounds and the owners have been there for decades and
| know all the housing inspectors and police. It seems
| pointless to even bother when the landlord wants the
| house to fall into disrepair and the neighbors will use
| their connections to authorities to dump on our grounds
| again as soon as we clean it up. On one occasion I was
| sent a notice _that I would be imprisoned_ because of
| trash my neighbor put somewhere not even on our property
| and _before I even moved in_. I dutifully cleaned it up
| because it was clear I was going to be framed, but as
| that took the entire weekend I had little energy leftover
| afterwards to do yard work around my own place after
| being exhausted dealing with the neighbor owners.
|
| Meanwhile the neighbors' house indeed did look spotless
| _because they dumped all their trash on the renters '
| yards_.
| davidw wrote:
| > HOAs
|
| If people are going to do restrictions about who lives
| where, HOA's are probably better than zoning. They're
| more localized, and the costs of administering them are
| born by those who perceive them to be beneficial.
|
| I'd never live in one, but to each their own. I'd rather
| have someone choose one of those in a free market than
| get involved to zone the entire city one way.
| alexb_ wrote:
| "Eyesores" need a place to live too. And I said "look
| like me" for a reason: class is a bigger part of this
| than anything else.
| mikestew wrote:
| The examples I list look just like me: white, male, and a
| little on the scraggly side. And at least one household
| member in each example works at Microsoft. So I am a loss
| at what you're driving at in reference to class.
|
| We know how people treat rental cars. I don't know why
| it's a big shock that people will treat rental properties
| in the same manner, and why other folks would rather not
| live next to that. Blame race and class if you like, but
| to not allow at least a little more nuance to the
| discussion is silly.
| heleninboodler wrote:
| That feels like a pretty cheap and dishonest dismissal to
| me, since in my extremely-homogenous neighborhood, all
| the "low quality tenants" _do_ look just like me.
| kurupt213 wrote:
| I mainly don't want increased property crime and drugs...
| and the main offenders look mostly like me... more strung
| out tho
| giantg2 wrote:
| I think that's less of a concern right near me. This is
| basically farm land or woods being turned into medium and
| low density developments. I think that comes into play
| with cheaper or higher density housing (either the
| legitimate low quality or the racist low quality
| version).
| trhway wrote:
| >Yes, the investors are the symptom and not the cause.
|
| absolutely. If anything investors provide for liquidity
| of the market.
|
| The real issue is that investors, ie. the rich, are
| getting more and more ability to buy real estate while
| the middle and the low class are getting less and less
| capable of doing so. The reason is the huge sloshing
| amounts of money being given to the top, and thus those
| money causing a strong push for the price rise of the
| assets (back at the beginning of pandemic i said that it
| will result in the biggest redistribution of wealth
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23924777 toward the
| rich and large ones)
| larkost wrote:
| > absolutely. If anything investors provide for liquidity
| of the market.
|
| No, no, no. "providing liquidity" is not a good thing
| unless liquidity is actually a problem almost everywhere
| people talk about this.
|
| The "liquidity" provided by high-frequency traders in the
| stock market does not benefit anyone but themselves. For
| everyone else the difference between trading in minutes
| and hours (or even days) is near-meaningless. And they
| don't provide liquidity for seldom traded stocks.
|
| And on the housing market they are not providing
| liquidity for the market in general. They are buying and
| then renting those properties out. Since they are all-
| cash offers they often trump "regular" buyers out of the
| market, even when offering the same price. Again, the
| only ones who benefit by this are those investors
| themselves.
|
| These investors are one of the major forces pushing up
| the prices, the are part of the problem, not the
| solution.
| jrumbut wrote:
| It seems so clear that the way forward is not to try to
| convince people to sacrifice the foundation of their
| financial security but is rather to compensate them.
|
| Make it so neighbors are competing to host whatever they
| are NIMBYing about currently because it comes with a
| package of goodies that will offset the problems. It
| doesn't have to include much new spending, rebalancing or
| reprioritization of existing resources to ensure fairness
| can be part of it.
|
| Is this the norm? I feel like I haven't heard it often
| during debates over unpopular new developments.
| missedthecue wrote:
| _" They are treating their home primarily as an
| investment because that is what they have been told to do
| their whole life."_
|
| It's not some psyop that has duped an entire nation, it's
| people accurately recognizing that their home is the
| biggest purchase they will ever make in their life, it's
| almost completely done with debt, and most don't want to
| end up underwater.
| slg wrote:
| > it's people accurately recognizing that their home is
| the biggest purchase they will ever make in their life,
| it's almost completely done with debt, and most don't
| want to end up underwater.
|
| What is those people's second biggest purchase which is
| also usually done with debt? Does anyone believe that the
| government should enact policies to ensure that car
| prices always increase so they would be a better
| investment? Houses obviously have a longer lifespan than
| cars, so I'm not suggesting they should necessarily
| depreciate the same way, but there is also no reason
| housing should always be appreciating.
|
| We have this idea that the price you sell your home for
| should always be higher than the price you bought it for.
| There is no reason for us to preserve that idea beyond
| the fact that people have now internalized that idea and
| plan their financial lives around it. The longer we allow
| that to continue, the harder it becomes to change, but
| the idea itself is not some fundamental requirement of
| society.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Resale value is probably one of the number one things car
| buyers look at when shopping.
| slg wrote:
| No one expects that resale value to go up. No one
| suggests that the government creates programs to prop up
| that resale value. People understand that owning a car
| gives them value and they are fine paying the difference
| between the purchase price and the resale price for that
| value. Why should homeownership be different? Why should
| homeownership not just be free but profitable? It makes
| no sense other than homeowners were told it was true,
| demand it be true into the future, and they (now joined
| by institutional investors) are a powerful voting block.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Look at what people actually do, not what they say for
| cheap virtue points online.
|
| Reliability is way, way down the wish-list. People don't
| really consider it until all the other key features they
| want are very solidly satisfied. And even then the take
| rate is maybe 50%. For every jerk in a 4Runner or Pilot
| there's an equal and opposite jerk in a Landrover or
| Tiguan.
| [deleted]
| davidw wrote:
| The goal should probably be something close to price
| _stability_. If prices bounce all around, up and down,
| people pay more attention than if they were just kind of
| 'there', and you could buy or sell whenever the need
| arose in order to move into housing that better suits you
| at a given point in your life.
| slg wrote:
| Exactly. True stability is likely unattainable, but I
| would love if it was a governmental goal like a steady
| small positive rate of inflation is a goal. There will be
| temporary changes like the last year with inflation. But
| for the prior 30 years there has been a very steady
| roughly 2-4% rate of inflation. Could you imagine if the
| federal, state, and local government fully committed to
| steadying housing costs? It would be amazing. It just
| seems politically impossible to get to there from here
| because of the people who would be hurt by that
| transition.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Let's be real here: the only housing that people generally
| oppose being built is high-density, low-income housing. And
| there are good reasons for that.
|
| And Vox putting out an article like this is just too
| perfect.
| Aunche wrote:
| Mid and high density housing for the high-income earners
| get opposed across the entire economic spectrum. On one
| hand, you have NIMBYs that place strict zoning
| restrictions and mandate bullshit environmental reviews
| to stall the development that does occur. On the other,
| you have affordable housing advocates opposing
| gentrification by blocking cement trucks and refusing to
| be leave their apartment that got bought out unless if
| they get paid $1 million. At the end of the day,
| developers can pull through by simply throwing enough
| money and time at the problem, but that's a cost that
| ends up being passed to the future renters.
| NoraCodes wrote:
| > people generally oppose [...] high-density, low-income
| housing. And there are good reasons for that.
|
| Are there, other than "I don't want to live near the
| poors" and "I don't want to see people who have
| problems"? That's not a good reason.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Those aren't the only reasons, but they _are_ good
| reasons. People don 't buy a nice house in a nice suburb
| to live next to poor people. It's harsh, but it's
| reality.
| NoraCodes wrote:
| > It's harsh, but it's reality.
|
| Right, it's _harsh_ - pointlessly so. If your ethical
| system values the right of rich people to not interact
| with poor people over the right of everyone to have a
| roof over their head, that ethical system is evil.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| What makes them good reasons? Plenty of things are real
| without being good.
|
| There is no ethical framework in which "I don't want to
| live next to the poors" is an ethical sentiment - even
| though it is understandable in some ways. Well, maybe in
| Objectivism, or "Fuck You, Got Mine". Though even an
| Objectivist would be hard pressed to argue against
| someone else's right to build whatever they want on their
| own property.
| docandrew wrote:
| There's a difference between people who have problems and
| people who cause problems for themselves and others.
|
| A good neighbor who has fallen on hard times will have
| plenty of sympathy.
| NoraCodes wrote:
| What about a good person who was born poor, grew up poor,
| worked from the age of 16 supporting their family, and
| remains poor? There are many such people in the USA, and
| very few seem to support policies that would make housing
| more affordable to them.
| davidw wrote:
| There are reasons for that, but they are generally _bad_
| ones involving people not wanting to live near other
| people who look like the author of the article, even if
| they won 't say that part out loud.
|
| Higher density housing is a massive component of building
| lower carbon footprint cities, as well as making our
| cities more financially resilient. It's also something
| that can increase equity a lot by giving people with
| lower incomes access to nicer areas and schools.
|
| https://www.brookings.edu/research/we-cant-beat-the-
| climate-...
| ROTMetro wrote:
| I don't want higher density for the same reason I don't
| go on vacations on cruise ships and don't use public
| transportation. People are gross and assholes. The more
| people the more chance of tragedy of the commons, and
| once it sets in it is hard to stop. Most college educated
| Americans lived in college dorms, and went on to NOT want
| to live in shared building environments. It's not about
| racism, it's about not wanting to live in high density
| areas, hence buying homes with ZONING LAWS that guarantee
| me I can live how I choose. If I want high density, that
| is what cities are for. Stop trying to TAKE my (property)
| rights away(that is what zoning laws are, guarantee of my
| RIGHTS as they related to THE LARGEST INVESTMENT I WILL
| EVER MAKE IN MY LIFE). It's great to have an opinion, but
| to project onto others in order to make yourself feel
| superior and manipulate power dynamics is why this
| country is falling apart. Every action you take should
| BUILD and add value, not simply tear some 'other' down.
| But that would be hard, and BUILDING society is hard, and
| you would have to endure others having a right to their
| opinion. To quote Julius Caesar "It is easier to find men
| who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are
| willing to endure pain with patience.". You are a fine
| soldier for your cause, but your argument shows signs of
| a poor citizen.
| travisathougies wrote:
| Actually, zoning laws are not part of your property
| rights. Zoning restriction dictate what you can build on
| your property, but ownership interest in your property
| does not entitle you to 'buy' zoning laws. This is easily
| seen as you cannot sell zoning laws.
|
| Zoning laws ultimately restrict your property rights as
| you lose the right to do what you wish with your
| property. They ought to be abolished to protect property
| rights.
|
| Most societies did just fine without zoning laws for the
| entirety of human history.
|
| Note, that I don't approach this from the YIMBY or woke
| side of things. Rather, as a pretty staunch free market
| advocate, it is painfully obvious to me that we should
| not restrict people's rights to do with their property as
| they see fit.
|
| As an example, I was recently going to buy land to
| develop into a business. However, zoning laws in this
| area of the county (in the middle of nowhere mind you)
| meant I would have to jump through endless permit and red
| tape. Any so-called supporter of property rights should
| be livid that this goes on in this country. Buying the
| land should be enough to give me rights to do what I wish
| with it. Environmental laws should deal with actual human
| health hazards, not how much shadow I'm spilling onto a
| neighboring property or how much view I'm blocking.
|
| A lot of the issues with zoning is people attempting to
| own that which they don't. You don't own your neighbor's
| property.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Nobody is talking about buying or selling zoning laws.
| However, the value of property and the taxes paid on it
| are very much impacted by zoning laws. So people
| absolutely do make decisions on buying property based on
| zoning laws.
|
| The value of my house would be decimated if there were a
| pawn shop next door to it. I wouldn't have bought my
| house if that were even a remote possibility.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| You don't have a property right to your neighbors'
| properties. Your neighbors do.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| <<but they are generally bad ones
|
| Um.. the qualifier is very broad. I would posit that the
| owner of the house ( and therefore part of a given
| community ) is in a very good position to judge whether
| or not a given project is, or is not, beneficial to that
| community. There is nothing to be quiet about.
| Neighborhoods that house predominantly black population
| tend to have houses with lower dollar value. As a result,
| chances to transform the owner's local habitat to one
| that that does not benefit the owner is highly
| irrational, regardless of current political winds.
|
| << It's also something that can increase equity a lot by
| giving people with lower incomes access to nicer areas
| and schools.
|
| They are not nicer as a matter of fact. Part of that
| niceness is being funded with higher prices ( and taxes
| ). You take that away by adding some things NIMBYs are
| fighting about and the result is a neighborhood whites
| will flee. And cries of racism will continue.
|
| edit: clarified value in first paragraph
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| >There are reasons for that, but they are generally bad
| ones involving people not wanting to live near other
| people
|
| Could have just ended the sentence there.
| davidw wrote:
| That's not it though, really. People with a bit of cash -
| the kind who show up to planning commission hearings at 2
| in the afternoon on weekdays - can very easily go buy
| some land in a remote place and do just that. They like
| city amenities though.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Maybe? Some of us have significant others, who believe
| staying close to family and whatnot is of some
| importance. I don't, but I am biased since I left mine
| thousands of miles away and have not looked back much.
|
| If it was up to me, I would already have moved somewhere
| with lower taxes, but "kids, school and so on" currently
| takes priority over my selfish needs.
|
| <<They like city amenities though.
|
| Yes. I pay for them. I better like them. Otherwise, I
| will be the one complaining during next board meeting.
| jaywalk wrote:
| You're never going to win anyone over with the tired "if
| you disagree with me, you're a racist" BS.
|
| Low-income, high-density housing attracts problems. It
| has literally nothing to do with race. You could
| guarantee that the high-rise apartment building you want
| to construct down the street from me would be 100% filled
| with people who look like me, and I'd still oppose it.
|
| Keep your YIMBY nonsense IYBY.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Even if you ignore the racist roots mentioned in a
| sibling thread (and I maintain that you shouldn't), we
| will need low-income housing as long as there are people
| with low incomes! And it's best for everyone involved if
| that housing is commingled in every community rather than
| being concentrated in one place. It's well documented
| that the neighborhood you grow up in has a huge impact on
| how upwardly mobile you'll be if you're in a low-income
| family.
|
| Look to Vienna's social housing program for an example of
| this done very well. That doesn't look like it attracts
| problems, now does it?
| giantg2 wrote:
| "And it's best for everyone..."
|
| How exactly is it best for the well-off? I'm curious what
| pros and cons it would have for them.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| It promotes empathy with and reduces bias against those
| of different racial and economic backgrounds, for one.
| It's easier for stereotypes to take hold in highly
| segregated environments because you don't get much
| interaction with those outside your own groups.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I mean, that's good for society. But that's not a benefit
| for the well off who rely on their "network" (aka
| nepotism and cronyism).
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Social cohesion and avoidance of class warfare.
|
| Historically, the decline of most late-stage empires was
| triggered by spiraling economic bifurcation.
|
| Sometimes, it's better to be less wealthy but on top of
| an ordered country vs more wealthy and without the rule
| of law as society breaks down.
| giantg2 wrote:
| That's good for society. I doubt that many of the
| moderately wealthy would really be a cause of this. It
| seems the ultrawealthy are the main cause in the downfall
| of empires, as they hold the most influence and become
| leeches off the people working. And now we democratize
| those negative decisions via things like REITs, so
| everyone's 401k is part of the problem.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| When there's no more food to eat, the poor will always
| turn to eating the rich, if we want to take this to the
| extreme (or, well, when there's nowhere left to live,
| they'll live inside the rich, I guess?).
| davidw wrote:
| Where I live, the hospital is struggling to hire nurses
| due to the lack of housing options. That's not even the
| 'low income' bracket. Teachers struggle to find housing
| as well. Those are both things that high income people
| need, especially the former.
|
| Restaurants are shutting down for want of workers.
| Because they can't afford it.
|
| Low income workers provide valuable services in our
| communities. Telling them they can't live where they work
| creates all kinds of problems, both social and
| environmental - they often drive in to do those jobs,
| creating more pollution and traffic.
| akamia wrote:
| One practical benefit for the well-off is having people
| in close proximity who can staff their local restaurants,
| shops, schools, etc.
|
| It's much easier to hire and retain staff for your
| business when your pool of potential employees isn't a
| 30+ minute bus ride away.
|
| For the well-off residents, it means better and more
| consistent service at their neighborhood grocery, coffee
| shop, restaurant, pharmacy, etc.
| jaywalk wrote:
| I don't know what to tell you. I just don't want to be
| surrounded by high-rise apartment buildings. I didn't buy
| a nice house in a nice suburb to stare at giant cement
| buildings. It's that simple.
| jeromegv wrote:
| You're building a straw man.
|
| The reality is that in a suburb far from infrastructure,
| investors won't want to build a 30 stories building.
|
| But they might want to build a 3-4 units building,
| something 2-3 stories maximum. But this is currently
| ILLEGAL. Only a single house is possible and ANY
| densification is impossible.
|
| You go to the downtown of older cities and you don't see
| giant cement buildings. But you do see livable
| neighbourhood with buildings that are just slightly
| higher than the norm and can house multiple families.
| jaywalk wrote:
| I'm not building a strawman at all. Let me make my
| position even more clear: I don't want to live near
| multi-family housing. I want it to remain illegal for it
| to be built near me.
|
| Leave the suburbs alone. Every single place you people
| infect with your ideas turns to hell.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| People need to live somewhere and the population is
| growing. Where do you suggest that the kids of current
| residents live?
| akomtu wrote:
| Maybe Im naive, but whats wrong with building entirely
| bew towns and cities? Last time I flew across the US, I
| saw vast wilderness with a few tiny populated places here
| and there.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| There's nothing broadly wrong with building entirely new
| cities, but it's incredibly difficult to do for a variety
| of reasons. Most attempts to do this fail. Expecting new
| cities to absorb all of the increase in population is
| unrealistic.
|
| If you're talking new suburbs of existing cities, well,
| that's basically the only expansion we've done in many
| places. Some problems with that:
|
| - It leads to more driving needed to get to the city (and
| thus more emissions, exactly what we need to avoid right
| now).
|
| - If the implication is that you're building outward
| because the inner suburbs are getting more expensive to
| live in (which will happen if they don't densify at all
| and the population grows), then you're basically forcing
| most kids to move far away from their
| parents/grandparents/etc. Some people won't want to live
| near their family but many do, and being able to maintain
| those close family ties feels important.
| davidw wrote:
| It's a pretty well document fact that it has a lot of its
| roots in racism.
|
| https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-
| forgotten...
|
| If that makes you feel uncomfortable, so be it.
|
| Americans spend zillions of dollars every year visiting
| Europe, which is full of high density housing. And come
| home raving about how much they love it. It does not
| 'cause problems'.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| I love Costa Rica therefor I want all my food drenched is
| Salsa Lezao according to your powerful logic.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| There's a correlation between crime / neighborhood blight
| and low income residents.
|
| That correlation may be because of historic and current
| structural racism, lack of access to mental health
| services and a social safety net, or a myriad of other
| socio-economic issues, but it doesn't change the fact
| that it exists.
|
| Insinuating that anyone who brings up those issues is
| racist isn't helpful.
|
| It would be more productive to say "Yes, I understand why
| neighborhoods might be resistant to denser, low-income
| tolerant development, and here are some ways we could
| incorporate that fact into a productive plan..." E.g.
| building more mixed-income developments.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Of course, they love visiting and perhaps the idea of it.
| Then they realize they can't have their larger houses,
| cars, etc that they want. And that government will be
| more involved in their lives (zoning, policies,
| prohibitions), which is fairly reasonable given the track
| record in many places in the US.
| dakna wrote:
| >It does not 'cause problems'.
|
| Like with most policies, the details are much more
| nuanced.
|
| Check out the history of the Gropiusstadt in Berlin:
|
| https://www.goethe.de/ins/jp/en/m/kul/sup/boe/21633080.ht
| ml
| jaywalk wrote:
| America is not Europe. It will never be Europe. Things
| that work in Europe may not work in America, and vice-
| versa.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| This always strikes me as an unsatisfying response. What
| about America is so fundamentally different than Europe
| that would make the same policies that work there not
| work here?
|
| Every time I've seen this type of argument brought up,
| it's fallen flat when the same infrastructure is built
| here because it _does end up working_. We're really not
| so unique.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Land area and population density?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dep
| end...
| cycomanic wrote:
| Well Sweden has a lower population density than the US
| and there is still plenty high density housing, so your
| argument is?
|
| I think it would be good to do away with these simplistic
| this or that doesn't work here because... The US society
| was remodelled quite dramatically to be very car centred
| over a very short time and now people say that it can't
| be any other way because of the geography? The US was
| literally different 70-80 years ago.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Which doesn't mean much as a comparison point in the US
| because much of that land has zero or approximately zero
| residents, and nobody's talking about building high-
| density housing in the middle of nowhere anyway. Upwards
| of 80% of the US population lives in urban areas and
| _those_ places certainly are comparable to much of
| Europe.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Upwards of 80% of the US population lives in urban areas
|
| Look up the US Census definition of "urban." In the town
| where I live, three houses around me are on 100 acres
| collectively--not to mention even more adjacent
| conservation land and that's classified as urban because
| it's near a smaller old mill town and only about 50 miles
| from a major city.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Without knowing exactly which town you're talking about,
| I would posit that that's likely still dense enough to
| have some pretty direct comparison points somewhere in
| Western Europe. It's not like all of Western Europe is a
| city.
|
| Which doesn't mean that the same infrastructure you'd see
| in a dense European city would make sense in your town,
| mind you. I just think that Europe and America aren't as
| incomparable as some people seem to think.
| ghaff wrote:
| Well, it's a typical more rural New England town. There
| is zero public transit of any sort. Essentially no
| businesses in town except barely when they merge with an
| adjacent small old mill city. So even in the town center
| where there are some sidewalks basically nowhere to walk
| to other than the library or post office. About 7K
| population total.
|
| Though not that different really from small English
| countryside towns I've walked through.
| bombcar wrote:
| Apparently the new "urban" definition is something like:
|
| >Adopting 500 persons per square mile (PPSM) as the
| minimum density criterion for recognizing some types of
| urban territory.
|
| https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/03/24/2022
| -06...
|
| Which basically means anything "town-like" or higher is
| "urban".
|
| So most Americans live in urban areas even if they are in
| a tiny town in the middle of nowhere.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yes. Most people see urban and imagine at least a 2nd or
| 3rd tier city in terms of population. Not a 5K person
| town that may or may not be within a not too long a drive
| of some sort of population center.
|
| Urban in the sense of "don't need to own a car" is a much
| smaller slice--especially if you aren't adjusting your
| expectations.
| xienze wrote:
| > What about America is so fundamentally different than
| Europe that would make the same policies that work there
| not work here?
|
| And yet, if I suggested that the US do something a lot of
| (all?) European countries do, like having to present ID
| when voting, I'd get an endless stream of replies about
| why that's fundamentally impossible in the US (and
| racist, naturally). And that's a FAR easier problem to
| solve than pie-in-the-sky "make everything more dense and
| have high speed rail everywhere and European-style public
| transit in every city" daydreams that are so popular.
|
| Maybe some things really aren't that easy to do in the
| US.
| triceratops wrote:
| > like having to present ID when voting
|
| Complaints about this usually revolve around the fact
| that voter ID laws aren't accompanied with increased
| funding for and availability of voter ID services. Show
| me a law where they added Saturday and late-evening DMV
| services, or pop-up voter ID registration services at
| grocery stores, pharmacies, post offices, churches,
| community recreation centers, and schools.
|
| The purpose behind these laws is quite clear. It's
| fundamentally unfair to add voter ID laws to depress
| turnout under the guise of "election security".
| waffle_ss wrote:
| > _What about America is so fundamentally different than
| Europe that would make the same policies that work there
| not work here?_
|
| The amount of violent criminality? Look at any major
| light rail network in America and they are nowhere near
| as safe as the European equivalents.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| The author:
|
| https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-
| analysis/blogs/sta...
| davidw wrote:
| I'm talking about the author of the article I cited,
| Jerusalem Demsas.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| In the UK social housing has a bad reputation because
| poor people are far more likely to just be nightmares to
| live nearby.
|
| I lived in one throughout my entire childhood. Around
| half of people were OK, the other half just generally
| dickheads.
|
| That has 0 to do with racism. Many UK towns have trivial
| populations of non-"White British".
|
| The problem is mostly that over time (years or
| generations) poverty gradually turns people into a shell
| of what a well adjusted human could otherwise be.
| davidw wrote:
| You can make a decent argument that concentrated poverty
| does cause some problems. Which is why you should do your
| best to spread all kinds of housing throughout a city,
| including plenty of upzoning in wealthier areas.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| I'd rather just live next to well off people to be
| honest.
|
| We do it on a national scale in most countries (visa
| policy). That's far harsher.
| AmVess wrote:
| Good idea. We'll start with where you live. You get to
| put up with the noise at all hours, the high crime, and
| the generally shit condition lazy people keep their
| neighborhoods in. After living in it for a few years, you
| can come back and tell us how great it is.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Just build high-density housing in rich areas!
|
| And then what, you expect rich people to move in? They
| won't. Poor people are going to move in. And the rich
| people who made that area nice in the first place are
| going to flee, because it will turn into a not-nice area.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Famously all the rich people have moved out of Manhattan.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Manhattan is Manhattan. My nice, quiet suburb is not
| Manhattan.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| And your nice, quiet suburb is unlikely to get many high-
| rises if it's actually far enough away from the nearest
| city center, because it doesn't particularly make sense
| to build towers in the middle of nowhere.
|
| By contrast if your suburb is nice and quiet despite
| being right next to a city because decades of policy have
| locked it in place and it's pricing people out... too
| bad? Other people need housing too and outward from an
| already dense city is where it makes the most sense to
| build them.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Too bad? Hilarious.
|
| Stay in your concrete hellhole, and stop acting like you
| know what's best for everyone else. If I wanted to live
| like you, I'd live where you do. And no matter how much
| you want my area to change (because you clearly can't
| stand for people to live in ways you don't agree with)
| it's not going to.
| kaashif wrote:
| > Stay in your concrete hellhole, and stop acting like
| you know what's best for everyone else.
|
| So the side advocating for upzoning (allowing people to
| build what they want on their own properties) is "acting
| like they know what's best for everyone else" while you,
| advocating for strict limits on what others can do on
| their own properties according to your desires, aren't?
|
| I guess we can make this consistent if you admit you're
| doing something you know isn't best for everyone else,
| and aren't even trying to. Which would be fine if you
| weren't using the state to support your aims.
|
| If we don't do that, and both sides are trying to do what
| they think is best for everyone, this is a difference in
| degree not kind. There obviously need to be limits on any
| zoning.
|
| > because you clearly can't stand for people to live in
| ways you don't agree with
|
| You are in support of using the coercive power of
| government to restrict your neighbors from living in ways
| you disagree with, if those ways include building more
| housing!
| heleninboodler wrote:
| We should stop pretending it's a choice between single-
| family houses and 30 story high-rises. There are lots of
| seattle neighborhoods, for example, where people bought
| single family houses 20, 30, 40 years ago _because of the
| character of the neighborhood_ and now suddenly the
| yimbys have changed the zoning to accept seven story
| buildings. A good friend of mine has lived in and cared
| for his home for 25 years and now the houses bordering
| him directly to the south have been sold and a 7 story
| apartment building is going up 5 feet from his property.
| Once it 's built, he will literally never get direct
| sunlight again. That's pretty significant.
| davidw wrote:
| You can't avoid change. You have to pick what kind of
| change you want. This graphic sums it up pretty well:
|
| https://twitter.com/issiromem/status/1557816668604141568
|
| What your friend has observed is what happens when you
| keep it bottled up for years and years.
|
| Instead of gradually moving to 4-plexes and 3 story
| apartments and narrow townhomes, when all that demand
| _finally_ gets unleashed, it 's a larger change.
|
| Change can be disturbing, so we should aim for more
| frequent gradual changes than 'quantum leap' type stuff.
| That said, at least your friend has options in that their
| land is probably worth a ton of money now and they do
| have the possibility to get out and go somewhere more to
| their liking.
|
| Tons of people in high cost cities like Seattle have no
| home at all due to housing costs.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| The fact that the change is "sudden" is a direct result
| of the fact that the ability to build has been restricted
| for so long. If building densely had been allowed all
| along, things would get built out whenever it made
| financial sense to do so, and you'd be able to see the
| trend coming gradually from a mile away. But now you've
| got all these low-density areas right next to (or in!)
| cities that have had artificial limitations on building
| for so long that when you do upzone a part of it it's
| like letting out pressure all at once. The demand has
| grown with the population all this time but it hasn't
| been met.
|
| It's more important to me that people have places to live
| than that existing homeowners everywhere can have a
| neighborhood that never changes. The two are
| incompatible. It would be preferable for that change to
| be gradual, but given the current state of things I don't
| see how that's possible.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "You can make a decent argument that concentrated poverty
| does cause some problems."
|
| What differs between it being concentrated or spread out?
| I see you're making the argument that it should be spread
| out, but I don't see any explaination of the benefits.
|
| Edit: why disagree? This is an honest question.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Forcing poor people into rich areas will make them stop
| being poor. Or so I've gathered.
| bombcar wrote:
| It just makes the rich people move away. We call it
| blight, white flight, and gentrification as it cycles
| around.
| spoonjim wrote:
| High density housing also inevitably leads to more
| murders
| jason0597 wrote:
| The level of crime in Rotterdam is lower than in San
| Francisco though
| cycomanic wrote:
| It's a nice story except that the statistics seem to say
| something different. The states with the highest homocide
| rates are actually not very densely populated.
| https://www.usnews.com/news/best-
| states/articles/2021-11-12/...
| dev-3892 wrote:
| Also, inevitably, more fingers per square foot, more
| calories consumed per acre, higher water usage, and more
| conversations per minute in the neighborhood.
|
| things that people do increase when there are more
| people. really unclear what your point is here, and the
| way you said it really makes you look mean.
| spoonjim wrote:
| _Per capita_ murder rates are much higher in large cities
| than in rural areas.
| idontpost wrote:
| That's just a lie. People oppose new SFH subdivisions all
| the time.
| currydove wrote:
| This is definitely not the case.
|
| Example: a .1% increase in shadow over Dolores Park in SF
| almost stopped a new 19 unit development - https://twitte
| r.com/sam_d_1995/status/1415839145386196993/ph...
|
| It was approved years later after adjustments -
| https://sfyimby.com/2022/04/supervisors-approve-
| shortened-pl...
|
| Granted...this particular situation was unique as the
| development was market-rate units, not low-income, in a
| communal living layout. There were other concerns on part
| of neighbors (some real, some silly, and others just
| simply obstructive). This, along with CEQA in California
| have been constantly used by existing members of a
| town/city/neighborhood/etc to reduce additional
| development of _any_ kind, not just low-income.
|
| This is at a point where NIMBY isn't even the only
| acronym anymore, BANANAs is the new one the kids use
| these days - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near
| Anything.
|
| Some more links - -
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/how-
| san-fr... - ugh i know, the Atlantic, but its good -
| https://missionlocal.org/2021/07/developments-in-
| development... -
| https://www.ocregister.com/2022/03/16/berkeley-case-
| proves-c...
| jeffbee wrote:
| The funny thing is we would all love to have more
| shadows. All American cities need more shade.
| jonnydubowsky wrote:
| Thanks for introducing a new (to me) term, i.e BANANAS.
| Upon searching i discovered a few others:
|
| NIABY: Opposition to certain developments as
| inappropriate anywhere in the world is characterised by
| the acronym NIABY ("Not In Anyone's Backyard"). The
| building of nuclear power plants, for example, is often
| subject to NIABY concerns.
|
| NAMBI: ("Not Against My Business or Industry") is used as
| a label for any business concern that expresses umbrage
| with actions or policy that threaten that business,
| whereby they are believed to be complaining about the
| principle of the action or policy only for their
| interests alone and not for all similar business concerns
| who would equally suffer from the actions or policies.
|
| BANANA: is an acronym for "Build Absolutely Nothing
| Anywhere Near Anything" (or "Anyone").The term is most
| often used to criticize the ongoing opposition of certain
| advocacy groups to land development. The apparent
| opposition of some activists to every instance of
| proposed development suggests that they seek a complete
| absence of new growth.
|
| NOPE: (Not On Planet Earth)To leave an uncomfortable
| situation, usually quickly.
|
| LULU: Locally Unwanted/Undesirable Land Use planning.
|
| NOTE: Not Over There Either (meaning is same NIMBY)
| currydove wrote:
| hah! wow, i had no idea about the others
|
| thanks for digging
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| I disagree, I've seen plenty of people outraged about
| high-density high-income housing saying that it doesn't
| have enough low-income options (unsurprisingly, these
| people are not fans of the low-income housing either). In
| general, I think people just don't like change- there's
| likely a reason they moved to _that_ neighborhood and don
| 't want it to be disrupted.
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| People gotta live somewhere
| themitigating wrote:
| Too perfect how? Because you disagree with the viewpoint?
| What are the good reasons that people shouldn't want high
| density low-income housing?
| renewiltord wrote:
| LOL that is total bullshit. In SF, they oppose high-
| density high-income housing too. It's total motte and
| bailey shit. Here's the real algorithm:
| if density == low: return "This won't solve the
| problem" if income == low: return
| "This ruins the neighbourhood character"
| if density == mid and income == high: return
| "This is gentrification and soulless coffee shops!"
| if density == high and income == high: return
| "This is for Arab/Chinese/local-xenophobe-target-du-jour
| investors only" return "This ruins the
| neighbourhood character"
|
| The absolute bullshittery around this nonsense is really
| something.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| This pretty much nails it. The way I saw it put which
| feels fitting is, "Everybody who moves into San Francisco
| wants to be the last person to move into San Francisco".
| Of course this isn't a practical desire in any city, but
| that doesn't stop people from trying to make it happen
| anyway.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| >> "Everybody who moves into San Francisco wants to be
| the last person to move into San Francisco".
|
| Person moves to SF and puts down life savings as down-
| payment on 1:4 leveraged home...not a surprise they want
| to ensure they arent wiped out. A 20% decrease in value
| wipes out the life savings. The whole system is designed
| to perpetuate itsself.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| You have it. You can be a NIMBY, YIMBY, or any other
| XIMBY, but there's just no winning.
| Kharvok wrote:
| People want to live near peers. Low income housing
| creates problem areas and people don't want to live near
| problem areas.
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| Definitely not the case.
|
| In my middle- to upper-middle-class mill town there's a
| proposal to turn a disused historic mill building into
| luxury apartments and residents are fighting hard against
| it. The main stated reason is traffic, although it's
| unclear to me if having a bunch of apartments will
| generate noticeably more rush-hour traffic than when the
| mill was operational. I think some folks are also put off
| by the term "luxury apartment" too, as this area is
| becoming less affordable than it once was. So they
| counter-productively fight against increasing the housing
| supply, which would actually create downward pressure on
| rent, even for non-luxury places, as folks in more modest
| apartments might be tempted to move to these fancy new
| places, creating vacancies for others.
|
| I think a lot of people just don't like change, so they
| fight it - they want their town/neighborhood/whatever to
| be just the way it was in the "good ol' days", which just
| isn't realistic. The mill jobs aren't coming back, but we
| do have white collar workers willing to pay for
| attractive places to live. Why not re-use the damn mill
| building?
| davidw wrote:
| Traffic from housing is generally fairly minimal. Traffic
| and parking are the big NIMBY fears and are generally
| unfounded.
|
| "Luxury" apartments are, 9 times out of 10, just brand
| new apartments that happen to be in an expensive
| location.
|
| It's kind of like cars - a brand new Toyota Corolla is
| not the cheapest car out there. A 20 year old used one is
| going to be a lot more affordable. But you don't get old
| ones unless you build and sell the new ones to people who
| have the money to buy new cars. If there are not enough
| new cars, those people will drive up the price of the
| used cars.
|
| Indeed, this is exactly what happened during the
| pandemic.
|
| As someone who lives in a former mill town myself, feel
| free to write if you're curious about organizing in favor
| of housing. It's a lot of fun!
| bombcar wrote:
| > I think a lot of people just don't like change, so they
| fight it
|
| This is it, hilariously. Locally the railroad started
| building a rail yard, and everyone got up in arms and the
| city and county was howling and a meeting was called and
| the rail company politely explained that they're
| regulated federally and are building a nice berm around
| the rail yard, but there's nothing you can do to stop it.
|
| And everyone stopped complaining, the yard got built, and
| nobody cares.
|
| We need more of the straight bribery that used to happen
| around nuke plants - if the plant is approved, everyone
| gets $1k off their property taxes for X years or
| whatever.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| > And there are good reasons for that.
|
| What are these reasons? What makes them "good"?
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| There's a huge amount of capital available and borrowing is
| still cheap.
|
| I don't know in the US but in many European locations
| building of new housing has drastically slowed down over the
| past decades, which naturally puts am upward pressure on the
| market.
|
| There is no need to demonise investing in property, which not
| the root of the problem (and frankly is often an ideological
| stance).
|
| If anything, there should be more investment in new buildings
| to boost supply but very often the problem is planning
| restrictions.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> We have spent decades telling American families that
| homeownership is the safest investment.
|
| Home ownership is a key part of retirement, as reducing
| monthly bills is critical and rent is a big one. It has been
| a fairly profitable investment for 30 years of decreasing
| interest rates, but it is no longer so.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| How did they back up that assertion? If I ran an onion fund I'd
| put a slide deck in my pitch that suggested I controlled the
| onion prices too.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _they owned such a large percentage of the rental housing in
| Tampa Florida, that even though vacancy rates were high, and
| rents were going down throughout the nation and other areas in
| the state of Florida, they were able to keep rents high in
| Tampa_
|
| Is there antitrust statute for housing stock?
| Finnucane wrote:
| Apparently some of these operations have become pretty
| sophisticated in being able to quickly sort and evaluate
| listings. Individual buyers don't stand much of a chance
| against buyers who can write a check as soon as a property hits
| the market.
| pishpash wrote:
| You mean Zillow's $880M house-flipping fail? AI isn't smart
| enough yet.
| standardUser wrote:
| They mean skilled professionals who make boatloads of money
| spotting and leaping on every decent property that hits the
| market, or is about to, while the rest of us - those
| seeking a home to actually live in - get to fight over the
| remains.
| Finnucane wrote:
| Zillow wasn't investing for the rental market. It was
| trying to automate house flipping, a much riskier
| proposition.
| bennysomething wrote:
| So should we do the same with food too?
| ineptech wrote:
| I agree, and I feel like limiting the mortgage interest
| deduction to owner-occupied homes would get us most of the way
| there at the stroke of a pen. It's a huge subsidy and I can't
| think of any good reason to extend it to rentals and investment
| properties.
|
| In fact, we should probably repeal it altogether - in theory it
| subsidizes home ownership for the poor and middle class, but in
| practice the only people who take it are those who itemize
| deductions, which the poor generally don't.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > limiting the mortgage interest deduction to owner-occupied
| homes
|
| As an investor, you don't have a mortgage interest deduction
| benefit. You have a business expense benefit.
| iav wrote:
| Not sure if you are aware, but all forms of interest expense
| is tax deductible for corporate income tax purposes in the
| United States, not just mortgage interest. This conforms to
| codes in other countries. There is no subsidy that is
| specific enough to rentals or investment properties. And
| since most of corporate bank lending is secured by all assets
| (including real estate), mortgage debt is somewhat fungible
| with other secured corporate debt, so it would be pointless
| to try to tax one but not the other.
| ineptech wrote:
| I believe there is a specific subsidy, but in the "other
| direction" - that's why you can deduct the mortgage
| interest on your vacation home despite not being a human
| and not a business.
|
| I'm aware that interest is generally deductible for
| businesses, and I'm suggesting that houses should be an
| exception to that. We subsidize most business borrowing
| because we want businesses to borrow and invest in stuff,
| and we should have exceptions for things we want to
| discourage investment in. Sure, it's difficult to imagine
| how to keep a giant corporation from finding a way around
| this, but we have difficulty getting giant corporations to
| pay taxes generally. It would still make sense to narrow or
| end the subsidy to discourage individuals and small
| businesses from investing in RE so heavily, and consider
| other approaches to discouraging larger corps.
| Ferrotin wrote:
| What discourages owning housing as an investment is _repealing_
| legislation that inhibits construction. Nothing else (besides
| laws affecting population growth) changes the fundamental
| supply /demand meeting point, in the long run.
|
| Other laws which discourage investment will also discourage
| construction.
| r00fus wrote:
| A related anecdote. 15 years ago, an investment advisor was
| pitching us on investing in water funds. Yes, the move to
| privatize water was well underway a quarter decade ago because
| the people with money KNEW we would have a world where rivers
| in multiple continents running out of water in the future.
|
| That it's come sooner than most predicted is likely making
| those ghouls salivate even more.
|
| Needless to say, we turned him down and just plunked our money
| into index and sustainable funds and chose handpicked stocks
| instead.
| bostonsre wrote:
| Anyone know the ownership percentage for the bay area?
| criddell wrote:
| > We need legislation that discourages housing as investment if
| we are to maintain housing as shelter.
|
| I'm looking forward to hearing how Vancouver's vacant house tax
| affects their market the next few years. It sounds like a good
| idea and I'm glad they're running that experiment. It's hard to
| predict how these things go over time.
| nikanj wrote:
| They've had it for a few years. It hasn't done squat.
|
| Turns out having 10 people and 9 homes remains a problem,
| even if you enact more policies.
|
| They've tried everything, except build enough homes. I'm
| under the impression this is the popular modern across North
| America
| barbazoo wrote:
| > It hasn't done squat.
|
| By what metric? I'm not sure that's accurate [0]. It looks
| like the vacancy rate has seen a steady decline and the
| money raised ($86.6m) helped Community Housing Incentive
| Program (CHIP) and Land Acquisition/Development
| opportunities.
|
| [0] https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/vancouver-2021-empty-
| homes-ta...
| criddell wrote:
| > It hasn't done squat.
|
| You made me go look and I think you're wrong. It wasn't a
| silver bullet (shocker!) but it did add 18,000 units to the
| rental market in 2019 and 2020 and raised $231 million in
| tax revenue that was used to support affordable housing
| developments.
|
| https://news.gov.bc.ca/files/SVT_Annual_Mayors_Consultation
| _...
| bornfreddy wrote:
| That does sound like a correct solution. It gives investors
| an incentive to make sure the houses are not vacant, which
| drives the rent down. Others should not be affected much by
| it, so that's a great solution.
|
| Edit: assuming the situation is where there _are_ vacant
| homes and people willing (but not able to afford) to live in
| them.
| djbebs wrote:
| Next few years? These are policies with effects impacting
| decades...
| RappingBoomer wrote:
| the worst aspect of this is that these landlord corporations
| are of course going to be paying off politicians to create
| laws, regs etc that will further restrict and make more costly
| the building of new housing... it's a vicious circle
| JamesBarney wrote:
| We just need to remember that banning housing investment means
| banning rentals which is problematic for people who don't have
| good credit and a down payment.
| yardstick wrote:
| Imagine if housing was cheap enough that paying the mortgage
| was around the same as what it now costs to rent.
|
| There definitely needs to be some rentals, but I believe that
| there needs to be controls over how many and the rental
| price.
| brianwawok wrote:
| In much of the US (read, in the Midwest where I am right
| now).. mortage monthly payment is indeed cheaper, sometimes
| a lot. And this is after taxes / repair issues.
|
| Renting is very much a poverty trap where the poor with bad
| credit get poorer and worse credit.
| boringg wrote:
| Depends on where you live - this "renting is a poverty
| trap" only applies to certain places and depends on home
| values constantly increasing. If home values crash where
| you live then you spent years putting money towards a
| worthless asset.
| quantified wrote:
| Renting is always worth 0 as equity, so it's a total loss
| regardless.
| brianwawok wrote:
| * It guarantees you do not lose money if the home values
| around you drop
|
| * It gives you a fixed monthly houseing cost. No "10k new
| roof" or "1k new stove" suprises hit you.
|
| * If you are say, saving 50% vs buying, you can put this
| difference in an index fund. This would over 10 or 20
| years potentially give you a LOT of money over buying.
|
| Look, buying is mostly great. It's one of the biggest
| builders of wealth for most Americans. But from a purely
| numbers game, it's not so clear "rent is just losing
| money".
| quantified wrote:
| It guarantees that you can be forced to move at a whim.
| Twice I've had to move, once during the school year,
| because the landlord died. And they'll steal from your
| security deposit. Good landlords are young great people.
| Corporations are scum.
| antisthenes wrote:
| 1. True, but housing prices rarely drop in desirable
| areas (usually where good jobs and schools are). If, for
| some reason, you decide to stay in a town with a dying
| industry, then yes, this is true.
|
| 2. So does a fixed-rate mortgage. Even better,
| refinancing a mortgage during a low-rate period (e.g.
| 2012, 2020) actually lets you _reduce_ your payment,
| while contributing more to equity. How often do you have
| an opportunity to reduce your rent?
|
| 3. Saving 50% of what exactly? You can put the down
| payment into an index fund, yes, but remember than the
| house is an asset that gives you 5x leverage initially,
| assuming 20% down. You can't get 5x leverage at your
| broker, and even if you could, playing with 5x leverage
| on the stock market is insanely risky compared to real
| estate.
|
| > But from a purely numbers game, it's not so clear "rent
| is just losing money"
|
| It's pretty clear actually. They've compared retirees who
| rented all their life vs home-buyers. The difference in
| wealth was striking, a factor of 6x-7x if not more.
|
| What's not clear is whether that trend will continue in
| perpetuity under the conditions of declining population.
| jjav wrote:
| > It gives you a fixed monthly houseing cost.
|
| Renting is the opposite of a fixed monthly cost, since
| rents go up all the time. If you rent, you can't tell me
| what your rent will be in ten years. I can tell you what
| my mortgage will be, exactly the same as today.
|
| > No "10k new roof" or "1k new stove" suprises hit you.
|
| If these bother you, you can sign up for house
| maintenance insurance programs to give you a fixed
| monthly cost. I'd recommend against that since they make
| a profit off you, you're better off putting that money
| into an investment account and withdraw from there when
| you neeed it.
| 1991g wrote:
| This is true only if you place zero value on "having a
| roof over my head".
| boringg wrote:
| Absolute statements rarely hold up when you shine a light
| on them.
| quantified wrote:
| That's sometimes true, but there are a lot of nuances to
| it.
| notch656a wrote:
| But renting also guarantees you will never have negative
| equity.
| quantified wrote:
| Negative equity with a roof over your head is better than
| on the street. Your equity going to zero is still cheaper
| than raising a family to adulthood in a rented place.
| jaywalk wrote:
| > If home values crash where you live then you spent
| years putting money towards a worthless asset.
|
| It's still a roof over my head regardless of how much
| it's worth. And more importantly, how much it's worth is
| completely irrelevant unless/until you want to sell. And
| if you do want to sell, and home values have crashed,
| then the next house you buy will also be cheap!
| random314 wrote:
| The OP is talking about a situation where it would be
| cheaper to rent your home in the future, than make
| mortgage payments on it.
| [deleted]
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| I mean, in San Francisco or the Bay Area in general,
| renting is a ton cheaper than owning at current prices.
| People still buy, because it's nice knowing your landlord
| won't get the cheapest contractor that'll drill into
| asbestos in your kid's room when something happens.
| xur17 wrote:
| As someone that happily rents (I enjoy the increased
| optionality that comes with this option), the constant push
| to get everyone to own a house seems weird to me. Yes, we
| should make it possible to own a home, but it doesn't need
| to be the only option.
|
| Also, rentals tend to be higher density than houses that
| are owned. If there is a housing crisis, this seems like a
| desirable thing. Ex: roommates (yes, possible with a house,
| but less likely), etc.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| When I bought my home 4 years ago my mortgage was ~10% more
| per month than the apartment I was renting. Looking at the
| apartment complex's website, it looks like the same
| apartment is now about 60% more per month than my mortgage.
| Kalium wrote:
| I have good news for you! How many rentals are available is
| closely controlled in most parts of the US. This is one of
| the things zoning accomplishes. It's possible that the
| outcome may differ slightly from what you want, however.
|
| Rent controls are unfortunately very similar in key ways.
| They've been tried, and the results may not quite line up
| with what you might be hoping for.
| pishpash wrote:
| That's never going to be the case because of equity. Of
| course government-owned housing can be sold for use rights
| only with no equity, but that's 'socialism' which Americans
| have been viscerally conditioned against.
| vel0city wrote:
| My mortgage + insurance + taxes is a lower monthly payment
| than what my rent was at the time I bought my house.
| Compared to that same unit renting today, its several
| hundred dollars a month cheaper. It has over twice the
| square footage and a private garage. This is in a pretty
| big metro area, not the middle of nowhere.
|
| One of the biggest benefit of owning is a hedge against
| housing inflation. Its not a perfect hedge, I do
| acknowledge. As property values increase my taxes go up, as
| housing materials increase in cost the cost to repair it
| goes up. But the amount my taxes will go up in a year is
| far less than how much I've been seeing rents shoot up.
| bombcar wrote:
| You're also shouldering maintenance which is often not
| calculated well; the depreciation allowance the IRS
| allows for rental properties is a rough estimate but it's
| not perfect - it estimates that the property (house, not
| land) will be worthless in 27.5/30/40 years, depending on
| if you take GDS, ADS, or it was placed in service before
| 2018 - you usually want the fastest depreciation possible
| but there are reasons not to choose such, involving
| capital gains on sale, etc.
|
| They're "small" expenses but if you track out the various
| things and divide them over the ownership period, they do
| add up.
|
| E.g. - current house, here 5 years, so far: furnace and
| A/C, $9k, fence, $14k, landscaping and misc, $2k, tools
| and supplies, $3k, plumber and window repairs, $2k. So
| about $6k a year, double my taxes and half my mortgage
| again. And I haven't even hit the big ones (and didn't
| count appliances as those were "optional" purchases).
|
| Owning is still a good idea for many, and has benefits,
| and renting will almost by definition be more overall,
| but it's not a given. You note the main advantage -
| stability. If you're on a fixed loan (whether it be 5,
| 10, 20 or 30 years) your payments are calculable years in
| advance and you get to pay much with tomorrow dollars,
| which are almost always worth less than today dollars.
|
| But you do have to want to stay in the area for years.
| ethanbond wrote:
| There are ways to disincentivize toxic forms of investment
| (especially speculation) without _banning_ it. A high land
| value tax, for example, would simultaneously increase
| investment _and_ decrease speculation.
| boringg wrote:
| I don't see how a high land value tax increase investment &
| decrease speculation? If your talking about flipping homes
| that's one thing but REIT ownership isn't home flipping for
| the most part...
| pwinnski wrote:
| A very high real estate tax with huge discounts for a
| single primary homestead makes investment less
| profitable.
| idontpost wrote:
| That's just a less efficient, and less accurate land tax.
| giantg2 wrote:
| That won't fix the current problem. That would only
| potentially prevent it from reoccurring to the current
| levels. Landlords pass tax onto renters. Renters may seek
| to buy a home, but if supply is locked up by landlords,
| they may just be stuck.
| ethanbond wrote:
| High LVT means you pay a high tax on the land itself and
| little or no tax on what you do _on top of_ that land. It
| encourages highly efficient land development which means
| increased supply of commercial and residential units
| (thus reducing rents), and it makes lots of speculation
| prohibitively expensive. Since holding undeveloped land
| is just as expensive as holding developed land, you're
| going to want to put it to productive use sooner rather
| than later.
| twoodfin wrote:
| At the levels where an LVT is effectively coercive, it's
| functionally indistinguishable from rent paid to the
| government for land you don't actually own.
|
| I expect most citizens would recognize this and any
| effective LVT would be politically DOA.
| travisathougies wrote:
| I mean property tax is already rent.
| twoodfin wrote:
| Property tax is rent like a condo fee is rent: It at
| least approximates a (progressively, in most tax schemes)
| assessed user fee for community services. The size of the
| fee is proportional to services rendered.
|
| The LVT as envisioned by its advocates isn't like that.
| It's a fee--largely determined by market forces--to
| continue to occupy and make use of "your" land. If the
| government can insist you pay some market-set cost to
| remain on a plot of land, you don't own it in the way we
| classically think about land title ownership. You're not
| the market participant, the government is.
| [deleted]
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| > At the levels where an LVT is effectively coercive,
| it's functionally indistinguishable from rent paid to the
| government for land you don't actually own.
|
| I don't see how this follows. Would you mind explaining?
| boringg wrote:
| Thats sounds a solution for undeveloped land in urban
| areas though REITs are buying up the housing stock which
| is different.
|
| If I understand your solution correctly it also puts a
| higher burden on the rest of the population who then have
| to pay higher land taxes each year (politically
| unpalatable) and I would argue that REITs probably have
| more capital to be able to pay off higher taxes where
| cranking up land taxes on the population makes home
| ownership more challenging.
| allemagne wrote:
| They are fundamentally the same problem -- profiting off
| of owning something fundamentally scarce that you did not
| produce, i.e. rent-seeking. When the taxes are
| proportional to the most productive use of the land you
| own it is less profitable or sustainable to manipulate
| the housing market.
|
| The strictest Georgist philosophy would hold if you
| happened to homestead in the heart of Manhattan your
| family will eventually have to choose between paying the
| price for holding that piece of land hostage from the
| rest of society or letting someone else make use of it.
|
| In practice, places like Denmark and Estonia make
| exemptions for owner-occupied dwellings.
| giantg2 wrote:
| ... and pricing out existing residents in low density
| housing by taxing them to oblivion.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| Only residents who own tons of land they aren't doing
| anything productive with.
| giantg2 wrote:
| That might be how it starts, but history shows rates
| balloon over time. We already have senior being kicked
| out because of property tax. Your definition of "tons" of
| land is vague and may be used against people who have
| moderate amounts of land (.5-1ac).
| [deleted]
| boringg wrote:
| The whole argument is how to make housing more affordable
| to live in. Your argument is ... pay more for land tax to
| avoid speculation however if you live somewhere in order
| to pay for it you need to consistently be more productive
| than the speculators (who would just charge the land tax
| to the renters anyways). Which doesn't solve the problem
| in any way shape or form.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I never understood this argument. People are not priced
| out of their homes. Their homes are rising in prices so
| they actually have assets to match the price increase.
| Yes they might not be able to afford the tax, but they
| have a million dollar asset that they could use. The
| whole point of the tax is to disencent a single person
| living in a huge house all by themselves.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| Land value tax means you don't pay any extra tax for
| developing your property, but you do pay extra tax if the
| neighborhoods get more expensive. Ergo, incentive for
| investment and disincentive for speculation.
|
| Actually you could still speculate by "swing trading"
| when you expect the value to change rapidly, but you'd be
| less likely to speculate by doing a "buy and hold"
| strategy on a neighborhood that is gradually gentrifying.
| The increased taxes you pay each your will eat into your
| profits, and since the buyer will have have to pay those
| taxes too, the value will be lower.
| Salgat wrote:
| The solution is high property taxes offset by high
| homestead tax exemptions.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| You can crowd out usury private investment (which this
| specifically is an example of) with government investment.
| Have the Fed buy treasuries, use federal funds to build and
| manage affordable housing.
|
| Capital is make believe, a fiction, rows in a database.
| Physical laws are mandatory, everything else is a shared
| delusion or a suggestion. The rules can change at anytime
| with enough will.
|
| Broad strokes, if Capital is primarily serving a small
| minority while the majority suffers for it, the tool (capital
| allocation) is broken and it is time to reevaluate the
| implementation.
| sudden_dystopia wrote:
| You realize that we are already running trillions of
| dollars in deficit for the programs we already have in
| place? The first step, should be to lower the deficit and
| actually fund the programs we have in place. We cannot just
| keep printing money without worsening the deficit and
| worsening the inflation. Yes, consumer sentiment is all
| hopes and dreams, but monetary policy is not. There are
| real world implications.
| bombcar wrote:
| That money (or some portion of it) is currently flowing
| into the housing market via Freddie and Fannie and the
| loan guarantees provided for 30 year fixed.
|
| You could imagine other programs that could encourage
| renting, for example (no thought has been given to this,
| just an example/idea) - federal guarantee that you would
| pay NO capital gains tax if you could prove that you
| continued to rent out the property and never increased
| rent more than 1%, say.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| We're going to inflate that debt away, like all developed
| nations with a declining fertility rate will do (Japan
| leads the way for us). Extend and pretend. Again, it's
| not real! It's just numbers in a database.
|
| For those concerned about sovereign debt, that should've
| been thought about before running it up on unnecessary
| conflicts (which there have been many!) and other
| unproductive efforts (tax cuts for the wealthy). Real
| needs coming up, and no excuses because of previously
| suboptimal governance. Lots of assets and wealth in the
| US to tax for those who really want the debt line go
| down, but if debt line doesn't go down, nbd.
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| If debt doesn't matter, then why do any of us pay any
| tax? We can just replace all taxes with more debt.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| Getting the federal government to manage all rental
| properties sounds awful. I sent a request the IRS last
| September and they still haven't replied yet with anything
| but letters saying they're backed up.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| This is not very imaginative. Think how federal dollars
| are going to small jurisdictions to deploy municipal
| fiber, not HUD being your landlord. The federal gov is
| the VC, local government are the startups, sort of, if
| you want to twist the startup ecosystem analogy. You're
| provided funds with strings and milestones; if you don't
| perform, your funding is pulled (or something similar).
|
| With regards to the IRS, even though there are occasional
| delays, I've always had a top notch experience even when
| my own mistakes would have incurred thousands of dollars
| in penalties (which were waived more than once). If you
| want effective delivery of government services, you must
| fund them at the necessary levels. Effective government
| is not free.
| Salgat wrote:
| Apartment complexes are for more economically efficient
| compared to single family homes. We need to incentivize these
| instead of letting them buy up homes meant for a single
| family.
| com2kid wrote:
| IMHO cities need to limit how many large multi-national
| conglomerates are allowed to build huge rental complexes.
|
| A large % of the high density housing being built around
| Seattle is rental only, all that does is funnel money out of
| the city. Residents don't get to build equity, and rental
| prices keep going up year over year, vs mortgage payments
| that, except for the property tax portion, stay the same over
| 30 years.
|
| Also large rental complexes don't build communities.
|
| Someone who bought a small 2 bedroom house 10 years ago and
| who now rents it out, those people aren't the problem. Heck
| odds are they are renting that 2 bedroom out for less than
| what a large corporation would charge.
| bombcar wrote:
| Most small landlords don't do the accounting properly and
| are losing money; this is disguised by the favorable
| depreciation and the rapid property price appreciation.
|
| For example, many small-time landlords would have been
| better off just buying a much more valuable property to
| live in themselves, than buying one to live in and one to
| rent. Eg, buy a $400k house instead of two $200k houses and
| renting one.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| When they don't come in and build out those large rental
| complexes those very well paid engineers rent/buy every SFH
| for miles causing the absolutely insane gentrification
| we've seen in San Francisco that pushes everyone out.
| [deleted]
| com2kid wrote:
| > those very well paid engineers rent/buy every SFH for
| miles causing the absolutely insane gentrification we've
| seen in San Francisco that pushes everyone out.
|
| I used to live in a large, over 100 unit, town home
| complex.
|
| Central to the complex was a very large open green space,
| larger than most suburban yards.
|
| Over the years, about 50% of the units are now rented
| out, typically at a price lower than in the nearby built
| for rental apartment complexes. Individual landlords
| prize stability in tenants more than maximizing short
| term value, also if a person is only renting out 1 unit,
| that unit being vacant for a month or two is a lot of
| lost income, raising rent by $200 and then losing out on
| 4k of rental income due to having to lose then find a new
| tenant is not something a smart landlord does on a yearly
| basis.
|
| Prior to that I lived in a luxury condo complex in a very
| nice area that was again, lots of rental units. From what
| I gather, soon to be retirees had bought in and were
| renting the units out until they they needed to move into
| them. They also prized stability and boring tenants over
| maximizing monthly income.
|
| The point here is, within reason, today's fancy high end
| condos are tomorrows reasonably prized housing.
|
| Will the 50 story skyscraper condos ever be reasonably
| prized? No, of course not, but if someone dropped 150,000
| units of medium density housing into Seattle, I bet that
| in about 5-10 years housing prices would start to come
| down.
|
| The other issue I have is the absurd number of 4 story
| town homes being built, which should instead be 4 story
| condo complexes. Insane square footage is wasted on
| stairs, and no one over 35 can live in those places, and
| raising a family in them is either impractical or
| horribly annoying. (Good for baby gate sales though...)
|
| If it were up to me I'd remove elevator requirements for
| 4 and 5 story condo complexes in return for having the
| bottom floors requiring ADA units.
| aprdm wrote:
| The concept of credit score isn't something that has always
| existed in humanity. It's something that we can go on
| without, even more so given the ridiculous profitability of
| banks
| pgwhalen wrote:
| It hasn't always, but something of the sort _has_ existed
| for a long long time:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years
| icelancer wrote:
| Like IQ tests, the credit score has egalitarian roots, but
| modern day activists think they're discriminatory and
| should be abolished.
| notch656a wrote:
| Credit score is hilarious. Until I was like 30 I paid for
| literally everything with cash. Everything. Never missed
| a bill. My credit report/score came back "unreportable."
| Not a shred of data to go off of. I was unable to obtain
| any credit card. I ultimately had to go to a bank and
| place $1500 in what was basically a 0% CD for the
| duration of my credit card, with the agreement my bank
| would just take it if I didn't pay. After a couple of
| years of paying that religiously they allowed me to
| unsecure the funds, but I still had shitty credit
| afterwards.
| docandrew wrote:
| Dave Ramsey talks a lot about that - to have a good
| credit score you've got to take on debt, which is
| counterproductive for a lot of people.
| cycomanic wrote:
| The IQ test does not have egalitarian roots, it was
| simply a tool designed to diagnose people with severe
| learning disabilities and was later abused to give a
| metric to people to feel smug about themselves. It
| doesn't have significant correlation with any meaningful
| success metric as soon as we disregard the people with
| learning disabilities.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| If banks stopped lending based on creditworthiness they'd
| be doing a lot less lending causing far more people to not
| be able to afford a house.
| aprdm wrote:
| IMO they need to change their model. If someone has been
| affording rent at 2k for many years, then they can afford
| a mortgage at 1.5k, that's not the case nowadays.
| icelancer wrote:
| Renting on a yearly basis at $24k/year is very different
| than committing to the deed transfer on land + house at
| $18k/year on a 30 year term.
| alexb_ wrote:
| For one, rent can get more expensive, vs a fixed rate
| mortgage which doesn't.
| sigstoat wrote:
| you don't do someone a favor when you lend them money they
| can't pay back.
| Test0129 wrote:
| Credit scores are probably the most useful metric for a
| person in general. The reason isn't because it's an
| assessment of creditworthiness, but it saves the time
| interviewing each person for each loan, asking for quite
| literally thousands of pages of documentation proving they
| are creditworthy, etc.
|
| If you recall how these things were done before credit
| scores it was not pretty. Without them lending would
| virtually cease to all but the most obviously creditworthy
| people.
|
| I generally agree the system for credit scores needs to
| change. In particular it should not be controlled by a
| veritable monopoly. But this does not discount the utility
| of it in general.
| [deleted]
| nathanyz wrote:
| They just bought an entire new homes community on the east
| coast of Florida. Crazy but seems like they are creating locale
| specific monopolies.
| jwarden wrote:
| But housing _is_ an investment, and a shelter. Discouraging
| housing as an investment discourages investment in housing.
|
| What I think you are trying to say is that it is preferable
| that the investment in housing be made by the people who are
| going to live in the house (or by the government) and not by
| entrepreneurs.
| alexb_ wrote:
| The conventional way to get a ROI is to actually improve what
| you invested in. Forcing a low supply is not improvement.
| gbasin wrote:
| The CoreLogic data shows that what it calls "mega" investors,
| with a thousand or more homes, bought 3% of houses last year and
| in 2022, compared with about 1% in previous years, with the bulk
| of investor purchases made by smaller groups.
| BeetleB wrote:
| 1000 is too high a threshold. I wonder what it would look like
| if you dropped to 50 or 100.
|
| I hang out in RE circles. Anecdotally it seems that probably
| most of these are bought by people who have just 1-20
| properties - regular folks who have regular jobs but are
| looking for ways to supplement their income and hopefully quit
| their jobs. Owning merely 5 extra homes is not enough to
| replace income, and in some markets owning even 20 is not
| enough.
|
| But without a good study that breaks it down, I have no idea if
| my anecdotal experience is reflective of the nationwide trend.
| nwsm wrote:
| Ah yes, regular folks who buy 5 extra homes to supplement
| their income.
| aprdm wrote:
| IMO extra properties should be heavily taxed. Say you have
| more than 3, it should basically not be profitable anymore.
| No one wins if people are hoarding houses
| logisticseh wrote:
| Totally agreed. Petite landlordism is causing is a LOT of
| economic damage to Gen Z and even younger millenials. It's
| a much larger problem than REITs, IMO.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Would a duplex count as one property or two? How about a
| 4-plex?
|
| Would this apply to apartment complexes as well? As in, it
| won't be profitable to own more than 3 complexes? Would
| that result in most capital going into megacomplexes and
| fewer people wanting to buy small apartment complexes with
| only, say, 10 units?
|
| Not disagreeing with you, but there are nuances involved.
| wyre wrote:
| Ya I think per building would be a good metric. We need
| higher density housing. Megacomplexes accomplish this.
| carom wrote:
| So the number in the title is mostly small LLCs.
| honkycat wrote:
| So glad I bought a house when I did. I was unsure b/c the value
| seemed inflated, but rent has gone up, up, UP!
|
| A lot of my friends are now paying rent that is $100-$200 within
| my mortgage payment. And that is for an apartment without AC or a
| yard.
| sevenf0ur wrote:
| Same, I thought that 2019 prices were insane. Since then it's
| appreciated an additional $150k. My house made more money than
| I did one year. I'm expecting things to level out for awhile.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| I will be perfectly ok if the high interest rates drive these
| companies bankrupt. They chose to speculate. Speculation comes
| with risk. Let them bear the burden.
|
| For owner occupancy protections, the real answer was to never to
| give tax breaks to investors in the first place. Only owner
| occupants should have any tax breaks. But this is not going to
| happen.
|
| So let the speculators burn and go bankrupt.
| s800 wrote:
| Should be illegal.
| pickovven wrote:
| Individual owners are also investors.
|
| Do people think they're just reselling their houses for the price
| they bought them at?
| JoshTko wrote:
| Financial speculation in necessities need to become illegal.
| book_mike wrote:
| I fully support developing newer cheaper alternatives to housing
| and cut open the jugular vein of this rotten market. Let the
| investors and creditors burn.
| swamp40 wrote:
| There are Billions of dollars in cash just sitting around at
| companies like Blackstone Group waiting for the housing market to
| crash - which of course it will.
|
| https://twitter.com/zerohedge/status/1562080678652641280
| cardosof wrote:
| There and back again, a Georgism tale.
| ctoth wrote:
| One insidious bit here is that as lower-income people are priced
| out by increasing rents , they can't even go downmarket because
| of things like this:
|
| Investors Are Buying Mobile Home Parks. Residents Are Paying a
| Price https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/27/us/mobile-home-park-
| owner...
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| What's nuts is not just that investors get to buy homes, but that
| its _tax advantaged_ to do so. Between prop 13 in California, to
| 1031 exchanges, there are plenty of reasons to invest in RE over
| even say the stock market. I don 't get to do a 1031 exchange for
| my Meta stock into AAPL or something...
| paxys wrote:
| You forgot the biggest one - cheap mortgages backed by
| unlimited money printing. Ever since 2008 loading up on as much
| <3% housing debt as you can afford has been a no-brainer
| investing strategy.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Investors don't get the same rates that homeowners do, but
| they are still quite low.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| This was by design - the real estate industry lobbies hard.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| In fact, the previous president signed a law removing 1031
| exchange for everything except real estate. Coincidentally,
| the previous president is in the real estate business.
|
| https://krscpas.com/the-tax-cuts-and-jobs-act-tcja-and-
| code-...
| tpmx wrote:
| Is this really a change for the worse compared to the status quo?
|
| Compare this with the home-ownership rate graph here:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership_in_the_United_S...
|
| Remarkably steady at around two thirds over the past ~50 years
| which of course is less than three quarters.
|
| (Not an american, so I may be confused by some terminology.)
| jmyeet wrote:
| Let me summarize all the problems here:
|
| 1. In most of the US it is quite literally illegal to build
| anything other than single-family homes ("SFHs"). This is a form
| of NIMBYism and reduces housing supply;
|
| 2. Part of (1) is that absolute necessity of car ownership in the
| US. This is by design to keep the riffraff (ie poor people) out;
|
| 3. We need robust public transit infrastructure to give people
| the option of living somewhere where they don't need a car to
| survive;
|
| 4. Pretty much anywhere you can build SFHs, you should be able to
| build multi-family dwellings ("MFDs"). Homeowners that own an
| extra unit or two _on the same site as where they live_ is about
| the most ethical form of supply private rentals;
|
| 5. More states need to follow California's model of blocking a
| lot of NIMBYism at the state level. This requires towns to have
| an housing plan for affordable housing;
|
| 6. Ultra-luxury housing needs to be taxed punitively;
|
| 7. Cities and states need to be in the business in providing
| social housing as a significant supplier of housing. Americans in
| particularly have a kneejerk reaction against this as "socialism"
| or it'll be propagandized as slum housing. Vienna is about 60%
| social housing. Use that as a model;
|
| 8. Certain classes of housing should be illegal for corporations
| to buy. I'm fine with a corporation owning and running an
| apartment building with 200+ units with a management office
| onsite where they handle all the maintenance. I'm not OK with
| corporations constricting supply by buying up all the SFHs in a
| state.
|
| 9. We need to remove a lot of the tax benefits for investment
| property ownership (eg 1031 exchanges);
|
| 10. We need to remove a lot of beneficial tax treatment for home
| ownership period (eg Prop 13 in California caps property tax
| increases, inheriting property on a stepped up basis for CGT
| purposes);
|
| 11. AirBnB for anything other than a room in your house or a unit
| on your property (so you too have to live with the consequences)
| should be illegal.
|
| This isn't a demand side problem. It's a supply side problem but
| we also need to restrict certain types of demand (eg REITs buying
| residential housing en masse).
| nineplay wrote:
| > Homeowners that own an extra unit or two on the same site as
| where they live is about the most ethical form of supply
| private rentals
|
| I'd never build or buy a MFD at least partly because I don't
| trust that the current vilification of landlords wouldn't
| eventually expand to MFD owners. MFD owners will still raise
| rents, they will still evict, they will still have disputes
| with tenants over maintenance and common-area rules.
|
| The righteous anger will still bubble up. Only an idiot would
| risk it.
| jmyeet wrote:
| That's fine if you don't want to do that. Really. A lot of
| people (and, to be clear, I'm not saying you specifically
| here) fall into the trap when seeing things like this and
| they feel like it'll be forced on them like someone will come
| along and just build a second house on their hand and say
| "congrats, you're a landlord now".
|
| But plenty of people will do that. They will want the extra
| income. The problem is currently that's literally illegal in
| most of the US.
|
| As for evictions, these vary state by state but evictions are
| only really a huge problem with housing supply is so
| restricted. Yes there are some bad actors. But a lot of times
| eviction means homelessness for some people.
|
| I'd personally be OK with making it relatively easy to evict
| someone who is living on your property (as opposed to say
| living in an apartment building).
|
| But a very real problem with treating real estate as an
| investment is the owner profits by forcing negative
| externalities on their neighbours without having to suffer
| through them themselves (eg AirBnB). We need to clamp down on
| that.
| mercy_dude wrote:
| Don't forget also the anticipation of inflation - many use
| housing as a hedge of high inflationary environment.
|
| If there is more damage the Fed could have done to GenZ since the
| bailout, that was reckless Covid spending. I sincerely wish these
| agencies are shut down someday. But alas we are going the other
| way.
| gbronner wrote:
| We've inadvertently created substantial cost advantages for
| REITS:
|
| * Assuming that they never sell, they never pay capital gains
| taxes. Meanwhile, if I move and sell, I get hit now. * Ability to
| cross-collateralize a bunch of houses lets you tap into
| institutional capital. No pesky appraisal fees, no payoff for a
| mortgage broker, etc. Result is that their cost of capital is way
| below an individual's. * Better management -- ability to hire a
| bunch of actual skilled handymen to work across multiple
| properties means that they have specialization/ gains from scale.
| Typical homeowner is a jack of all trades who has to hire
| specialized talent which is vastly more expensive. * lots of
| pricing data with which to price as optimistically as possible. *
| ability to write off expenses
|
| So basically, tax regime changes have created the rise of the
| REIT.
| charlescearl wrote:
| References to the racialization of property in the united states.
| The issue is not simply who has a right to a own home, but who
| has a right to housing.
|
| - The History Wars and Property Law: Conquest and Slavery as
| Foundational to the Field, K-Sue Park,
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3793972
|
| - Racialized geographies of housing financialization, Desiree
| Fields, Elora Lee Raymond,
| https://escholarship.org/content/qt5gd214jn/qt5gd214jn.pdf
|
| - Race and uneven recovery: neighborhood home value trajectories
| in Atlanta before and after the housing crisis, Elora Raymond,
| Kyungsoon Wang & Dan Immergluck,
| https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Elora-Raymond/publicati...
|
| - Race for Profit: The Political Economy of Black Urban Housing
| in the 1970s, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
| freitasm wrote:
| See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32568638
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| I live in Tampa. Investment groups with bottomless pockets are
| buying up whole neighborhoods.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| I'm so frustrated by some of the conversations people get in
| around housing. They want to live in the most desirable places on
| planet earth, and seem to think that we should just abolish the
| concept of property ownership to accomplish this.
|
| What do you guys think happens when you get what you want, and
| nobody can "own" property anymore? Do you think there is an
| unlimited amount of single family 3000 square foot homes in San
| Francisco and that you will _all_ be able to live in them?
|
| Go on zillow and look at cities you've never heard of in that
| awful "flyover" part of the country. There are scores of homes
| for less than $200k, and plenty of homes around $100k. Go look at
| Parkersberg, ~~OH~~ WV.
|
| Here's a house in Indiana for $125k. The payment on that is going
| to be like $450/mo. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/51-S-Main-
| St-Laketon-IN-4...
|
| It's just absolutely insane to me the places that peoples minds
| go when this topic comes up.
| tnel77 wrote:
| I can't live in Indiana because the entire state is racist.
| This should be obvious.
|
| Edit: /s for those who need it
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| I think it is more like put regulation in place which makes
| owning housing as an investment untenable.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > seem to think that we should just abolish the concept of
| property ownership to accomplish this.
|
| This is a funny comment given the article is about corporations
| converting massive swaths of housing in the united states into
| rental properties.
| bradleyankrom wrote:
| Picking nits, but Parkersburg is in West Virginia, not Ohio
| (source: born there).
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Ah sorry about that! I was just picking a random spot in Ohio
| that was kinda nearish the Great Lakes. I guess I moved to
| Far East. Did you like it there?
| bradleyankrom wrote:
| We moved when I was about two weeks old, but a lot of my
| family is in that area (on both sides of the river). The
| area is struggling economically, but it has some historical
| and scenic charm.
| mancerayder wrote:
| Just to hammer home the point: NYC has rent stabilization,
| which applies to about 50 percent of the rental stock. The rent
| can't go up more than a certain amount, one must renew with the
| tenant with few exceptions, etc. Now, not surprisingly these
| units are offered by real estate brokers who demand steep fees,
| and guess who gets first dibs, but brokers and their
| friends/families.
| standardUser wrote:
| Most rentals in NYC no longer work with brokers, especially
| in the low-to-middle range.
| nikanj wrote:
| Abolish propery ownership? I'd settle for "let the newcomers
| also build homes, the same way the previous generations did".
| notch656a wrote:
| Every single time I've posted allowing newcomers to build
| houses the same way their great-great-grandaddy built a shack
| I've gotten an army of people up in arms complaining they're
| afraid the lack of safety regulations will result in their
| town burning down.
|
| Where I live zoning laws are decent and land cost next to
| nothing. But you still have to contend with the universal
| housing codes, which means you're absolutely fucked because
| grand-daddy built a house that is basically irreplaceable
| (you can't permit that anymore) that grandson can live in,
| but fuck you if you want a house like that for yourself
| because that's all you can afford to build.
| pickovven wrote:
| It's absurd to frame this as some sort of luxury consumption
| decision. Sure, that might be true for like beach front
| properties but we're talking about virtually every major city
| in the country.
|
| People grow up and have social connections in these places.
| There are jobs there. There are political reasons for moving.
| But most importantly _these are cities_ , not suburbs. It's
| just wildly ridiculous to disallow dense housing which would
| allow more residents and lower housing prices.
| H1Supreme wrote:
| > Go look at Parkersberg, OH.
|
| I think you might be referring to Parkersburg, WV. It's right
| on the Ohio river, next to Ohio.
| triyambakam wrote:
| I'm not following - how do the cheap houses in Indian relate to
| the high prices in SF and abolishing property ownership?
| danenania wrote:
| I think the core of the problem is that we're losing the middle
| class of housing.
|
| Obviously the nicest areas of the country, with the best
| weather, most opportunities, low crime, elite schools, etc. are
| going to be expensive. But it's getting to the point where it's
| prohibitively expensive for a middle class family just to live
| in a place without high crime/drug addiction/homelessness,
| reasonably good schools, reasonable healthcare options, and
| some measure of community/walkability (forget about weather and
| jobs).
|
| You can live cheaply if you're willing to sacrifice in some of
| those areas, but they are major sacrifices that will have a
| negative influence on quality-of-life and the future prospects
| of kids who grow up there.
|
| It wasn't always like this. I had a neighbor when I lived in
| North Berkeley (a beautiful neighborhood that checks every box
| you could want) who told me he bought his house in the late 90s
| for 150k. Now it's probably worth 2 million or more. I realized
| that everyone who bought on that block around that time had
| almost a six figure annual income for most of their adult lives
| solely from the appreciation of their homes.
|
| I'm sure there are good deals out there that can still be
| found, but we really do have a problem if a table stakes decent
| family life is only affordable by the top 10% (or less).
| anon291 wrote:
| Part of the problem is the middle of housing was often in
| towns anchored by one or two factories or other local
| businesses. With businesses being hyper-centralized today due
| to the internet and technology decoupling business from land,
| employees are now located much more centrally (we'll see how
| remote work changes this). For example, Google has hundreds
| of thousands of employees in the Bay Area alone. That's
| crazy. In the past, this would have formed several towns all
| across the country (because Google would need such a
| footprint to be able to deliver services nationally).
|
| Now that anyone can start a large company without barely any
| land investment, it's no wonder people are increasingly
| concentrating in small portions of the country, while large
| portions are incredibly cheap, and in some places,
| depreciating.
| nineplay wrote:
| Housing values in and around Silicon Valley have gone up
| extraordinarily since I was young for reasons that were not
| easily predictable. It's not a good model for housing costs
| in the rest of the US.
|
| I grew up in uninteresting towns in Monterey County and San
| Bernardino County and both could check off points of
| 'acceptable places to live' which are affordable to the
| middle classes. No one talks about them because no one cares.
| linguae wrote:
| And even now these places are starting to become
| unaffordable for the middle class. I had an unsuccessful
| search last autumn for homes in Watsonville and northern
| Monterey County under $550,000 due to bidding wars that
| often resulted in homes selling for considerably more than
| asking. Prices are now starting to drop and inventory is
| rising, but interest rates are considerably higher than
| last fall when I started my search.
|
| There's been an explosion in home prices in the California
| Central Valley since the pandemic started. In 2019 it was
| possible to buy a brand new house in Los Banos and Merced
| for $280,000 and $250,000, respectively. Today you need
| around $450,000 and $400,000, respectively, to purchase
| similar new homes. And it's not just the cost of materials
| that led to the massive price hikes; the cost of pre-
| existing homes also boomed in these towns.
|
| I grew up in Sacramento and now rent an apartment in Santa
| Cruz County. Sacramento, once known for affordable housing
| with easy access to Bay Area and Tahoe amenities, is no
| longer affordable for many people. There are massive
| homeless encampments that I see whenever I visit the area
| these days. The housing situation is getting out of hand,
| and while this may not be indicative of a national crisis,
| in California the crisis has spread outside of the coast.
| anoonmoose wrote:
| > Here's a house in Indiana for $125K
|
| Laketon, IN, population 606, had its post office closed in 2010
| and, from a quick perusal of Google Maps, probably doesn't have
| a single traffic light. Doubt there's much public transit out
| that way. Only 30 miles to a town I might be able to get a job
| in, though...
| daenz wrote:
| There's a post office 5 miles away[0], where there are plenty
| of businesses that you could work at. Let's not be dramatic.
|
| 0. https://goo.gl/maps/y3dERcUkD7wMLzEW8
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Are you not able to work remotely? Or is that too much
| remote?
| anoonmoose wrote:
| Combo electrical engineer and embedded firmware engineer,
| who spent the previous ten years in production test
| engineering...nah, my job is pretty hands-on. I went into a
| pretty empty building during most of 2020 and 2021 five
| days a week.
|
| I mean, I've got a few skills that might be sharp enough to
| get me a remote job but I really like the hardware world.
| furyofantares wrote:
| Over satellite internet?
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I've got a coworker who's looking into this and he seems
| to bounce around the idea of Rural New Mexico or
| Colorado, then another week he's got his eye on some 3K
| square foot house in Ohio for $125K or something like
| that, but just as rural. Every place he's looked at has
| fiber available.
| tzs wrote:
| > Doubt there's much public transit out that way. Only 30
| miles to a town I might be able to get a job in, though...
|
| Lots of people in the SF area and lots of other big cities
| have commutes of 30 miles or more. And I'd bet the traffic on
| those commutes is a lot worse, so 30 miles in the Laketon
| area is likely equivalent to maybe 10 miles in SF.
|
| I'd expect entertainment and cultural events are limited in
| Laketon, but it's a 100 mile drive to Indianapolis and 140
| mile drive to Chicago. With all that you'd be saving on
| housing compared to SF weekend getaways to those cities
| should be affordable.
| mabbo wrote:
| The problem is market power. We want a free market in which
| supply and demand dictate price without manipulation.
|
| But in any given region, there is a fixed supply of property
| that is slow to change to demand. And there is also a fixed
| demand- everyone needs a home. If one market participant buys
| up enough of it, they can choose to raise rents on that entire
| segment of the market. People _need_ a place to live, and if
| their job, life, livelihoods are tied up in that specific area
| then leaving isn 't a viable option.
|
| The market participant literally is rent-seeking. They aren't
| improving these homes. They're raising prices by virtue of
| owning enough of them to be able to manipulate the market. They
| can charge more for the same service without providing anyone
| with more value.
|
| Saying that anyone opposing this is some kind of communist
| against property ownership is a straw man argument. We just
| want to see a fair free market.
| nineplay wrote:
| I'm with you friend. Posters throw out lines like "property
| shouldn't be an investment" as though the idea that property
| has intrinsic value is something invented in the last 50 years
| or so, not something that has been true for millennia.
|
| I've been told that "housing is a right" which, if conceded,
| still runs into your point - housing may be a right, housing in
| the most expensive and populated areas in the US is not a right
| and there's no way to make it one.
| undersuit wrote:
| How about housing in the most expensive and populated ares in
| the US is a necessity? If there can't be housing available
| for all the workers in an area then there needs to be a
| change. Whether it be higher wages, changes in zoning, or
| public housing depends on the area, but doing nothing doesn't
| fix things. Having all the low paying workers commute 2 hours
| to work every day to make frappes and burgers for the rich
| locals is not a viable option.
| nineplay wrote:
| There are no magic wands here. Property is a limited
| commodity, it can't be expanded to fit demand.
|
| > then there needs to be a change
|
| No there doesn't
|
| > Having all the low paying workers commute 2 hours to work
| every day to make frappes and burgers for the rich locals
| is not a viable option.
|
| Viable is in the mind of the beholder. Viable solutions
| include
|
| - low income workers moving to more affordable areas,
| leaving the wealthy to make frappes and burgers with their
| Kurigs and air fryers
|
| - low income workers continuing to commute feeling it is
| still the best option for them considering all factors
|
| - wages raise in high-income areas to compensate baristas
| and chefs, allowing them to move closer to city centers.
|
| All of these are 'viable' and none of them make housing a
| right or necessity.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| > I've been told that "housing is a right"
|
| An easy reply to these same people is to ask if they think
| they have a right to wood, brick, concrete, sewer pipes,
| electrical wire, all the other materials that go into making
| a livable house, and, on top of that, if they think they're
| freely entitled to the labor required to construct a house
| out of these properties.
| danenania wrote:
| _Every_ right requires infrastructure, investment, and
| labor to ensure. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of
| happiness aren't free.
|
| Whether or not housing should be a right, rights that are
| expensive to provide but are nonetheless provided anyway
| are nothing new.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Their reply is that the _land_ beneath the house shouldn't
| be available for private ownership.
| pickovven wrote:
| Your point would be more compelling if people weren't
| specifically blocking additional housing so their investment
| appreciates.
| paxys wrote:
| This is such a twisted framing of the issue. No one wants to
| "abolish property ownership". In fact housing proponents want
| the exact opposite - give everybody the opportunity to own a
| house rather than a select few large corporations and
| investors. Let me build my own house on a piece of land in or
| near the city, just like my grandparents did just a couple of
| generations ago. Remove years worth of excessive permits,
| reviews and other red tape. Remove restrictive zoning laws.
| Remove neighbors being able to veto my property because it
| would cast a shadow in their garden for 6 minutes a year.
|
| And no, "too bad, go live in the middle of nowhere" isn't an
| acceptable answer.
| desperadovisa wrote:
| Sorry but with all due respect, "too bad, go live in the
| middle of nowhere" is _absolutely_ an acceptable answer. You
| 're acting like you're _entitled_ to live where ever you
| want, but the simple reality is that this is _not_ possible.
|
| You need to come to grips with that objective fact.
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| This is a pretty silly response. Are people _entitled_ to
| live wherever they want? No. But the situation is very
| obviously not that black and white. We allow many things in
| society that people aren 't entitled to, largely because we
| believe it will build a better society.
|
| Am I _entitled_ to own my investment properties? No.
|
| Am I _entitled_ to block neighbouring housing from being
| built? No.
|
| But society allows both of these things because they
| ostensibly should result in a better society. Of course,
| they may not, and if they don't result in a better society,
| we should probably turn the dial back on these factors, but
| not get rid of them altogether.
|
| So should anyone be _entitled_ to live anywhere? No. But
| should a middle-class person be able to build a life in
| places where there are opportunities for job growth (and
| like it or not, right now, that 's the big cities)?
| Probably, if we think that will result in a better society.
| So we may need to turns some policy dials to ensure this
| will happen.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Why are you not entitled to own your investment
| properties?
| surfpel wrote:
| Thank you so much for this beautiful insight. I just
| purchased a 100 sqft plot of land in the Alaskan wilderness
| where I will hire 20 employees and start a manufacturing
| business... oh wait, that's ridiculous.
|
| Your argument contributes nothing because it fails to
| address the real negative consequences of unaffordable
| housing. After a point (which we most certainly have
| crossed), it affects society in strongly negative ways.
|
| I don't know what kind of society you want to live in, but
| I don't want any part of that.
| furyofantares wrote:
| There's a giant gap between "you're entitled to live
| wherever you want" and "too bad, go live in the middle of
| nowhere."
|
| My read is that the person you're responding to is in the
| middle of that gap; and your response frames them as being
| on one extreme edge and then says an acceptable answer is
| to go to the other extreme edge.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Clearly it is ethically problematic for the people of San
| Francisco to squirt out babies and then 18 years later tell
| them to go fuck off, go live in Gary, Indiana.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| Don't give anyone any ideas or they might discover that
| they can buy a house like this [1] that is walking
| distance to the commuter train, walking distance to the
| beach, and walking distance to the trails in a National
| Park [2] [3] [4]
|
| [1] https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/8725-Maple-Ave-
| Gary-IN-46...
|
| [2]
| https://www.google.com/maps/@41.6199213,-87.2571163,16z
|
| [3]
| https://www.google.com/maps/@41.6199718,-87.2697873,16z
|
| [4]
| https://www.google.com/maps/@41.6218829,-87.2348586,16z
| totony wrote:
| You are acting like owning a home _entitles_ you to dictate
| how other people get to live. It does not. Owning a home
| shouldn 't allow you to dictate that someone cannot build a
| home near you. Unfortunately it does in some places, but
| this is fixable.
| [deleted]
| weo3dev wrote:
| False. I'm assuming you either do not have kids or do not
| have much available compassion for other humans besides
| yourself. Both my wife and I have worked our asses off to
| be where we are today, and due to circumstances in our
| lives, are renting for the time being. We are in the "upper
| income" range which real world I would state as high middle
| class now. Guess what - our range of housing affordability
| is outside a circumference of 20 miles out from the city.
| Not only does that take us out of acceptable educational
| opportunities for our kids, that removes us from the exact
| thing we worked hard for in order to experience and have
| had no problem doing that for more than the past ten years.
| Suddenly, within the span of less than two years, the homes
| we qualify for now - with 750 upwards credit score, little
| to no debt, and a sizable downpayment, are not even close
| to where we live now. I submit that your statement is
| somewhat ignorant.
| desperadovisa wrote:
| I empathize for you, I do, but nothing you've said here
| means you _deserve_ to live in San Francisco and a) not
| somewhere else or b) more than anyone else.
|
| You do not _deserve_ to live in San Francisco. Sorry.
|
| What's probably a bit more toxic about your attitude is
| the implied belief that you deserve "better" than
| everywhere else in the US, that San Francisco is "yours*
| and not anyone else's.
|
| And not for nothing, but I do have children (two) and am
| entirely capable of empathizing with others.
| turtlebits wrote:
| No one is forcing you to live in the city you do now. I
| am probably in a similar income range yet live a <3 miles
| from a major city that is known for high housing market.
|
| People have such high expectations of housing, they are
| pricing themselves out. I do live in a 60+ year old, 1400
| sf house, but that doesn't bother me.
| paxys wrote:
| Why is it not possible? The only "objective fact" is that
| people in certain areas in this country have lobbied hard
| to make sure that no one else should be able to move in
| anywhere around them. These rules are all reversible.
| daenz wrote:
| >And no, "too bad, go live in the middle of nowhere" isn't an
| acceptable answer.
|
| As someone who grew up in a small town, do you understand how
| condescending this is? People have homes there, have families
| there, work hard and live decent lives. Just because they
| live at a pace you're not accustomed to, doesn't make living
| there some kind of hellish existence. Many would say the same
| about a filthy, overcrowded, crime-ridden city, of which I've
| lived in several across the US.
| noahtallen wrote:
| I grew up in a very small town (under 5k pop) and did not
| find this condescending. There are very clear and obvious
| drawbacks to living there. It's really not for everyone,
| evidenced by the fact that 80% of the US population lives
| in urban areas despite small towns being incredibly cheap.
| daenz wrote:
| It's not condescending for someone to imply "I live
| somewhere important, you live somewhere unimportant" ?
|
| Phrased another way, if someone came in for an interview
| and said "I'm from Laketon, Indiana", do you think it
| would be appropriate for the interviewer to say "Oh,
| you're from the middle of nowhere." ? I don't think that
| would be appropriate at all.
| paxys wrote:
| You seem to want to get offended for no reason. If I forced
| everyone from your town to move to downtown New York would
| they be happy about it? Or could it be that different
| people have different lifestyle preferences?
|
| I'm sure where you live is lovely, but I still don't want
| to move there myself.
| daenz wrote:
| Just because _you_ don 't want to live there, doesn't
| make them "middle of nowhere" is my point. That's an
| extremely common elitist attitude that I see among tech
| people who look down their noses at people in rural
| communities.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| >just let me build a house where somebody else already owns
| the property where I want to build that house.
|
| How does that work out in your mind without abolishing the
| concept of property ownership? What happens when somebody
| wants to build _their_ house where you already have yours?
| paxys wrote:
| I'm not talking about building in someone's front yard. If
| you sell me a piece of land that you own, and it is now
| legally mine, should I be able to build a house on it? That
| itself is practically impossible to do in 99% of cases in
| most major cities in the US. A city like San Francisco
| approves like 7-10 shovel-ready housing projects _a year_ ,
| and fewer actually get completed.
| mebreuer wrote:
| I agree that in SF it has gotten out of hand. But the
| concept that communities can establish rules for what you
| can build in those communities seems acceptable?
|
| If I moved to a a suburb because I wanted a smaller
| scale, and my neighbor wanted to build an apartment
| building next door, I'd probably push back against that.
| It feels like what is happening in SF is some extension
| of that.. projects getting caught up in community board
| reviews that happen slowly and unpredictably, and are
| staffed by old-timer SF residents who want to keep the
| city small. Frustrating for sure, but hard to fault them
| for that, if that's why they moved there pre-tech boom?
|
| I personally live in NYC and appreciate that you can
| build whatever you want here!
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Link me to an example of an empty lot in San Francisco
| that you are trying to build a single family home on and
| can't, please.
| themagician wrote:
| People just want homes to live in, in areas where there are
| good jobs, and get pissed when entire blocks of SFR housing are
| turned into Airbnbs or investment properties. You walk down the
| street and _every house_ has an STR permit on it.
|
| It is really not that difficult to understand.
| pickovven wrote:
| The current state of things are that most property rights are
| abolished. Why do all my neighbors get to decide if my property
| has 10 or 20 units on it?
| 3qz wrote:
| Isn't this completely reasonable? I would expect that at least
| 1/4 homes is a rental and every rental home is owned by an
| investor.
| twawaaay wrote:
| Except the problem isn't investors buying property.
|
| Investors are buying up property for rental because it is
| profitable because there is huge demand for it because a lot of
| people simply are unable to own their own house and that is
| because housing is getting expensive faster than salaries.
|
| The problem is government tied in stupid games while important
| problems like encouraging new, more affordable housing is set
| aside as some kind of communist agenda. A house does not need to
| cost the equivalent of your entire life's savings.
|
| Also government sleeping on the job not including useful
| knowledge in school curriculum -- like basics of personal
| finances and economics.
| daoist_shaman wrote:
| > Also government sleeping on the job not including useful
| knowledge in school curriculum -- like basics of personal
| finances and economics.
|
| Seems intentional at this point. Keep 99% of the population as
| useful, financially-illiterate workers who don't realize they
| are being exploited by the 1% ruling class to whom laws don't
| apply.
| driggs wrote:
| I have considerable experience in the Real Estate backend
| software industry, and so am occasionally contacted by
| headhunters hiring for Real Estate Investment startups. Here's a
| typical reply that I give to them: I am
| philosophically opposed to "investing" in real estate, as your
| industry exists entirely to snatch up affordable housing from
| actual homeowners as a get-rich-quick scheme, benefiting those
| who are already rich at the expense of those who would otherwise
| be rising up out of their own financial situation.
| Nothing personal, but I wish you - and everyone in your predatory
| industry - swift failure in your endeavor, for the benefit of the
| average homeowner. Have a good day!
| fourstar wrote:
| Where did your "considerable experience" in the RE industry
| come from?
| ravivooda wrote:
| I do something similar for Amazon Recruiters.
|
| Hi there!!
|
| You seem to have contacted me even though I explicitly told
| Amazon that I'm not interested in pursuing opportunities at
| this time. It's been very bothersome the number of mails I get
| (2+ on certain weeks). I've patiently requested earlier to be
| removed from your reach-out list, but alas here we are again!
|
| Sent from an auto-drafted template that I've set up for
| specifically Amazon Recruiters.
| shmerl wrote:
| This should be illegal.
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| We (people) must recognize that housing is a finite resource and
| is a variable in a major humanitarian crisis.
|
| Owning a second house for rent-seeking behavior should require a
| license like using any other scarce natural resource.
|
| Like occupying a river for selling bottled water or digging
| ground oil.
|
| It should not be a no-barrier free-for-all speculative endeavor.
| Dig1t wrote:
| This should be illegal. Plain and simple.
|
| Just make it illegal for a corporation to own residential
| property. Or heck, even just make it illegal for one to own > 5
| properties or some number of acreage. That would put a damper on
| this shit.
| daoist_shaman wrote:
| Private property needs limits when you have an unbounded
| population.
| sebhook wrote:
| It would be interesting to see the "investors" segmented by
| assets under management (AUM). I'm sure some "investors" are mom
| and pop rental situations while other institutions, such as
| BlackRock, are purchasing single-family homes at scale.
|
| I'll also be curious to see what happens when remodels need to
| happen. Many trade labor markets are hyper localized and
| difficult to scale across a property portfolio, this is where
| RedFin and Zillow struggled to "flip" effectively.
| acchow wrote:
| Aren't most mom-and-pop investors getting real estate exposure
| _via_ their Blackrock holdings?
| BeetleB wrote:
| I believe GP is referring to "regular folks with jobs" who
| buy houses on the side to supplement their income (as opposed
| to investing in funds).
| __derek__ wrote:
| > The CoreLogic data shows that what it calls "mega" investors,
| with a thousand or more homes, bought 3% of houses last year
| and in 2022, compared with about 1% in previous years, with the
| bulk of investor purchases made by smaller groups.
|
| Re: Zillow, it actually did well in the flipping business when
| relying on its models to make the buy decision. It got into
| trouble after tweaking the model to say "buy" on more (and more
| expensive) homes.
| duxup wrote:
| IIRC Zillow did "too well" to the point that they felt their
| model wasn't gauging the market correctly and was going to
| inevitably fail them spectacularly. The fact that it did
| well, better than it should have was just good luck... but
| also a bad sign because the model predicted a different
| outcome.
| anon291 wrote:
| BlackRock, for all the flack it gets, ultimately is purchasing
| these homes on behalf of large institutional investors, like
| retirement plans, pensions, social security programs etc.
| epistasis wrote:
| I'm sure the percentage is much much higher in supply constrained
| cities, because those cities are where there's much more
| opportunity for speculative real estate growth, and the local
| political structures are dedicated to keeping the supply
| constrained, and the speculative real estate asset price growth
| unchecked.
|
| At the core of a lot of this is the NIMBY behavior and downzoning
| that started in the 1970s. It's hyper-commodified housing, while
| decommoditizing out places to live. (Please note that the
| difference between commodify and commoditize, here.)
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| And it's just as much the fault of people who demand we don't
| build for SFHs, only high density housing that's highly
| undesirable to a large fraction of the home buying population.
| You don't get to just blame NIMBYism for constraining the
| supply of the most desirable homes.
| epistasis wrote:
| In supply constrained areas, more SFHs are physically
| impossible. And the more people who are allowed to live in
| their preferred multi family units, the more SFHs available
| to those who prefer them.
|
| We don't block SFHs _anywhere_ , there's no minimum density.
| However we block higher densities nearly everywhere.
|
| So blaming the people wanting higher density makes zero
| sense.
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