Comment by mythrwy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mythrwy | Hacker News Reader

Speculation and free markets are great and all and there is a time and a place for those and it allocates capital more efficiently than central planning (from what we have seen so far) and freedom to attain wealth is a beautiful thing.

That being said, there are basic human needs that should be met by any civilization of note. And if a civilization doesn't then it is failing. These needs include the the opportunity to obtain food and water (or food and water itself), basic physical security (for the most part), and in respect to the topic, a place to lay ones head.

Home speculation never should have been allowed to grow to the monster it has become. Ever. Not just because it's morally wrong, but because it is destabilizing. As we found out before and will again.

When you have people sitting on three vacant homes in hopes they will appreciate while others are shitting in the streets and sleeping on sidewalks it's absolute lunacy. We all are entitled by birthright to a little piece of earth. It's our heritage. The current situation is just objectively nuts and will be corrected. Sure as gravity or the sun rising in the morning.

Now, I'm not suggesting to take everything from the rich and give to the poor. I know that doesn't really work sustainability. I also know everyone in the world can't live in the most desirable places. So I'm not making any concrete suggestions at all because I don't have the answers. But what we have going on now is both horrible and crazy.

I wholeheartedly disagree that land in the US is anyone's birthright, with the exception of people of native descent, and they (painting with a VERY wide brush stroke, I know) generally didn't believe in land ownership to begin with.

I do agree that speculation has driven to some crazy things in the US housing market. Though I'm not against speculation in any market per se, when we see what banks, businesses, and otherwise shady actors were/are doing to manipulate things in their favor when we're talking about something as important as housing, it gets quite frustrating.

I say this as a guy who had absolutely no issues with purchasing my own home a year ago in a hot market (Portland, OR), moving from another hot market (Seattle). I've got no sour grapes, I got the house I wanted and never had to worry about where I was going to live with my family if the house I was renting would be sold to someone else and the rent skyrocketed. But I have seen first hand the real nightmare that the rapid turnover of properties does to the people that ACTUALLY live in them when the owners treat the property as a line item rather than someone's house.

It's a double edged sword: tighten financing rules and regulation and you make it hard for people to 'move up'. Make them overly loose and you get 2008 all over again. Then again, maybe if it was harder to get jumbo mortgages it would apply a pressure against unfettered growth of housing prices, reducing the expected outcomes from speculation. Or it'll just create some other unintended consequence...

Side note: Having your 9 month pregnant wife watch The Big Short while going through the mortgage process and being one of 11-15 offers on the first few houses you looked at is a really stupid idea. So. Many. Tears.

I hear you and apologies for the rant. Down votes are entirely understandable as I don't care for radical sounding rants either.

I'm not saying in in the US, nor concretely, but philosophically I think when a person is born they inherit the right to inhabit a piece of earth. You shouldn't arrive in the earth and not be able to sleep on piece of it without paying someone. I guess I feel that land in general belongs to the collective. And philosophically I'd extend that beyond national boundaries. Just because someone before us with a gun and a flag, or else a deed and a banknote did something doesn't mean they increased real estate. It was here before, it will be here after. So that's just theoretical but it seems axiomatic to me.

I own a home as well. I could sell it now and make money on it. Great. But then where would I poop?

I guess point is, it seems to me to be both unjust and destructive to have the essential needs of a place to sleep and raise a family be subject to wild market forces. Plus I think it discourages actual productive economic activity. People have a hard time relocating to where there is need partially because of speculation. So it inhibits the flow of human capital.

I don't disagree at all with your practical analysis of the situation. Admittedly I have no idea how to solve the problem, and it is a hard one, particularly now that so much "wealth" is represented. I just don't think it should have been allowed to get to this point, and I think we need to approach the problem with an entirely different framework. And I'd say part of that is realizing the ability to have a place to live and raise a family is an essential human right and it is sacred and it is many many times more important than the right of people to build or preserve wealth through paper ownership of real estate.

Leave wealth building for bitcoin and Apple stock and companies that make mascara. Or hard work and savings. Not wheat and water and living quarters.

> Leave wealth building for bitcoin and Apple stock and companies that make mascara.

The flip side of this - people then complain that we have 25 different high-tech varieties of boner pills while the developing world is dealing with antibiotic-resistant infections and malaria. Despite the SV Founder Changing The World rhetoric, most people are in business to get paid. People go where the money is.

If you declare that no one should get rich off of bread because it's A Basic Necessity, you're going to find that the bread biz is going to stagnate while endless innovation happens in the Twinkie and tortilla chip biz. Some martyrs who are willing to sacrifice their career prospects to work in bread will stick around and make process, but the legions of people who are just looking for a non-shitty job are going to stay far away.

Yup. That is the problem right here in the real world. Don't disagree a bit. We've seen what happens with price controls, rent controls, government subsidies and mandates.

That's why I say I see the problem, not the answer. But I'm pretty sure we can do better than we are right now. Policies discouraging wealth accumulation through living quarters might be a good start.

Have you ever read much about land value taxation? I think a well-implemented LVT could do a lot to help with these problems -- though I'm no expert, it seems a lot of economists rate it favourably.

You don't necessarily need price controls or rent controls. You could put a special tax on second homes which would make renting and investing economically unfeasible. You could even make it so that speculation was enabled by allowing the sale of derivative housing futures (a young person would buy a house at a reduced price, and then have to pay the investor every time the house's price increased over the next 10 years). That would allow both investors to speculate and young people to buy.

"If you declare that no one should get rich off of bread because it's A Basic Necessity, you're going to find that the bread biz is going to stagnate"

If you declare that nobody should get rich off there being a shortage of bread because it's a basic necessity, you're not going to stop somebody getting rich from making artisanally crafted locally sourced handcrafted sourdough (or whatever).

> If you declare that no one should get rich off of bread because it's A Basic Necessity, you're going to find that the bread biz is going to stagnate while endless innovation happens in the Twinkie and tortilla chip biz

This is simply false.

We've declared water A Basic Necessity, such that clean water is piped into everyone's home, by the government, at effectively zero profit.

And yet, there's still over 100 bottled water types and brands, carried at almost every retailer nationwide. There's 6 dozen flavoured water types, there's an entire industry of water pitchers, water purifiers, carbonated water drinks, and much more. Clean Water is now a crazy innovative industry in large part because we made it a covered fundamental human need.

You absolutely can declare housing A Basic Necessity, and it wouldn't hurt any meaningful industries, it wouldn't prevent any innovation, and it would largely improve the finances of most citizens, strengthening the economy at large.

With the exception of the Dutch, the land making business is already pretty stagnant. I'm not very worried about it getting worse.

Soviet leaders understood it. You move to new city to work: here is your new flat. You are working: here is your bread (and cinema, clothes…).

The thing is, supply and demand for all of them is quite unpredictable. Removing market forces leads to imbalances, improper resources allocation, and in the end deficit and even more suffering. So centralized system is clerly not an answer.

Housing is still ridiculously cheap in much of the US. Should everybody have the right to live in the trendiest city?

No, but I believe you should be able to live where you can find work. I'm frightened about getting a job in CA due to the housing market.

Housing is only cheap if you can make enough in the area the house is located to afforded it.

Not in relative terms.

The millennials we are talking about are not, for the most part, going without shelter. They are living in smaller, less nice place than they would otherwise, and/or renting.

Homelessness is a qualitatively different problem than middle class millennials competing with boomers for houses.

True, but using homes as a wealth building instrument is (one of) the root problems in both the case of people not being able to own homes and homelessness.

I rant because, well, its just plain nuts, but I don't have answers.

I do think we need a paradigm shift in this regard though and I think it's inevitable, just a matter of how much pain it causes.

Very high property taxes with homestead exemptions (reductions when you live in the house as a primary residence) might be part of the solution.

But the biggest one is letting property developers go wild. SF and the south bay have been doing very much the opposite for a very long time.

Also, Prop 13 needs to be phased out. It's completely killing liquidity in the market, and removes any incentive for homeowners to not want rampant home value increases, which encourages them to prevent property developers from doing their thing.

You might find this enlightening: http://www.henrygeorge.org/pcontents.htm

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