Amsterdam's Plan: If You Buy a Newly Built House, You Can't Rent It Out | Hacker News Reader

Amsterdam's Plan: If You Buy a Newly Built House, You Can't Rent It Out

citylab.com

335 pointspseudolus362 comments

Resident of Amsterdam here, any policy the city is going to come up with is realistically speaking only re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic at this point. Some systemic issues:

1) Building new & building up is mostly politically impossible. A large part of the city is effectively a historic open-air museum. Supply is always going to be squeezed.

2) The rent controlled market is huge in The Netherlands and disproportionately big in Amsterdam compared to the rest of the country.

This puts off #1 because low-income people have an out, but squeezes prices on the middle and upper-end, and creates generational special-interests groups (there's decade-long waiting periods, people pass off such properties to immediate family etc.).

Most of the profit construction companies make on (highly regulated) new construction is reportedly on the relatively small proportion of apartments they're allowed to sell for a high price on the free market. The rest is on the mandatory public housing market from day one.

3) A further squeeze on non-rent controlled properties is created because some of those only escape that "market" by having a bunch of "points" that are calculated as a function of size, amenities etc.: [A] & [B].

This creates all sorts of absurd situations. E.g. having a sink on some random wall in the middle of a bedroom purely because it (along with other crazy point hacking) brought the property just over the point limit.

4) (Re-)zoning of properties that do exist is relatively restricted and centrally micro-managed.

5) Interest rates have been dropping for years, leading to inflated property prices. It's relatively easy to get sub-2% loans, even as low as 1.5%.

A. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woningwaarderingsstelsel#Punte...

B. https://www.huurcommissie.nl/fileadmin/afbeeldingen/Download...

Is housing in Amsterdam that problematic? A friend recently moved there and would send me photos of places he was looking at for him and his family. He had plenty of really nice options at costs they could afford. It seemed vastly more affordable than NYC or the Bay Area.

Nothing is problematic here if you have a 100k dollar salary.

For the rest of us, yes it is.

Just because something is more affordable than the two most expensive housing markets in the world doesn't make it affordable.

Yes, by Bay standards, Amsterdam is not bad (especially for rent). It's still bad for virtually everyone in Amsterdam who isn't on rent control.

On the (sad) bright side of living in the Bay for awhile, if you ever move anywhere else, housing will probably all look like a bargain!

You'll probably also take a massive paycut.

For sure. I haven't done any research, but I'm sure there are some areas, though, where the % pay cut is less than the % reduction in housing costs, though.

If you do know of such a place, please post it. When I do the math SF always comes out on top.

I have much more money left over in Austin than I did in San Jose (and living in a 4bd house instead of a crappy SJ 2bd apartment) despite a COLA adjustment from the company... And by the looks of it I could get the pay back up here anyway if I can be bothered to drive to the office of some local company.

Purely personal anecdata, of course, but it does work for me, and the quality of life is (for me, anyway) much higher.

Texas

It depends if you're single or have kids and/or a spouse that doesn't work or makes significantly less money. In those cases, a lot of places will beat the Bay.

If you're single or duel (tech) income with no kids, the Bay wins almost always.

It's fine for me. I mean, our house wasn't cheap, but it's a nice house in a nice neighbourhood, and I'm really happy to live here. We do need two good incomes to be able to afford it, though. Sure, I could live much cheaper elsewhere, but then I wouldn't be living here.

When that's your comparison, almost every city in the world is more affordable compared to the Bay Area. Europe, barring London, is typically much more affordable in my experience (extensive transit systems helps as well). There's a reason cities like Berlin are hot spots, they're not just culturally fantastic, they're affordable for all working classes.

> There's a reason cities like Berlin are hot spots, they're not just culturally fantastic, they're affordable for all working classes.

This.

Last time I've looked, there were rental appartments in Berlin that were on the market for as little as 500€/month, while equivalent apartments in Amsterdam went for over 1200€/month.

You looked up a while ago then. More like 900-1600 euros and going up. At least if you want to live inside the Ring.

Yes it's problematic in the sense that studio apartments typically go for €250k, whereas the median salary lets you borrow around €180k, and prices rose 10% last year, i.e. at a median salary even with 100% savings rate of net income, you can barely keep up with price increases. (although price growth is flattening these coming years).

In other words, purchasing the smallest housing unit is impossible for about 3 out of 4 people, many of whom are born and raised there, and it's getting worse.

Then there's the rental market. There's social housing, but the median salary is too high to be eligible for it. And even if you were low-income, the waiting list is now 15 years. So say you're 25 years old, there is no prospect of moving out of your parents' home unless you leaves the city you're born and raised in.

Then there's the rest of the rental market. Rents typically start at 1100 or so for the smallest housing units, and you're typically required to earn gross 3.5x the rent each month, which is more than the median salary, too.

And this concerns the smallest housing units. Not having your bedroom in your living room and in your kitchen is a luxury you can't easily find in this price range. Anything that's liveable long-term is going to require substantially above-median incomes.

As for comparisons with Bay Area, it's simply not appropriate in any conversation about affordable housing worldwide if you ask me. Nor is an anecdote of a friend with uniquely high-income who can afford a nice place, appropriate either, in a discussion about affordable housing for all.

> There's social housing, but the median salary is too high to be eligible for it.

It's worth noting that it's the salary at the time that you get the housing that counts, which creates a perverse situation where people now making say €200k/yr are still paying well below say €750/month in social rent. I've met some of those people.

So we've got a social program that benefits both those of lesser means, and also some very rich people.

But I guess "the poor (including because they're students) should get cheap housing" and "nobody should be forcibly evicted from social housing" are both things that sound good in isolation.

> So say you're 25 years old, there is no prospect of moving out of your parents' home unless you leaves the city you're born and raised in.

This sucks, but honestly it's hard to sympathize with the crocodile tears of people most responsible for creating and benefiting from the system that's now biting them in the ass.

The parents of that 25 year old have likely been either benefiting from the rising property prices of a house they own, or have been getting government subsidized housing for decades.

The real solution of aggressively increasing the housing supply would have gone against their short-term interests, and now it's gotten so bad that their kid can't apply for social housing at 18 and get it after they finish university (which used to be the case).

Meanwhile, families who for whatever reason didn't have established roots in Amsterdam but work there have been commuting on the train or bus for 1-2 hours every day for decades, since they weren't in a situation to vote themselves and their kids into a benefit granted by the municipality.

Where'd he move from? Because there are a number of things that really help people from outside the EU here in the Netherlands. First is the 30% tax discount they receive, which usually adds a couple hundred euros to their net income. Secondly, companies often help expats to find houses or even pay part of the rent. Then there's the fact that in order to hire someone from outside the EU, you need to prove that you can't find a Dutch person to do the same job. Companies do this in part, by paying them higher wages, which indicate that these people have rare skills.

Expats are actually a big part of why housing prices on the free market are rising, since they can often pay much more than Dutch people can.

The 30% ruling isn't for those outside the EU, but to a first approximation for anyone who's a highly paid professional that's hard to hire domestically blah blah who wasn't previously residing in either The Netherlands or in the border regions of Belgium and Germany.

There's plenty of Germans, French etc. who have the 30% ruling.

I suspect your friend is not in the middle class, there is a very attractive tax treatment to attract foreign knowledge workers that he likely qualifies for. If you have money there never is a problem.

All things considered, Amsterdam is doing about as good a job at keeping the city affordable, accessible and diverse as is possible under these circumstances. Nobody wants it to become a rich people's ghetto, hence the big focus on rent-controlled housing and keeping speculators out.

It is certainly possible to get affordable housing that's not rent-controlled, but that's going to be either South-East, North or New West, which are fine places to live, but not as popular as the neighbourhoods closer to the center. The center itself and the older neighbourhoods around it are either rent-controlled with insane waiting lists, or simply too expensive.

Ultimately, there's simply a limit to the number of houses available here. There's not much room for the city to grow. Nobody wants it full of skyscrapers (and I've seen an argument that skyscrapers don't really help all that much anyway), nobody wants to tear down all the historic buildings. One of the most recent major expansions of the city, IJburg, doesn't seem to be terribly popular. The city is rapidly filling in all the gaps that can be filled with new houses without hurting living quality too much, but in the end, Amsterdam wants to stay a nice city to live in. That means a lot of people want to live here, but it also means not everybody can live here.

There's other nice cities here, though. Try Utrecht or Haarlem.

There's a huge middle ground between the current status quo and a completely deregulated zoning and construction policy. It's not a choice between either the current Amsterdam, or the Centrum becoming something like Midtown Manhattan.

Things like:

* Liberalizing height restrictions across the board from 4-5 story houses to something closer to 8-10.

* Finding some realistic compromise between the preservation of truly historic buildings, and the current policy which pretty much just enacts a blanket policy of preservation on the "look" of pretty much all existing houses in the Centrum.

* Liberalizing zoning within reason. E.g. ever wondered why there's so many phone shops in Amsterdam? It's because they're on an exhaustive list of types of shops that can be placed in certain areas. Huge inefficiencies in land allocation are created as a result of political lobbying driving zoning policy. Government subsidies via zoning for parking spaces (at the cost of residential land) are another example.

> IJburg, doesn't seem to be terribly popular

Uh, what? It was pretty much a sand field 10-15 years ago, and now 22k people live there at a density of 10k/km^2, compared to say 14k/km^2 in Amsterdam West, an already established district.

I think it's a relative disappointment that the density isn't at least 2-4x that, but IJburg's a fantastic example for their being a huge demand for housing, and the city's ability to fill that demand once it gets out of its own way.

> The city is rapidly filling in all the gaps that can be filled with new houses without hurting living quality too much[...]

I'd change that to something closer to "while tiptoeing around existing property owners, assuring them that prices won't fall, that the view out their window won't change" etc.

Nobody (well, few) are suggesting that the entire Centrum be bulldozed and replaced by Soviet-style tower blocks, just that we've struck the wrong balance between NIMBY-ism and new development.

> * Liberalizing height restrictions across the board from 4-5 story houses to something closer to 8-10.

Will that improve anything? There are places in Amsterdam where they builds higher, but those rarely turn out the way people hoped. Take the old Bijlmer flats, for example.

> * Finding some realistic compromise between the preservation of truly historic buildings, and the current policy which pretty much just enacts a blanket policy of preservation on the "look" of pretty much all existing houses in the Centrum.

But that "look" of the inner city is a big part of the appeal of Amsterdam.

Yeah it'll improve things. To a first approximation a 100 m^2 apartment in the center costs 500k. If you've got 4 floors of that it's a total cost of 2 million.

Once you can build higher the costs diminish since most of the cost is opportunity cost of the parcel of land it's sitting on, not the building itself. A real rise in supply will counteract rising prices. You can build 8x 100m^2 apartments for way less than 8 million.

> Take the old Bijlmer flats, for example.

Yeah exactly my point. Some centrally planned NIMBY high-rise project that had to be put in Zuidoost because of restrictive zoning policy, of course it was a disaster.

It's also can't be compared to what a re-development of the Centrum would look like. The population density is probably no more than two or single story apartment units. They're huge tower blocks surrounded by large parks[1]. I'm talking about re-development within the A10.

> But that "look" of the inner city is a big part of the appeal of Amsterdam.

Something has to give. If your definition of the "look" is "exactly the way it is now" then yeah, we can't change anything and we'll continue to have a housing bubble, and probably long-term Amsterdam becoming a backwater as jobs & development moves to somewhere like Rotterdam.

I'm not talking about demolishing the historic Prinsengracht and dropping something that looks like the (Soviet-style) Bijlmer tower block on top of the resulting rubble.

There's lots of places in the city where the houses don't have much historic value, e.g. here on De Wittenkade: https://goo.gl/maps/BzTLyvHGUvr

It's now illegal to change any minor detail of how those houses on the left look like (just replacing a window needs to have council involvement).

We could build something in the same style, except 6 stories instead of 4. Or (more cheaply) build something in the same style as the right side of that canal, but up to a 6+ story height. Neither would fundamentally change the look of the city, but would help a lot with the housing supply. Both are illegal.

I'm arguing against my own best interests. I own a house in the Centrum that's ballooning in price due to the municipal policy. Would some part of me like to live in a time capsule? Sure. But I think the interests of current and future residents matter more than NIMBY concerns.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gooiord,_Bijlmer.jpg

> Once you can build higher the costs diminish since most of the cost is opportunity cost of the parcel of land it's sitting on, not the building itself. A real rise in supply will counteract rising prices. You can build 8x 100m^2 apartments for way less than 8 million.

It's not that simple. Higher buildings need to be stronger, and they need elevators.

The are absolutely areas in the city that could have higher buildings, but plenty of areas in the city already have them. There are plenty of large apartment blocks in West, North, Buitenveldert and Bijlmer.

Inside the Ring, sure there are areas that could have higher houses, and I'm not necessarily opposed to that, but it's not going to gain as much extra houses as you think. Up to 4 floors, having no elevator is considered acceptable. Higher than that, by current rules, you really need an elevator. Do you want to have people walk up the stairs for 6 floors? Or make all the houses smaller to make space for an elevator?

There are trade-offs involved. It's not simply a matter of taller houses therefore more affordable houses.

I believe by the current plans, they intend to build high rises on Zeeburgereiland, but I've seen a very convincing argument that you can house just as many people there with lower buildings. The gain isn't as big as you'd expect.

In the Bijlmer, they're explicitly moving from large apartment blocks to low single-family houses. I don't know what the reasoning behind that was exactly, but I suspect some lessons were learned there. Maybe people actually do prefer lower houses. They're fairly affordable, and people actually get to have a yard, which is a rare luxury in Amsterdam.

I don't see the need to pack as many people as possible in the city. The city has to remain livable, and as far as I can tell, the city is doing a really good job at that. They do try to fill up all the unused spaces in the city, like de Omval 20 years ago, and Zeeburgereiland now (I'm still surprised they built IJburg before putting Zeeburgereiland to use).

It's not really a bubble when it's based on real supply and demand. The city actively tries to reduce speculation with measures like the one from the article, but because it's such a nice place to live, lots of people want to live here.

I don't see any reason for Amsterdam to become a backwater, and there already are plenty of jobs in Rotterdam. There are other towns around Amsterdam being built up, like Almere, Hoofddorp and Purmerend. Of course the Amsterdam will keep looking for places to create new houses, but opportunities for that will remain limited.

> Higher than that, by current rules, you really need an elevator[...]

You're really making my case for me :)

Of course there's trade-offs involved. The point of deregulation is that instead of us or some council meeting having to decide say if 4 floors, 5 or 6 is OK for a walk-up, people can just vote with their money.

And yeah, I'd argue that there's plenty of people who given the choice between paying an extra couple of hundred a month and a shorter commute would be fine with walking up 1-2 extra floors.

But the point is I don't need to be right. If it's deregulated and nobody builds 5-6 floor houses without elevators we've lost nothing, but if they do we've produced a lot of value for them just by getting out of their way.

> I don't see the need to pack as many people as possible in the city. The city has to remain livable[...]

There's plenty of European cities that are nice to live in that are ahead of Amsterdam when it comes to population density: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_Union_cities_...

> It's not really a bubble when it's based on real supply and demand.

It's based on an artificially restricted supply, which is politically motivated. The city's only needing to micro-manage the market it's already ruined because it started out with intervening in it. There's plenty of cities that historically have grown in size, density and population while real estate prices have stayed level or even gone down.

> Of course the Amsterdam will keep looking for places to create new houses, but opportunities for that will remain limited.

I 100% agree that it very likely will stay that way. I'm only making the point that it's almost entirely an artificially created problem.

Salaries in the Netherlands aren’t 100k a year for a starter for a regular programmer job. It’s more like 30-60k depending on experience.

Wouldn't this drive up demand for public transportation and construction in neighboring cities?

I live in Dublin (the one in Ireland) and my commute is about half an hour by tram. Prices are ridiculous in the center, but where I live they are much more reasonable.

Like most selective political actions in a market, I suspect this has good intent but will produce predictably counter-productive outcomes. The intent is obviously to "make housing more affordable", but they're only restricting one part of the market, and that part is "newly built" homes. What about the real estate market that is simply "homes"? So if newly built houses cannot be rented out anymore, and a large driver of building homes is this customer base of "landlords", what will happen to the rate of building, and the price of older homes?

It doesn't seem like a stretch to assume that the building rate will go down, and prices on older estates not affected by the law will go up. Unless the law is applied broadly across any and all estates, the end result will simply be, best case, that the market adjusts: worst case, that you end up with very unwanted and negative economical effects that no-one predicted.

The article states that "It’s not yet been clarified, for example, how long an owner would have to occupy their home before being able to rent it out" -- in my opinion the problem here is not where you draw the line, the problem is the drawing of the line. It will only create synthetic movements in the market and I don't think it will help in achieving the stated goal at all.

If one were inclined to be cynical, one could even assume that like with most political proposals, there are those who stand to gain from this, and they may be sponsoring it. Namely: whoever owns "old" real estate in Amsterdam. Is it also cynical to believe that politicians may know that this will not help, but are more interested in looking like they are "doing something about it", rather than resolving the issue, causing economical loss for property owners? The stated beneficiaries of this proposal are those weak in buying power claiming the "right" to live in a certain place without being priced out -- normally not a group with huge political leverage.

The key problem is the rich buying property for literal rent-seeking to become even richer.

This drives prices up for homes in the city to a point that only if you are in a relationship and over 30 you might be able to buy your first 'home'.

There may be downsides to the measures proposed, but the fun part of government is that you can learn, change and adapt. Because you write the rules, you can change and you can use this ability to create a better living environment for people, which is the ultimate end goal.

> The key problem is the rich buying property for literal rent-seeking to become even richer.

This key problem is in no way solved by the political proposal, as "the rich" can move to buy older real estate instead.

> This drives prices up for homes in the city to a point that only if you are in a relationship and over 30 you might be able to buy your first 'home'.

The reason that prices are going up is because a lot of people want to spend a lot of money for the real estate, so in the end you must take a moral stand regarding who owns the right to live and/or own real estate in the city, and what this right is based on. Long term consistency is key here, because short lived stabs at the market like this one will not make any difference apart from creating volatility.

As soon as you create economical impediments to achieve your "moral", or "political" goals, you must ask yourself questions almost like a penetration tester: how would I exploit this law if I wanted to stand to gain from it economically? There's almost always a way, and unless you take this into account before creating the law, you're just making the problem worse, and more complicated (normally the same thing).

> the fun part of government is that you can learn, change and adapt

Government shouldn't be having fun with laws. They should be enacting laws that are thoroughly studied, where the possible outcomes are weighed against eachother to minimize risk and maximize the odds of success. Of course you always need to evaluate and adapt, but this proposal is sloppy to say the least, perhaps even malicious.

Let them have older real estate. That pie isn't growing. The point is that the rich can't dominate the entire market any more, there is a class of housing reserved for the middle class

Giving the rich a monopoly on a fixed tier 1 subset of real estate in a market with huge demand is not how you solve affordable housing to the "local" middle class. It will create synthetic incentives, and escalate prices on all real estate as demand seeps over into black or grey markets. Changes like these need to be across the board, or not happen at all.

This isn't "giving the rich a monopoly", it is restricting their existing monopoly by declaring a type of housing (newly constructed sfhs) out of their reach.

But the middle class of today will be the rich of tomorrow, and not allowing them to rent out their own homes when they move means that basically they are prevented access to the same mechanisms of wealth creation that made today's rich people rich.

This law literally helps out rich people and hurts low income people.

Low income people can't buy a house. They can only afford to rent. This law would criminalize the ability of poor people to live in the city, and it would do so to help the wealthy home owners.

Complete nonsense. First of all, homeowners aren't wealthy. Landlords are wealthy. The law says that wealthy landlords have to keep their hands off of brand new houses for a certain period of time so that homeowners can have a crack at it (therefore lowering prices, since rental profit isn't a consideration)

This does nothing to prevent anyone from renting apartments, condos, or houses built over five years ago.

Poor people aren't the ones renting brand-new construction. The renters of new houses are going to be people who could have and would have bought the house, if super rich landlords weren't jacking up prices.

Ok, so you are seriously going to argue that a person who rents new apartment isn't going to be significantly less wealthy than someone who purchases a new home?

Do you see the obvious contradiction here?

All this law does is take away poor people's ability to rent a home, that will instead be sold to a wealthy home owner.

If you can afford to purchase a new home then you are way way more wealthy than someone who can only afford to rent that same home.

As you know with security, it's very difficult to predict in advance how flaws/loopholes will be exploited.

So the key thing here is to setup a society and government that can quickly respond + adapt and fix loopholes.

Cities don't exist for rich people to exploit. They are the places where we live our lives, the focus is quality of life.

Not some theoretical discussions about 'markets'.

> As you know with security, it's very difficult to predict in advance how flaws/loopholes will be exploited.

Not always. This law has some very obvious loopholes that I would be very surprised if they weren't abused, should it ever become reality.

> So the key thing here is to setup a society and government that can quickly respond + adapt and fix loopholes.

Nobody's saying that this is a bad thing, and it doesn't in any way require badly thought out laws like this one.

> some theoretical discussions about 'markets'

"Some theoretical discussion" is exactly what is missing in this proposal, which is why it's so badly thought out and will miss the mark, to nobody's benefit but the property owners of what politicians arbitrarily decide is "old" real estate.

Which policies do you propose to protect lower/middle incomes from getting priced out of their cities?

Build more housing, lots and lots more housing. Central Paris is beautiful and it’s almost uniformly dense eight story walk ups. Build new cities. It’s not like the Dutch haven’t built commuter cities around Amsterdam before. Do it again, taking account of the lessons learned from places like Almere.

Sydney is a great example of where that doesn’t work. There’s a crane every 100 meters here and everyone but people with loads of money or rich foreigners is priced out.

> Build more housing, lots and lots more housing.

We've already tried this, it doesn't work. Housing is valued exclusively by the value of the housing around it. Building more housing raises the value (and therefore the cost) of all nearby housing, and does so continuously until the economy resets.

So, if you are a private equity firm, you love this, because it's a guaranteed safe place to park tons and tons of money.

But if you are a human who needs to buy housing to survive, more housing hurts you, because it drives the "fair-market value" for all nearby housing higher, making any specific unit less affordable to you personally. Paradoxically, the more housing construction happens, the less likely a person can actually get housing.

---

There isn't a "just supply vs demand" on housing, because supply isn't fungible, and (with the exception of perhaps California), the demand is not primarily driven by people, but by private equity. You can't out-build private equity, no matter how many cranes hit the sky, because (currently) the act of taking the loan to begin construction generates more of the private equity that you are trying to outbuild. To fix housing, you have to fix equity first, because (in most but not all cities) the finances are the problem, not some huge influx of new residents.

"We'll just out-build these high prices" is the housing equivalent of "we'll lose money on each transaction, but make up for it in volume".

> We've already tried this, it doesn't work. Housing is valued exclusively by the value of the housing around it. Building more housing raises the value (and therefore the cost) of all nearby housing, and does so continuously until the economy resets.

Really? Maybe I'm being overly simplistic, but surely building enough dwellings to exceed the immediate demand would lead to prices dropping?

Could you point towards some links to learn more about this?

> Maybe I'm being overly simplistic, but surely building enough dwellings to exceed the immediate demand would lead to prices dropping?

I thought Toronto was doing a good enough job at building lots of housing, and it still hasn't worked.

The issue is that in order to actually have prices dropping, you need to overbuild by a bit. But prices dropping is an undesirable outcome for real estate developers, who are almost exclusively responsible for building new housing in a city. Naturally they don't want to shoot themselves in the foot, so they will only ever build as much as to satisfy the current demand, but not quite, and try hard not to exceed it.

Even with government-issued social housing, there's no way to solve this: as long as there's any space for developers in a market, their new supply is going to adapt elastically to just underserve current demand.

The only thing that has practically lead to supply-related price drops is an irrational boom followed by a realization that developers have actually (unintentionally!) overbuilt this time. Unfortunately, irrational booms are also accompanied by prior fast price increases and a lot of pain on all sides, so we probably shouldn't advocate for one.

So, I'm not sure what a good solution is to actually provide more supply than needed and have prices dropping, but the free market is not it. Especially as real estate developers get better with forecasting demand.

Maybe demographics will help a bit in 20 years or so.

Instead of building more housing, build more narrow-gauge electrified commuter railway lines and stations--with large multistory parking garages adjacent in the US, and maybe bike lockers attached in the EU.

If you make everywhere effectively closer to everywhere else, there is more competition for "good location", and landowners can't charge as much for any specific spot. Or at least they can't until demand goes up again.

Why narrow-gauge?

Smaller turning radius, therefore better suited to city architecture. Also, tunnels require less width.

I dont think that matters. The only time you care about existing city architecture is when youre building a tram. Most trams use standard gauge and that works fine.

Tunnel width does not depend directly on the gauge but on the loading gauge, i.e. the size of the car. That is generally wider than would be required by the gauge.

On the other hand, using the same gauge as other rail means you can run trains across both old and new infrastructure.

If your model of the property market is correct then you should be able to reliably make enormous amounts of money by investing in real estate investment trusts with exposure to the appropriate property markets or construction or construction materials companies that are publicly traded.

There’s nothing special about private equity that gives it better access to markets like property.

“We’ll just out-build these prices” is the equivalent of “Charge more” when the problem is that you, a consultant, are too busy. If you keep doing it for long enough the problem goes away. Tokyo has grown by 1.5m people since 2001. House prices and rent have been basically flat throughout. Have the metropolitan areas you’re talking about added about 100,000 people a year for almost two decades?

> We've already tried this, it doesn't work. Housing is valued exclusively by the value of the housing around it.

Not sure about the claim that this has been tried. Most cities where building housing is happening are having rents increase at much lower rates than cities like SF that refuse housing construction.

Moreover if we didn’t just focus on private construction and returned to pre 1980s style construction of massive public housing projects, it seems likely to me that supply and demand could start working and hold rents steady or reduce them. (E.g. something interesting I saw on this recently https://twitter.com/RottenInDenmark/status/11080317257523363... )

Instead of public housing most anti-housing activity seems to be focusing on failed policies like rent controls.

If people are just building investment properties to park money that sit empty of course that's not going to help things, it's not really increasing the supply if no one lives there and no one can rent it. They might as well be building a statue or some non-housing object.

That doesn't mean actually increasing the housing supply is a bad idea. Heck, maybe they could have a tax on vacant units to try to force those investment properties that are already built on to the rental market. Or if that's too hard to enforce, raise the property taxes enough where vacant units look undesirable as an investment.

I don't know about the speculative investment market, but at least for the rental market demand is people. I think there are very few people just renting a place with the intention of leaving it unoccupied forever. If there were affordable rental properties everywhere, I think it would be less of a problem even if real estate investments remained expensive.

It is very difficult to predict in advance how flaws will be exploited but you should at least think very hard about how they might be exploited before announcing a policy. You should ideally have thought about it enough that you have the policy ready when you announce it and can explain and justify it, including all the details.

Good policy beats discretion reliably and consistently for reasons of dynamic consistency. If you find yourself announcing a policy when you don’t even have the details ready you are doing it half assed. You certainly haven’t had tax lawyers or economists with expertise in mechanism design look over your policy proposals. You are an unserious person, making policy up on the fly, floating trial balloons while running off your mouth, a Trump or AOC.

Cities don’t exist for rich people to exploit but if you build less housing than there is demand for the richest will, on average, get more of what’s available than the poorer.

Why would you think they haven’t thought about it? Sounds like a great plan.

> The reason that prices are going up is because a lot of people want to spend a lot of money for the real estate

Hum. No. People don't want to spend a lot. But the whole system is built so owners can extract rent either from rentals or from buyers to which banks will lend enough money to meet the seller's price.

Yes, that’s what happens in a market where supply is growing slower than demand. Prices go up. See levels.fyi for an example of this in the market for software engineers.

> People don't want to spend a lot.

The fact that prices are going up proves this is not true.

> The fact that prices are going up proves this is not true.

No. Prices go up because demand is higher than supply and people are forced to live somewhere (as in "reasonably near their work") and are therefore forced to spend lots of money on this. They wouldn't do so if they did not have to.

> This key problem is in no way solved by the political proposal, as "the rich" can move to buy older real estate instead.

I suspect this proposal has less to do with protecting middle class people's ability to be home owners, and has more to do with preventing perverse incentives around real estate development from having a long-term negative impact on Amsterdam's housing stock.

For instance: look at what's happening in Toronto. There are a massive number of high-end, 1-br condos being built because that's the type of property which makes sense as an investment instrument. Large swaths of the renting population are not served by that type of property, but investors are the customer for real-estate development, so that's what gets built.

> Large swaths of the renting population are not served by that type of property, but investors are the customer for real-estate development, so that's what gets built.

It all comes down to the same discussion: what are the inherent rights of a native population when compared to foreign capital owners. It's subjective. Your opinion could be anywhere between "money buys you property rights" to "land is owned by living on it" and you wouldn't be objectively wrong in any case, since you're making a moral argument.

The problem appears when a moral argument should enter legal and political reality. When you look at this proposal through the lens of "what will be achieved", it's hard to be optimistic.

> Your opinion could be anywhere between "money buys you property rights" to "land is owned by living on it" and you wouldn't be objectively wrong in any case, since you're making a moral argument.

Even that sort of moral argument is short-sighted because natives benefit a lot by investments by foreign capital owners, specially in real estate.

> It all comes down to the same discussion: what are the inherent rights of a native population when compared to foreign capital owners. It's subjective.

Indeed it is, and in an honest democracy a question of this importance would be voted on in a referendum. But before doing that you'd first want the public to be informed of the facts. But in Canada the government won't even do that - we have no idea how much property is being purchased by foreign investors directly, or via proxy friends/relatives who have obtained Canadian citizenship.

> There are a massive number of high-end, 1-br condos being built because that's the type of property which makes sense as an investment instrument.

And the funny thing is that the value of those properties comes to a large degree purely out of the overall rise in real estate prices, not because they satisfy the basic human need of a shelter. I wonder what the price of these properties will do when a real estate crisis hits. They are clearly not a place where people actually want to live.

> The reason that prices are going up is because a lot of people want to spend a lot of money for the real estate...

No. Real estate is 80% driven by finance and tax policy.

The condo craze is just like the big box and franchises hotel boom a 15 years ago. Lots of money flows in, and the buildings get sold when they start losing money around the 15 year mark when depreciation catches up. Many of the marginal “luxury condos” will be shitty rentals in the 2030s when maintenance becomes a problem, and you’ll see them rapidly go down market.

By that time, the money will have moved on the the next thing, and we’re all stuck with the mess.

> By that time, the money will have moved on the the next thing, and we’re all stuck with the mess.

What mess would that be? A wealth of cheap condos in a market flooded by companies liquidating their investment?

You still have to pay to maintain them, and expensive high-rise condo maintenance sets a natural floor for rents.

Bankrupt condo associations and people with underwater mortgages walking away. For the rental units, the profits tank, so the landlords tighten the screws on opex, and they aren't "luxury" anymore.

You may recall 2008, when this phenomena happened with single-family homes. Condos are much more fickle investments.

Note that in the Netherlands you can't just "walk away" from a mortgage. If the bank sells your house and the yield isn't enough to pay for the mortgage, you're still on the hook for the rest.

After 2008 the housing market just more or less closed down. Nobody was selling as their mortgage was under water, so they just stayed where they were.

The problem is demand being sufficiently high compared to supply to cause prices that consume most of peoples’ spending abilities.

Even if we removed the concept of ownership, which is the only way to remove rent seeking behavior, how are we going to address the limited supply in the face of extreme demand?

The long term structural solution in my opinion is to create more desireable places to live. This involves significant wealth transfers from already wealthy places to investing in infrastructure, education, communities in other locations, thereby increasing the supply of desirable places to live. That’s really the only way prices can be brought down in real terms.

Isn't it ultimately a side effect of a decade of extremely low interest rates, world wide? If bonds were yielding something closer to their historical norms, buying and renting out homes wouldn't be nearly as attractive to institutional funds.

You nailed it. It’s cheap to borrow money and if you have a large deposit you can get a mortgage which your tenants will be paying off. Then you buy another. In Australia you can actually write the interest off as a tax expense. So it lowers your taxable income. With enough maintenance and repairs receipts and a few properties you’ll pay fuck all tax. Awesome way for people with money to make more money.

> literal rent-seeking

Ironically, although literally they are seeking rent they are not necessarily, economically speaking, literal rent-seekers. The economists' abuse of language remains an unfolding tragedy.

Economic rent seeking is characterised by seeking a cut of the profits without creating any new value. If you buy a new house and rent it out, you have just caused new wealth to be created and you are recovering the capital costs, so a reasonable argument can be mounted that it isn't technically rent seeking.

If you want to clamp down on rent seeking, the best and potentially only reasonable way is a land tax, so people can't profit off controlling an irreplaceable asset that doesn't require maintenance.

> This drives prices up for homes in the city...

One of several factors. Credit availability is also a big deal.

> Economic rent seeking is characterised by seeking a cut of the profits without creating any new value. If you buy a new house and rent it out, you have just caused new wealth to be created and you are recovering the capital costs, so a reasonable argument can be mounted that it isn't technically rent seeking.

These houses already exist though. What new wealth is being created by purchase with intent to rent vs purchase with intent to occupy vs the builder offering the building for rent?

> What new wealth is being created by purchase with intent to rent vs purchase with intent to occupy vs the builder offering the building for rent?

There is value being created here in the market for risk, flexibility, and capital allocation. Residents who prefer to rent rather than take on the commitment of ownership also capture some of this surplus.

If someone doesn't have enough money to buy a house, they can move in and rent it. They get to live in a house that is nicer than what they can afford right now.

I don't know much about the housing market, but arguing from theory, if the new build market is restricted to _only_ people who can afford to buy a house, that might be a much smaller group of people than individuals who want to live in the area but just cannot afford the cost of building a house. Renting is good for that not-enough-to-buy group.

For example, I couldn't afford to live in a city if I had to own my own home. I don't have that much money on hand. I'd rather rent land from a landlord than money from a bank. At least the landlord is carrying the risk.

In the current Dutch market your rent will be a lot higher than mortgage payments for a similar house.

well... when your renting you know that your rent payment is the top of what you will pay a month. If you own the house, you also need to pay its taxes, repairs, upgrades, etc.. so it makes sense that you must pay more than just the mortgage payment to rent, its less risk.

The "wealth" created is that there is a new house up for rent, and thus more options for those who want to rent.

The advantage of renting compared to buying is that you can occupy an house for a limited amount of time without being financially exposed to changes in the value of the house, without having to find a new buyer when you move out and without needing upfront capital or credit to buy it (there are of course also disadvantages to renting, so some prefer to buy instead).

Not sure about Amsterdam, but property prices in Vancouver and Toronto are heavily driven by the middle class over-extending themselves on credit with a little help from “The Bank of Mom” on the down payment.

Sure, the wealthy are buying to, but based on average debt levels, it’s mostly people who can’t afford it.

As always in the Canadian Real Estate discussion, the RBC reports have the best data and analysis.

http://www.rbc.com/newsroom/reports/rbc-housing-affordabilit...

The Toronto and Vancouver markets are in territory that is shocking and in Vancouver's case, literally numerically impossible to sustain without constant infusions of external capital.

"Rent-seeking" has a specific meaning in economics and has absolutely nothing to do with real estate.

Houses provide rental income. Whether you get that as money (by renting out) or consume it in kind doesn't matter.

At the most successful, this proposal would leave rents the same, but lower house prices. Ie it would artificially give people rich enough to own a house an especially attractive high yielding instrument.

In practice, it will be even worse.

That's the optimistic case (a learning process for government).

I think the pessimistic case is that foreigners+investors make convenient scapegoats, the public has reasonable demands but will fall for plans that sound good on paper and don't work, and entrenched interests ensure that the actual root causes will never be fixed.

If you think about it, if 8 households want 5 housing units, there's just no way it can be affordable to all 8. Not by paying the 8 more, not by discouraging renting or owning, not by prohibiting investment etc.

The only things I can think of that could actually solve the root cause are:

1) Build more housing

2) Increase the housing available somehow without building more (tax units that are left empty, allow renting places that weren't allowed before).

3) Decrease the demand for housing. Maybe try to drive high-paying jobs away, or try to raise the minimum wage high enough that business go under.

Otherwise I just don't see anything else that could work, without creating some special class that gets affordable housing while everyone else doesn't (maybe the lucky people win government lotteries or inherit rent controlled apartments).

> The key problem is the rich buying property for literal rent-seeking to become even richer.

Well, no. The only reason they can expect the rent is because the tenant is unable to buy. If there were more housing that was within reach to be bought, then rents would go down, and the landlords would find themselves unable to rent profitably, and would thus sell the home at the market rate.

As with all affordable housing 'issues', the answer is to build more housing.

I agree that most such policies are naive or populist and won't achieve their actual objectives, but...

The default supply-demand dynamic doesn't generally apply to urban real estate. Supply is very slow to react to market changes, and is limited by all sorts of things that aren't price. In a lot of cities, prices (within reason) don't really affect supply at all.

First, building takes time and houses last a long time, so supply is unlikely to grow by more thana couple of % pa. Second, most of the space is taken and/or limited by planning, not price. Changing planning policies and improving transport is what actually gets a city with 250k houses to 300k.

Often, you'll find that people don't actually want the city to change/grow much and prevent it politically

The upshot is that is a supply-insensitive-to-demand market (the opposite of the cocaine market, economics teachers like for examples). If demand goes up, prices go up. Supply stays about the same. The inverse is that if price is held artificially low, this doesn't really dampen supply much.

Imagine manhatten house prices doubled tomorrow. How much extra housing do you think this would lead to?

All that said, this sounds like cheap politics. Developers complaining? That's probably a political point in amsterdam. It tick the do something box. Upper middle class people will get their new house a little cheaper (less competition). The new neighborhoods will be more middle class (and ethincally dutch), because owner occupiers tend to be these things. The rental market will be marginally tighter, as this grows the own/rent ratio a little.

> Imagine manhatten house prices doubled tomorrow. How much extra housing do you think this would lead to?

A lot. Rising prices would encourage the development of non-NYC cities. As those cities developed, some portion of Manhattanites and those thinking of moving to Manhattan would choose to move to the new cities. As the new city develops further, Manhattan becomes that much less attractive as a place to work until such time as Manhattan RE prices again drop / fail to rise, and vacancy rates increase. Vacant units = extra housing.

Economic mumbo jumbo isn’t the only consideration for policy like this.

Economic policy has left so much capital sitting around doing nothing that even marginal developments that are ultimately money losers are getting built everywhere.

Local governments ultimately are accountable to the people, and it’s appropriate for them to think about the impact on the civic space of these developments, that are often ultimately bad for the community.

Real estate is among the sketchiest of industries, and in the US at least almost all commercial projects are implicitly subsidized by the government. IMO anything that extracts value from developers is a good thing.

what will happen to the rate of building

If the demand for houses from people who want to buy them to live in is greater than the supply of houses, nothing. The houses will still be built and sold, just to different people.

Not necessarily true. If the rate of return is changed some people who would have invested their money this will not. Properties might come to the market later because it’s not worth it to pay the premium to have workers come in on Saturday for example. Developers will be less willing to pay extra for legal services to get through the planning process faster. I’m sure there are other similar effects I’m missing as an outsider to property development.

This is already something well-known in the Dutch housing market though. It is known as "zelfbewoningsplicht" (self-occupation.. duty?, e.g. the contract you signed when buying the house stipulates that you, or your direct family have to live in it yourself/themselves). It is usually enforced by "woningcorporaties" (social housing corporations?) with a social mandate and does result in lower prices for the houses/appartements that have it. The odd thing here is that it's now municipalities that are enforcing it on _all_ housing, rather than just on designated social housing. It will be interesting to see the effects though.

Regulation are introduced for their intended positive consequences, but they usually also have unintended negative consequences.

Here you posit that the global balance will be negative, but your supposition is mostly based on the assumption that regulating the free market has always net bad consequences. Which is a point of view which has been pushed VERY strongly in the last decades, but which only the most idealogical anarcho-capitalists can fully believe: try to have no regulation in, eg, food production, and people start dying.

As for this measure: we can all agree that it will depress prices for new homes, and increase prices for older homes. Is this going to be a net positive or negative for the middle class who wants to live in Amsterdam? It depends a lot on the price sensitivity of the construction of new homes. I suppose that planners in the city know more about this than me, and maybe you, and did their own projections. If they go on, we'll see the results.

The “old” property owners will have to price their properties to compete with cheap, modern, newly-built housing though. That’s absolutely in line with the end goal.

You also have to bear in mind that a significant chunk of properties in NL is owned by housing associations, this new rule only applies to individuals.

> they're only restricting one part of the market, and that part is "newly built" homes.

An interesting sidenote is this comment from one of the municipal administrators:

> It would be even better if we could also apply this rule to existing housing, but we think that requires the law to be changed.

Dutch source: https://nos.nl/artikel/2275897-amsterdam-wil-verbod-op-verhu...

> Like most selective political actions in a market, I suspect this has good intent but will produce predictably counter-productive outcomes.

The status quo seems like a given, but it's maintained by actions too.

We choose everyday not to change it, and this choice often produces outcomes that are counter productive.

To not change things is literally a conservative programme, and this usually serves the interests of the wealthy.

While not perfect it's absolutely commendable, compare this to the borderline criminal state of real estate market in places like the UK or Vancouver where foreign investors and corrupted politics destroyed and alienated the middle class population...Imho real estate should be absolutely outside the possibility of speculation and 'investment', a house is for a family/person to own and live in not some mega conglomerate side business of rip off rental and overinflated selling prices.

The UK is awful. Worse than American cities. No property tax, non existent/weak tenant laws, and renters have to pay the council taxes (in the US the owner is usually responsible for all HOA and taxes). The deposit protection schemes seem more designed to benefit landlords too.

Totally agree, most of them are hard assed companies with no morals and very loose practices.

One place I used to rent from tried to swindle my deposit for "repairs" of things that were clearly just standard wear and tear over the years.

I argued till I was blue in the face and they eventually agreed with me on most of the things and agreed to "refund" me. They messed up somehow and transferred me 2x my initial deposit, normally I would absolutely let them know about their mistake but as they messed me around for months I didn't say a word and kept it. Suprise suprise they went out of business a few months later

Depending on the local laws, the 2x return of your deposit may not have been a mistake. They may have been legally obligated to return 2x of the deposit amount because they failed to return your correct deposit amount within a certain number of days.

Example: 21 days for some areas

Taxes and HOA just get rolled up into the rent. It's not like those aren't already impacting the price because the landlord must be the one to pay the money.

There are still important second order effects. Making those the responsibility of the renter makes it harder to comparison shop (remember what it used to be like buying plane tickets when everybody just showed the base fare?) and it means the renter bears the risk of any sudden increase in those costs.

That is the downside. The upside is renters have better insight into how voting to raise/lower taxes will affect their rent. In the US that is all rolled into rent, and as a result renters happily vote to raise the taxes in the area they live without realizing that it will come back in rent increases eventually. (though there is some time lag as other economic factors affect how much rent can be raised)

Seems like you could have the best of both worlds by making it the landlord’s responsibility and requiring them to itemize it for the renter.

Also, what happens when a property is vacant? Do taxes revert to the owner, or do they not get paid?

In the UK, yes. The owner is responsible for council tax when a property is empty. This varies across the country, it could be totally zero rated when the property is empty and unfurnished, or it could be that you have to pay entirely. Where I live, landlords can get one month free in any 12 month period for empty (no residents) and unfurnished (except for white goods) properties.

Not all taxes can be passed on. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence

(Basically, a landlord bears the economic burden of a land value tax.)

From your own article:

"However, some economists think that the worker bears almost the entire burden of the tax because the employer passes the tax on in the form of lower wages. The tax incidence is thus said to fall on the employee."

This is much closer to reality than the contrary

Yeah it feels a lot like the feudal system still exists in some small way with our rental system. Revenge evictions are common enough to be a well known problem. In public discourse the right of the landlord to do whatever they like with their tenancy agreements dominates and other viewpoints are still often marginalised, typically with whinges about difficult tenants and the apparent right of landlords to an early retirement while they leech off their tenants' work. A disproportionate number of MPs are landlords. Even Tony Blair made a killing from his own buy-to-let portfolio.

> Revenge evictions

The last apartment I rented (15 years back) had an interesting mechanism for this: The rent was about $2000 but they applied something they called a "subsidy" of $400 off per month. Basically if you pissed them off they could immediately raise your rent by $400 per month to drive you out.

For the landlord side: Renting out my one house in London after I bought another one to live in (across the country). I had tenants who flat out refused to pay their rent after a few months living there. This went on for several years, and it took legal battles and numerous court fees to evict them. None of which they turned up to contest.

Before they left, they plastered globs of lard on the walls, and destroyed the kitchen floor and wall by rigging the water pipes to constantly overflow down the outside wall.

I was not allowed to enter the property to inspect it, nor was I allowed to "harass them" by speaking to them face-to-face, because they didn't want me to. I was powerless.

Yes, they lost their deposit, but I was out of pocket tens of thousands, which I basically couldn't afford. I maxed out my credit cards and bank account overdrafts. Even selling the house, it took me nearly 5 years to get back to zero.

I'm not saying that UK law is worse for landlords, but the laws aren't particularly on the side of landlords either.

It seems like you learned a valuable lesson about stepping into a space where wealthy, well-connected players dominate.

It seems like if you had the appropriate connections to government, this process would've been easier?

How exactly do you imagine that having "connections to government" would affect a problem caused by the law?

I'm sure he/she means nepotism/graft/corruption getting the landlord extrajudicial favors.... though their comment seems a bit out of place in this context.

It's not even entirely a problem caused by the law, beobab also just didn't know the full extent of their rights as a property owner. Tenent protections are strong but they wouldn't have stopped beobab from getting them out sooner and inspecting the property for damage.

I did learn valuable lessons, yes. Not that lesson, though. That's a lesson that you might need to unlearn. It will hold you back from trying anything on your own cognizance.

I learned a lot about contracts. I learned a lot about tenant laws. I learned a lot about insurance. I learned that if you have a cleaner employed in the houses you rent, then you have a legal right to enter the property to "inspect their work". I learned a lot about different types of people.

I did not learn any way, shape or form, that "having connections to government" would have made my efforts any easier.

I sometimes hear people muse about buying a house to rent it out, because it seems such easy money. I would never be able to do that, because renting out property is a real job with real risks and responsibilities, and it's not a job that I want.

I might rent out a house to a friend of a friend, but certainly not to a complete stranger.

I was going down that path a few years back, until I realized that after property tax and maintenance, it would be like taking on an extra part time job and only getting about $10K per year in return. And that's assuming they don't destroy the place.

Depends on the locality and when you got in - in the real estate cycle.

The goal is to have a property pad off by tenants in 20-30 years so you have a nice nest egg to add to your 401K.

Best investment are certain multi-unit properties - thats where the math works the best.

IANAL if you have the refusal to pay in writing (even text message) then surely it's a straightforward matter to evict them via section 8 notice, if you have kept up your end of the tenancy agreement, or section 21 and wait 2 months then court? Also, if you suspected that "Structural damage that requires urgent attention" had occurred, then you are able to enter the property to carry out inspections/repairs without notice (Housing Act 1988), otherwise you need to give them minimum of 24hrs notice.

As a landlord in the UK you have tons of power, while it's great you didn't abuse them, why you didn't exercise these legal rights when these people abused your property?

Let's just say I would have done things very differently if I knew then what I know now. I learned a LOT in the whole process. I was a lot more naive back then, and could have done a lot of things a lot better.

The problem in the UK is about (lack of) building more supply, not about the exact arrangement the law prescribes for renter/tenant relationship.

Plenty of supply outside of the South East of England. Even housing association apartments are being offered privately because of the lack of demand.

£100k for a 2 bed terrace 30 minutes from Manchester and Leeds [0]. £78k for a 2 bed house [1] 35 minutes from Manchester and Liverpool, under an hour from Birmingham, and on HS2

[0] https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-69983... [1] https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-80308...

I don't understand your point.

I was giving concrete examples of affordable houses everywhere that isn't London and commuterbelt.

I'm going to call you out on the tenants remaining in the property for "several years". That simply wouldn't happen unless you didn't follow the procedure to evict them.

UK laws are very much in the favour of the landlord.

That's a reasonable call, and to be fair to the tenants; it might have been less than I remember. I haven't got the details to hand, so I can't check.

But without going into detail, I definitely buried my head in the sand too much, and they did pay a small amount at one stage to make me think it might be okay. It was sixteen years ago now, and I've thankfully forgotten a lot of it.

I do remember that I had to restart the whole process when it was thrown out because a date was wrong on a letter. I wasted a whole heap of time trying to get the judge to reverse that decision rather than moving on and starting again.

Anyway, like I said, I was very naive back then, and made lots of mistakes.

"It was sixteen years ago now, and I've thankfully forgotten a lot of it."

Sorry you've had such crap tenants. 16 Years is a long time, and the laws could have changed on this in this time. So there is a good chance you are both right!

I want to come to this persons defense and say that if you own a single property and don't know rental laws really really well, you can get screwed over pretty easy. As with any field, the people who know the rules can screw over the ones that don't. People that rent out a single property and then work a day job are running on a lot of trust and luck.

I’m sorry you had to go through this. Alas, this can happen in most civilized countries that protect renters. We rent out an appartment in Austria, and had a similar, but less devastating situation. In the end, public welfare paid up for them, because they did live on welfare. Interestingly, the eviction failed because the renters just „forgot“ to move everything out of the apartment, and over the next 2y, welfare paid all dues because they couldn’t find a cheaper stay for them. Then, they moved out on their own.

The obvious answer for this problem is for the major housebuilders to adopt a 'build to rent model' rather than 'build to sell'.

It would eliminate the need for a middleman who is often borrowing money to fund the purchase himself, adding further inefficiencies to an already inefficient business model.

The prospect of builders becoming long-term landlords may also incentivize them to build a house that will last the course of the tenancy?

???

Developers (who hire builders) go to market for finance - they don't have the funds lying around.

Those financiers want a quickish (< 3/5 yrs) return, not a long term investment(20+ years).

Yes, I understand they want a fast turnaround on investment which is part of the problem.

The council taxes round here work along the following lines:

  £50k house -- £750 (1.5%)
  £150k house -- £1500 (1%)
  £650k house -- £3000 (0.5%)
  £3000k house -- £3000 (0.1%)

So, highly regressive.

Sadly the main complaint seems to be that wealthy pensioners who live in £1m estates have to pay.

Best comment here. Sydney AU has the same problem. The government is addicted to stamp duty and doesn’t want to do anything about the negative gearing and other handouts for the rich baby boomers. The situation is completely fucked up.

Feels quite similar to Ireland as well. Another rental market that has gone insane over the past 4-5 years.

Stamp duty is exactly backwards. They shouldn't tax transactions (that usually improve economic efficiency almost by definition), but they should tax holding land.

Negative gearing is a special kind of Australian crazy. Must be the drop bear bites.

Not denying we have a broken system, but how could we outlaw real estate investment without removing the option of renting an apartment or house?

Limit the number of properties a single entity can own.

> Limit the number of properties a single entity can own.

What problem would that solve? Certainly not any of the problems covered by the article.

That might be a problem for me. Despite owning only one home, I technically own 4 properties.

Just set up more holding entities and let them hold a limited amount of houses. The only thing profiting from this will be administrators.

You could heavily regulate rentals and/or make rentals a service the government provides. That's how we fixed this problem for Water, Electricity, and Natural Gas.

The article says:

> Amsterdam’s proposed laws wouldn’t stop new rental housing from being built—according to the city’s proposal, that housing would simply have to be proposed and approved as rental property in the first place.

The comment I'm replying to says:

>Imho real estate should be absolutely outside the possibility of speculation and 'investment'

Ah, sorry - I guess I lost track of the context due to the threading, my bad.

We managed to solve the issue of "everyone needs water & electricity" by making them government services (or in some locales, private services required to service everyone). It's not a perfect system but it's certainly better than what we're doing with housing.

> We managed to solve the issue of "everyone needs water & electricity" by making them government services (or in some locales, private services required to service everyone).

Private services are still not public services, and paying private companies to follkw public service contracts has nothing in common in providing a publix service through a public institution.

a lot of international investors don't even rent them out, they just purchase them and leave them vacant while they continue to appreciate

How do you feel about companies that buy land and build housing on it, hoping to sell? By most definitions that would be speculation and investment...

I am grateful they exist and provide housing development. As developers should naturally do.

The problem is that in Vancouver they're selling it... in Hong Kong, setting up real estate offices and recruiting foreign real estate agents sell the product outside the city.

There's no local demand for the housing at the prices that they want to get, so they have to go outside the city. This of course inflates demand and buyers with incomes beyond local Vancouver incomes crowd out locals.

Restricting home ownership as investment while not restricting apartment property investment or commercial property investment doesn't make things more fair.

It just puts property investment out of reach of the average middle class person and restricts social mobility.

e.g. a high-school drop-out plumber can afford to buy a house and rent it out based on just wages/credit, but he likely can't afford to do that with an apartment building.

“Homes” includes apartments. Commercial properties are, well, commercial, and don’t need any regulation of this kind since the goal is to ensure that people have access to housing.

This Amsterdam law only applies to houses (single family dwellings), as far as I can tell.

Some people can't afford the transaction costs associated with buying and selling real estate every year or few. Clamping down on rentals hurts the economically weak.

Your xenophobia is showing, blaming "foreigners". Absentee landowners with vacant properties are a problem. Landlords are a valuable service provider in an economy.

I didn't read any xenophobia in the parent, only anger at speculative investment. It happens that investment firms from china and the middle east are very active.

What's wrong with them? They are people too.

Firms are not people.

The folks that live down the block from me are people. A multinational investment firm is not people.

Yeah a bit of context on Dutch society: people here truly believe in equality. Amsterdam, no matter how crazy hip it is, must remain open to all levels of society.

The government is given a mandate by the People to do whatever it takes to make sure Amsterdam doesn't turn into a millionaire playground. If that means violating capitalism and property rights they will do so without hesitation.

Nah, just introduce a land value tax, and then welcome the foreign investors and speculators etc who came in and pay taxes for your local community.

Are you saying it should be illegal to rent property?

Moreover, have you considered who is going to benefit from the Amsterdam law? Existing landlords! It’s rentseeking (literally) on the part of landlords who don’t want competition!

Do you believe that is true even if places where speculation and investment have better housing conditions that those that don't?

Yeah but it gets housing built - which is the only thing that ultimately help affordability in the long run. Vancouver is building rapidly and developing rough neighbourhoods into pleasant ones. Sure, that is difficult on those who have had cheap rent in slum areas but that is the cost of improvement. I'm a long time Vancouver downtown resident who got "priced out" of the market. As far as I can tell policies that encourages construction at all prices of the market improve a city the most.

The three problems I see with prohibiting renting are:

1) It doesn't solve the problem of affordable housing.

2) If the owner leaves the property vacant instead of renting, it makes the problem worse.

3) The less well off usually rent instead of buying, so prohibiting it disadvantages them.

While it's presently the trend to blame foreigners and/or investors for economic problems, I don't think this will end anywhere good.

If you have 8 households who want to live in 5 houses, there is no way to make them affordable to all 8. Full stop. Not with paying all 8 more. Not with rent controls. Not by making everyone own, or everyone rent. It's totally impossible.

The trend now seems to be that affordable housing will be allocated to a lucky few who win a government lottery. Whether this is a politically superior outcome to building more (and allowing the character of the neighborhood to change) is subjective.

Prohibiting renting will create downward pressure on property prices and make them more affordable. If you can't rent a property, then it is worthless to you other than as a straight-up investment. If Amsterdam paired this with an unoccupied-residence tax then it would probably drive prices low enough for all housing to be owned by occupants (since housing would be worthless otherwise).

If Amsterdam went even further and subsidized/required lenders to approve 0% down home ownership then they could likely fully solve the problem.

How can it make it affordable?

For rents, if 8 people want 5 units, the rent will be high enough that 3 people are priced out.

For owning, if 8 people want 5 units, the mortgage payment will be high enough that 3 people are priced out.

I fail to see any difference.

I do think that discouraging unoccupied properties is a good idea though.

Yes, some people would still be priced out, but the equilibrium price under ideal circumstances would result in all units being owner-occupied (almost certainly at a lower monthly payment than renting would entail - there is less demand on the buy side since landlording and speculation are discouraged, and with 0% down financing nobody would be priced out of ownership due to lack of capital).

Why would the monthly payment be lower than renting? People are usually willing to pay more on mortgages than renting, since they get a house after 30 years or so (and of course, the person who is willing to pay the most gets the house).

Let's say 3 people are willing to pay $1500, $1600, and $1700/mo in rent. For owning, they are willing to shift an extra $1000/mo from saving in the stock market to home equity, paying $2500, $2600, $2700. There is only one house available.

For owning, the seller can charge a price where the mortgage works out to $2700/mo. The person willing to pay $2700 gets the house, and the others are priced out.

Now lets say a landlord comes in. He offers $2800/mo to buy it to rent.

The max he can rent it for is $1700/mo, so he does that. The same person gets the house, and the same people are priced out.

In every case, the price that is charged is determined by who can pay the most. Unless people are willing to pay less to own the house, I can't think of why the monthly mortgage payment would ever be lower than renting.

What a policy prohibiting renting actually seems to do, is force people to shift their (monthly) savings into real estate speculation as a condition of living there. There are some downsides to this. If the local economy is bad and you lose your job, it's likely your home value may not be good either. And people without substantial monthly savings to shift will be at a disadvantage.

The biggest argument I've seen in favor of encouraging home ownership, is that people cut back on spending in order to make their mortgage payment, and as a result save more overall (by building home equity savings instead of spending). But that's a pretty different outcome than making housing affordable.

1) Agreed. None of this increases the total housing stock, perhaps even lowers it. Limiting renting may reduce demand from investors, reduce prices below the rate you'd find in a market without rent-restrictions, and thereby reduce the incentive for new construction. That's mostly why I'm not a fan, particularly because there are already many subsidies and distortions in the Dutch housing market.

2) On paper not a problem. There's a law against vacancy in Amsterdam, you can and should get fined. But I have my doubts about enforcements, although they have a monitoring system in place.

3) Not sure how I feel about this one, there's another argument to be made as well that rent-restrictions have a price-dampening effect and may make purchasing possible for a group who'd otherwise be forced to rent in perpetuity. Plus very low-incomes do have substantial opportunities, more than half the housing stock is social housing in Amsterdam. But agreed, this policy can be unfavourable as well, it's just not necessarily always the case.

Housing stock has to increase, rent-restrictions don't help with that. And secondly Amsterdam has to cooperate more with neighbouring municipalities and regional transport infrastructure to spread the demand around. This latter part is really difficult, but if you don't solve this problem and create ever-centralising appeal in concentrating everything in Amsterdam, you can never outbuild the demand. At some point, people must be enticed to not live in Amsterdam. That requires investments into jobs, schooling, amenities etc outside of Amsterdam, as well as good infrastructure to connect it all.

And look at Toronto as well. A similar scheme has probably been used everywhere...

https://wolfstreet.com/2019/03/21/billions-in-toronto-real-e...

Good time to be a landlord in Amsterdam. This looks like it’s designed to penalize poor/young/foreign people, who will not be able to benefit from a decrease in new housing prices, but will be hit by the rent increase once new supply of rentals dries out. Most benefit will accrue to current owners (the market will be segmented into places you can rent out — current stock — and places you can’t, with current stock being more expensive).

> This looks like it’s designed to penalize poor/young/foreign people

Right, I'm sure impoverished young immigrants buying newly built houses only to rent them out is a very common thing in Amsterdam.

Read the comment again, young immigrants will have to pay higher rents because there will be a shortage of rentable housing.

Disincentivising a predatory rental market only lowers the cost of housing prices because it excludes buy-to-rent commercial landlording. Properties don't disappear from the market just because there's no landlord able to buy them. Granted this needs to be coupled with further disincentivising of the current stock being rented.

Rents will go up, as will prices for existing, rentable, houses. So current homeowners benefit at the expense of those who will continue to rent.

I have no opinion on the movement of new housing purchase prices. It depends on the kind of landlords buying houses in Amsterdam, and their alternative investment options; also on the volume of additional demand generated by the increase in rents.

I'm not sure why you believe the Amsterdam rental market to be predatory, or what you even mean by that. Perhaps you have more experience with it.

I'm far more experienced with the rental market in Dublin, I'm Irish living in the Netherlands. The situation in Dublin is the endgame of the same property market extremism.

The national obsession with landlording and trying to get someone else to pay for your mortgage ended a few short years ago with the world's biggest bailout. In Ireland there's very little regulation and what there is is almost completely unenforced. No lessons were learned and we now have a national housing crisis with a neoliberal government turning a blind eye to rampant homelessness and a lost generation. All potential solutions are met with excuses as to why it will only cause problems for the young being able to rent, thus furthering the crisis.

The (urban) solution is socialized housing, rent controls, and density. Not whatever this is.

I currently own a house. I love owning my house.

But there have been long (decade+) stretches when I actively did not want to own. I was single, or I knew my family size would change and didn't want to buy a huge house, or I knew I would only be in the market for a few years.

The transaction costs of buying and selling each time would have been probably 5-10% of the total price of the house (broker fee, mortgage fees, inspections, etc). It simply would not have made sense to buy and sell a house every time I moved.

Having plenty of rentals available made it easy to move to where I needed to be, in a house size that made sense (neither too big nor small), in a cost-effective way.

The answer of "don't move so much" cuts income mobility. I moved to the SF Bay Area because it offered higher salaries. And it wouldn't solve the issue of family size changing.

(I haven't yet done the reverse -- which is to rent out the house I now own, but if I get a job offer somewhere else it'd be silly to force a sale to make it impossible for me to come back.)

Why are the buying and selling costs so high?! Is that an American thing? In Scotland I only had solicitor fees and moving/furnishing costs.

Population density, growing market, supply/demand.

If you're close to the center, it's more expensive.

What kind of area do you live in Scotland?

Edinburgh City Centre. I was referring to the fees being such a large % of transactions. Both my properties cost 1-2% in total fees.

There was a thread a few days ago about a lawsuit against the National Association of Realtors, who are usually the largest part of these transaction costs.

Interesting to read this, it seems like there are already some rules that make renting a bit more difficult and less attractive.

I'd like to share a few points about what makes buying a house in Amsterdam (and the Netherlands in general) interesting:

- Amsterdam is growing and becoming the de fact European capital (english, tech jobs, etc) so it's growing a lot, and real estate prices are up - Interest rates are very low (~2% on 30years fixed, if interests go down we can refinance after 5 years). So no risk of going up, and no risk of missing out when going down. - 0 cash down necessary - low cost of buying. We bought a "first time buyer package" for ~3000 euros which included real estate agent, notary, building inspection and financial evaluation. Only other expense we had was 500 euro fee for our mortgage. - Practically no real estate tax (0.03789% of the official listed value) - Prices are ~200-300k for a nice 1bedroom, 300-500 for nice 2 bedrooms. Prices seem reasonable compared to salaries.

So, in most cases, going from renting to buying a similar property is definitely worth it. You'll pay about the same monthly (all included).

To note, the buying market is pretty competitive (similar to SF) where people often over-big 10-20% on the asking price. I've gone to multiple open house, and helped ~5 other friends buy a place, and most buyers you see are young professionals / young families, and doesn't look like the market is saturated by landlords / investors.

Now, we looked into moving and renting our place in case we decide not to sell it: - Can't rent on our mortgage - We need to take a commercial mortgage, ~doubling the interest rate to 5%. This increase makes the monthly cost above what we would rent the place for

Those 2 last points to me make it clear that it's already pretty hard to just exploit the cheapness of buying/investing in properties and renting them (I looked myself to buy more properties and rent).

So this rule surprises me a little because the current housing market is already pretty regulated against renting and very supportive to buying. We definitely see much more owners, and much younger, than what we've seen on average in other cities we've lives (SF, NYC, Paris, Montreal).

I'm happy for you to have embarked on the journey of owning your home, but 0% downpayments and what sounds like an increasingly heating up market (people overbidding the asking price) should be a sign to be careful. Make sure to keep the 15-20% cash that is usual for downpayments in a liquid form in case there is a downturn. The people worst hit by real estate crises are those who take advantage of these "easy" ownership offers and then neglect to keep a cash buffer in case their mortgage goes into negative equity.

It’s typical for the Dutch market to overbid (as well as ridiculously.) it is the land of the Tulip Craze after all ;)

Negative equity is only relevant when one needs to sell the property.

Like when the economy crashes and you lose your job.

It’s amazing to me that only 11 years ago the world say one of the worst housing crashes in a century, yet people think “it’s different this time” and keep pouring money into an already overheated asset.

It’s going to be interesting!

I agree with you but it depends on the market I guess. Europe doesn't have a housing/mortgage that is as volatile and "extreme capitalist" as the US. Much more regulations around banking here.

Maybe you mean not any more? If I remember correctly, Ireland housing got absolutely hammered in a way that was at least as bad as the worst areas of the US (Miami, Las Vegas) back in 2008.

That's untrue and bad advice. The reality is that it depends (from country and bank), but often banks will have a margin call clause in the contract. In my experience they almost always have such a clause to cover their own ass. They'll not use it for relatively self contained cases, but when the shit hits the fan and there's a 2008 style downturn, they will, because they want to protect their balance sheets.

This clause will then hit you at the worst possible time, when the economic situation is just bad everywhere and you'll be expected to prop up your mortgage, only you can't if you have no cash and nobody will lend you because you are in negative equity.

not in europe afaik

If banks in your country do not have the ability to make margin calls while simultaneously making 0% down loans, you should probably think twice about putting your money there, because the moment they go belly up, your savings will be gone. Or, if your gov't guarantees savings, then expect massive inflation.

Or if you need/want to refinance.

0% downpayment has been normal in the Netherlands for decades.

Downturns in the Amsterdam housing market are incredibly rare. My wife and I bought my first (her second) house in 2008, and a month after we bought it, the news said that for the first time in ages, housing prices in Amsterdam were dropping.

Despite that, we never had any trouble. Even during the crisis, house prices didn't drop much, they just spent more time on the market. We had been careful enough to make sure that in a pinch, my wife would have been able to pay the mortgage on her own (my income would have been too small for that), but even if we would have had to sell our house, I doubt we'd have lost a crippling amount on it (and the house we'd have bought instead would probably have been cheaper too).

After the crisis, things quickly recovered and we sold out house with €100k profit in 2017. (Of course our new house was more expensive too.)

The main risk he have, is that part of our mortgage is not automatically getting paid off. So even after our mortgage runs out, we'll still have some debt left unless we pay extra. These mortgages are now illegal: all mortgages need to paid off in a predictable manner, to ensure houses don't go too far under water even when the market goes down.

We have always overbid (but never too much) for the houses we bought, and when we sold, buyers also always overbid. It's how the market works here, I guess.

What you say is all true, but nothing of what you said is enough to displace the investors walking in and paying 20% over asking price in cash. And there are plenty.

I’ve recently learned that a whole building next to North Line terminal was taken off the market and sold wholesale to investors.

The problem is not the petty burgeois pulling a little speculative profit (oh well, there’s also that, see Airbnb) but the mega funds buying off whole block at a time because they can

I don't know the data, but you are probably right. Although at the same time Amsterdam has very little large buildings, so I don't know how much those large building increasing prices would put a lot of stress on the market overall.

Again I don't know, so you are probably right.

> Amsterdam is growing and becoming the de fact European capital (english, tech jobs, etc)

I would argue this is more true for Berlin, since it has English, tech jobs and the government of the biggest European national economy.

Its also poorer than any size comparable city in Germany.

Catching up real fast, though.

It's a real "melting pot" and is very very desirable as a place to live. It's the center of youth and technology culture, lots of hacker spaces. There's huge youth communities, public garden projects, lots of alternative communities. I love visiting there and if I moved anywhere in Germany that would probably be the place. I have a lot of friends who moved there. Apparently one of the strongest start up cultures in Europe as well.

So, in most cases, going from renting to buying a similar property is definitely worth it. You'll pay about the same monthly (all included).

As someone who owns in SF, this is definitely not the case here.

For a $1.5M home in SF, the total monthly outlay includes mortgage ($5,557 @ 3.75% with 20% down), property taxes ($1,454), property insurance ($2,250) for a grand total of $9,262 per month. You could rent the same house for $6,000 per month. And that doesn't even include expected maintenance ($625 per month) and opportunity cost of your $300,000 down payment ($1,250 @ 5%). So grand total, you're spending over $11,000 per month or $5,000 more than the cost of renting.

The reason for this is appreciation. If you're house goes up in value by 5% per year, that $75,000 that more than covers the extra $60,000 you're paying over renting. Question is - will it keep going up that much?

Edit: updated with actual numbers.

yeah I know. We are planning to come back to the bay area in the next few years, and real estate is definitely the #1 issue we have. More expensive to buy, much more expensive to maintain (taxes, etc)

Then why does anyone who owns property in SF rent it out rather than selling it?

Probably because a lot of those people bought the same house for $600,000 10 years ago. Their monthly cost is likely less than rent.

I know someone who bought a house 5 years ago and rented it out. She had to cough up $1,000 per month to pay all expenses. Rent has now caught up so she's breaking even.

In the rest of the US where housing prices aren’t as inflated, it can actually be cheaper to own.

It might possible that most of the people in SF who own property have owned it for a long time. So for someone buying a house now, they would be paying a ton of money. If you bought the house more than 10 years ago, when prices were much lower, your mortgage would be much more reasonable and the monthly costs you would be paying would be less than what people are renting for currently.

Hence complaints of NIMBYism. The lack of new development in SF drives housing and therefore rental prices upwards, and so if you owned property before the bubble, you can now charge rent at the modern, high rental costs while paying a mortgage based on the lower pre-housing crisis prices. You could easily be pulling in thousands of dollars a month this way with a single rental property. So lots of people are now have a big incentive to fight against new development.

It's often slightly cheaper to own than to rent in the Netherlands.

Your insurance numbers sound more like yearly numbers than monthly... Or are you really paying $25k per year for insurance?

I guess you are in a high-income bubble. The average per-citizen income in Amsterdam is € 28,700. That gives you a max mortgage of 130k. I was able to find a 29 square meter studio for that amount, just outside the A10 ring.

So, an average income in Amsterdam gives you access to one single property currently on the market of 29 square meter.

I am indeed very high income compared to the average (dual income working for a US company) but I believe what you say here is true for most markets? If 2 average income citizen want to buy a house, that gives them access to 260k mortgage, which offer access to property.

But yes, Amsterdam indeed is an expensive market. The different with a lot of other places is that outside of the city is still very affordable and liveable (lots of public transport, safe, etc). Unlike most big cities.

Good, it's ridiculous in Amsterdam right now with investors buying houses left and right just to rent them out.

A city of renters is a soulless city; less people are long-term invested and no one really buys into the community they live in.

> A city of renters is a soulless city

I am beyond skeptical on this point. The young and dynamic people responsible for a city’s soul generally can’t afford to buy (I would guess, I have no data)

You wouldn't be skeptical if you spent an extended period of time in a city mostly occupied by these "young and dynamic people". Hong Kong is a good example.

Ouch. You and I may well disagree about the meaning of soul!

Agreed, I always equate the soul of a city/neighborhood to having multi generational culture. Cleaning up Brooklyn and putting a bunch of hipsters there didnt give it soul...

One possible consequence of limiting the market is that it could lower the price of buying real estate. Hopefully, that should make it accessible to younger buyers.

Are there any occurrences of such a price control doing anything but worse unintended consequences?

There has been similar systems in place in France and Sweden, and probably other European countries. Usually, they are targetting financing system: you can borrow money at a rebated cost if you do not rent it for a period of five to ten years.

The intended consequences are more people being able to afford a house and home ownership has increased with most policies that I can think of. There are some consequences: rental contracts are very hard to find in Stockholm for instance, but those hardly seem unintended.

People need housing, this limits renting, which affects the supply of housing. In the end, when supply goes down, it usually doesn't make something more attainable.

Thats only a first order approximation, but it seems plausible to me.

It depends what part of "a city's soul" you choose to look at; and how stable your city's long term rental market is.

The local bands, and dances full of pretty single people? Mostly young people have the time and inclination for that, and they're less likely to be homeowners as you say.

But the volunteer coach of the children's football team, or the people who organise the annual artists' open studio? You can't take those sorts of responsibilities if you're moving away in a year or two, you'd almost be handing it over to someone else before you'd finished having it handed over to you!

Of course, hypothetically there's no reason a person renting a house can't rent it for 5 years or more - just in my country, that's rarely how it works out.

With 10 year and higher waiting lists for affordable renting in the Netherlands, many people stay in their rental home for their entire working life once they've finally got one.

Evidence to support this? I have never found this to be true - heavily owner-occupied towns tend to be sleepy suburbs whereas the economic powerhouses of city centers are almost always very renter-heavy.

Cities are renter heavy because housing is more expensive.

And because, especially these days, (at least some) cities disproportionately attract single people who mostly rent and then buy a house in the suburbs when they start a family.

IMO you have this backwards. It's much easier to get a mortgage to buy property in sleepy suburbs, so people can and do buy houses there to live in them, then have to commute to work.

It's almost impossible for most people working in soulful / desirable / economic powerhouse locations to get a mortgage on a property there, so you see lots of wealthy investors take up the properties there and rent-seek to make themselves even richer.

That's before we even mention the children factor.

Rent-seeking as an economic term doesn’t just mean that someone buys property with the intention of renting it out. It also has the requirement that the “rent seeker” then employs a social or political power structure to force users/customers into renting with no benefit.

I’m not thrilled about renting, but neither do I want to gamble on purchasing housing in an expensive market when I may have to leave my job or even the state. My landlord is taking that risk with her capital and therefore deserves to be rewarded for it.

I think it can work fine so long as there are sufficient protections for renters. Rent control, long term contracts etc. I understand that this is the case in Germany.

Unfortunately this works by making property less attractive to investors, who are the people with a large amount of capital, who typically are those people who have influence over the political classes...

This. Scotland recently introduced indefinite tenancies and I'm extremely interested as a young professional and investor to see the impact it has long term. Funnily enough Corbyn wants to introduce it in England and everyone is up in arms. They keep comparing it to the German market forgetting that it's already a thing in Scotland.

As a Scot myself, living in London, I've more than once longed for the regulations that we had in Scotland.

Even simple things like not being able to charge random fees makes it much easier to compare two or more properties on level terms.

You poor soul, come home! Joking aside it's still too early to see the effects of the new tenancy. I suspect it'll make properties harder to get for less attractive tenants and that there'll need to be incentives for landlords to take on such tenants in future. Probably still a net positive but we'll see.

"Rent control is the only thing more effective at destroying a city than bombing"

Vienna, a city that regularly tops the list of the world's most livable cities [1], has 80% rental rate [2]. Most German cities are dominated by rental, e.g. Berlin.

[1] https://mobilityexchange.mercer.com/Insights/quality-of-livi...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/dec/12/vienna-housi...

A huge chunk of the Viennese flats are publicly owned.[1] I think it's very hard to replicate for other cities. It's the result of decades of social democratic governance.

Two things they do really well: Keeping rent prices low by "dumping" and preventing ghettoisation by creating affordable housing in every district, not just some crappy areas.

[1] http://milwaukeeclt.org/2017/07/10/how-vienna-ensures-afford...

This is nonsense. I've rented for 10 years now and I love my city just as much as anyone. Buying doesn't really make a ton of sense at these prices so I don't, but I don't see how I am less engaged than an owner. Hell, I actually go to city hall and write my council regularly…

> A city of renters is a soulless city

A city of renters is a city of dynamic ideas, young people, and social movement.

In France, a lot of cities propose "accessible housing" which can be brought with a zero interest, or nearly zero interest, loan. The condition usually is, if you buy it, you cannot rent it for 5 to 10 years. It does allow for more housing that are owned and not rented and avoid excessive investment.

One of the drawbacks though is, since it only apply to building that have been build with help from the city (has far as I know), it can sometimes, if done poorly, create slum with huge bloc of social housing. Nowadays, they usually try to spread the construction more through out the city and make more diverse building to avoid this.

As someone who has just bought in another European city with high demand for housing , this sounds great on the surface level, but again the devil is in the details.

> It’s not yet been clarified, for example, how long an owner would have to occupy their home before being able to rent it out.

My GF has had offers of a years work in Melbourne and we have talked about it saying, it would be nice to do. Right now it would be easy to rent our place out, but it would be impossible if the rule stated that you must live in the place for 5 years.

Just buy an existing house. It appears to only apply to “new” houses, not “new to you” existing houses.

How many people buy a new build house, and then within a year decide to move half-way around the world, whilst still keeping the house?

Bought the house, then got a long-term assignment/promotion in another city, but 100% plan on moving back in the future.

This is not uncommon.

Its probably only people with "good jobs" with opportunities like that who can afford to buy in major cities these days.

I did, but TBH, I think that makes me (and most of HN) part of the economic class cities want to keep out of their culture, and I don't blame them.

Job offer overseas might be too good to turn down. A regulation like this would then deny this couple a potentially big improvement in their quality of life because there would be no income mobility for them. They would be unable to rent their place to go try out a potentially life changing opportunity in a different country. Regulations like these always end up having unintended consequences and hurting random people like this.

I can understand the dilemma if you intend to go to Melbourne and "test the waters" and potentially want to move back again. But if you move to Melbourne permanently, I would expect you to sell your house in the EU.

Well thankfully the dilemma doesn't actually apply where I live at present.

I like it here, so the plan wouldn't be to sell, but it would be nice to experience Australia for a year. But then again, plans can change.

At best this will do nothing, at worst the unintended consequence is a spike in rental prices. The root of the problem is supply and demand, and they're not willing to look at that. Increasing supply means highrises and more building permits, and reducing demand means restricting immigration, both highly toxic subjects.

It looks mostly like the proponents of the law want to limit the growth of the city, and prevent it from becoming dense(r).

Building an apartment house and not renting it out makes about zero sense. This means that only small, 1-2 family homes would be built, financed by family home loans.

This definitely is not going to help against foreign rich people buying "investment houses" and leaving them vacant. They could not rent them out even if they wanted to! But maybe it;s not a problem in Amsterdam.

This law may work for it's intended purpose, but it's an unconscionable violation of property rights. I worry that our statistician's approach to legislation is hastening our times' abandonment of principle, and that we're sacrificing any particular individual's good to the good of faceless society.

This doesn't damage the big majority of individuals, unless you consider investment funds as "individuals".

I worry that by the time the faceless particular individual´s have finished littering the entire planet because they can´t be bothered to care for anybody else, there won´t be a society.

Except society isn’t faceless. It’s our friends and neighbors. It’s our cousins and coworkers.

I’m more than willing to give up a bit of my extremely affluent lifestyle if it would genuinely help those around me who haven’t had the same economic opportunities as me.

>I’m more than willing to give up a bit of my extremely affluent lifestyle if it would genuinely help those around me who haven’t had the same economic opportunities as me.

All well and good. It's fine and commendable to personally sacrifice but when you start advocating for stripping property rights from other people to do it, it stops being a personal sacrifice and more of an imposition on others' freedom.

What about unintended backfire consequences of this law: people who own a place and are traveling, unable to put their places on airbnb because of this law and thus leaving vacant houses anyways and constricting short-term rental supply?

> I’m more than willing to give up a bit of my extremely affluent lifestyle if it would genuinely help those around me who haven’t had the same economic opportunities as me.

But, this law does deny others the same economic opportunities as you. If you've lived in your older home and want to rent it out and move elsewhere, you are allowed to. However, your younger cousins who are buying just now (and thus considering newer homes) will not. Thus, this law simply protects the old guard while throwing the young people under the bus in the name of screwing the rich. Congratulations!

Actually the house owner doesn't own the ground the house is build on. But the city remains owner ("leasehold"). Hence they can add restrictions and terms before you are allowed to build/use the land.

Why should property rights be the same for a commercial enterprise as someone's actual home? Not sure about unintended consequences on this one, but I would rather have a law be in place to allow more home ownership over more investment properties. As someone who grew up in a rental, and rented for the first 10 years, I see the benefits in home ownership.

> faceless society.

I'm sorry, but while I agree with you that it's a violation of property rights, and that concerns me, it isn't in hope of a good faceless society.

I live in Spain, and the mediterranean coast is completely flooded with investors and foreigners buying property they don't live in, nor they rent for locals. Most of this places are now faceless, souless, tourist traps.

My sister inherited a flat in Ibiza, just in the city center, and I wouldn't go to live there no matter what. Nice for a week visit before foreigners flood in, though.

Same happend with Barcelona. Locals are being pushed out of the center and there has been years since it doesn't give the same feel as it used to, not to mention that everything feels designed as franchised for foreigners, expensive and increasingly soulless. They retain the architecture so that saves the look & feel of Barcelona, but it isn't anything similar of what used to be.

Same with the andalusian coast. More and more towns get investor's money for building resorts and all kind of crap.

I'm seeing this getting a little traction in my city, and I'm pretty worried. If that flood of money comes here to hit the property market, I won't be able to match the demand and I'll lose my lifestyle, and be forced to move somewhere else, at least to the outskirts of the city. So if my city council comes with a mechanism to prevent that, I'm gonna be on board, you can be sure of that.

> If that flood of money comes here to hit the property market, I won't be able to match the demand and I'll lose my lifestyle, and be forced to move somewhere else, at least to the outskirts of the city. So if my city council comes with a mechanism to prevent that, I'm gonna be on board, you can be sure of that.

You can buy a house now, instead of renting. This way, changes of property values are no longer a concern (unless property taxes are significant in Spain).

I considered it many times, but I'd be very stretched out on money (I won't save that much compared to my current rent, and I'll have to put a lot of money upfront). Also, there's the problem of getting a mortgage, and prices being expensive for our salaries. Decent flats are +200k here. If the same flats were about ~150k I'd give it a thought, but 200k is too much for this place.

I'm curious what philosophical school you are referring to... Who's principle are you referring to?

Yes, nasty renters don’t deserve access to new houses.

How about "yes, the housing market should deprioritize making rich people even richer off the backs of renters"

By ensuring renters have an inferior selection.

Why do renters need to live in brand new houses?

They don’t need to. But it seems rather unfair to say that people with decent income but who can’t (or don’t want to) access large amounts of capital must have an artificially reduced selection.

Imagine if it was flipped around: new houses cannot be sold, and can only be rented out. Would that be reasonable?

I totally understand why people dislike speculators who buy houses and let them sit empty. I get why they dislike investors who buy properties and put them out for short-term rentals like AirBnB. But getting upset at long-term rentals? Why? Lots of people rent, for many good reasons. Especially poorer people. What’s so terrible about serving that market? If you think the landlords are making too much money, bring prices down by increasing the supply i.e. the exact opposite of this plan.

Two main thoughts here. First I love that municipalities are thinking creatively about the housing crisis. Second, I’m curious to see how policies like this end up playing out in practice. I can think of a bunch of negative outcomes such as rental properties degenerating and home builders getting less work.

In the end we can’t know what’s going to work until the experiment plays out which to my first point is why it’s very encouraging to see so many places trying different policies.

>I can think of a bunch of negative outcomes such as rental properties degenerating

Why would that be the case unless the property was losing money. Typically people care about properties that provide an income.

People generally care that the property provides income, not that it’s in good condition. Higher rents can cause a depression in renovations, because the higher rent increases the opportunity cost of doing renovations. This is quite visible in some cities.

This is very obviously not going to work out well. This policy means the total rentable property supply will now not increase and only decrease for X years based on this policy. Rents are going to spike throughout the city.

Trying to mess with the free market like this almost always has a bunch of unintended consequences and rarely works as intended.

It’s possible that the rental market will favour non-new properties and that houses currently needing restoration will find new owners who will invest, in order to rent them more easily (and at a higher price).

I don’t think it’s obvious how this will turn out at all. What you state is one possible outcome, but it’s not clear that is what will happen.

1) rental properties can still be built, they just have to be designated as such before their construction is approved

2) the price limits were designed to still make it possible to profitably build a new house, so the market will still produce new homes (maybe at a different rate)

3) they also put in place quotas for low, middle, and upper priced housing, guaranteeing a varied supply on the market.

4) middle income families will no longer need to compete with people buying investment rental homes, meaning they will be more able to buy affordable homes. This frees up rental property elsewhere in the system for someone else.

Housing markets are almost never free markets. It’s quite rare to see a completely free market for where and what kind of housing is built. This is at least an attempt to make sure that entire part of the population isn’t left out of owing a home. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. That’s the great part of government — if it doesn’t work, those in charge can be replaced by the citizens. I’m interested to see where the experiment goes.

Two main thoughts here. First I love that municipalities are thinking creatively about the housing crisis.

"I Will Do Anything to End Homelessness Except Build More Homes:" https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-en....

There is no need for "creative" solutions; this is a straightforward supply-demand mismatch.

Making sure that building enough affordable housing is possible for developers to begin with is of course not something that a NIMBY backed city council would ever do.

I have no comment on if this is good or bad, I am just curious how laws like this get passed in the first place. You would assume that most home owners would not be in favor of something like this, as it obviously would seek to decrease the value of their property by reducing the potential acquirers. The only thing that would make sense is if in Amsterdam, most voters rent vs own.

I don't understand who would vote for this. I mean if you are a renter this means rents will go up, and house prices probably won't go down enough to make them affordable.

> You would assume that most home owners would not be in favor of something like this, as it obviously would seek to decrease the value of their property by reducing the potential acquirers.

It's obvious even from the headline that this "ban" only applies to newly built homes, meaning that if you own an "older" home (whatever the definition of that ends up being), this does not apply to you. So in a perverted sense, being an Amsterdam home owner may be beneficial, since the politicians are rigging the market to your advantage, if you are an "older" home owner.

As for renters of these "older" homes, I'd say the outcome is fairly predictable: your rent will skyrocket as the demand for your landlords real estate increases, unless there are already other political tools in place to cap rents.

A minority of the electorate is contemplating selling or renting a newly-built house in the near future. Most of not all Amsterdamers’ are living the consequence of having house prices rising beyond what they can afford; many complain about foreigners moving in and not making the effort to acclimate.

I'm glad this was posted here because it echoes the philosophy of a late (18th?) century philosopher who i cannot remember the name of. Perhaps some of the other well-read minds of hacker news can remind me what his name is.

Basically he's an ehticist, an economist, and a philosopher and he also promotes a "value system" in his philosophy that states that buying a home for any othe reason than to live in it yourself is ethically/morally wrong.

I have been looking for his name for ages since i found it first, should've bookmarked it, never did. Now i desperately want to find him and re-read some of his works as well as his wiki page.

Edit: His name might be Henry George and his philosophy Georgism. Does that sound right to any of yall? Or is it someone else I'm thinking of?

Could it be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George ?

I get your point, but is it not fair to allow people to earn a living? Being a landlord is a job, it helps to put food on my table and a roof over my head. Surely there are other jobs out there, but why make this one illegal? All forms of employment can be used to exploit others, shall we make them all illegal?

I don't think the landlord labor/job is really the issue, it's the capitalization of real estate. Do you think it's ethical for banks and billionaires to buy up properties in very expensive markets and price out people who have been living there for decades? They're just looking to make a buck, and in the process may displace those with less power and luck to not be wealthy.

I doubt someone buying a property themselves, living in it while fixing it up, then renting it out is really the issue. That's the Mr. Money Moustache type approach, which to me is much less pernicious than the ultra wealthy leveraging their incredible luck and fortune.

So more investors will leave houses empty. Brilliant.

>...households that would have formerly expected to buy, however, are increasingly finding themselves priced out of the market, substantially by investors who then place the property on the rental market...

This is exactly the core of the problem: without aggressive intervention, it is always more profitable to buy a property and rent it than to live in it. Potential owner occupiers will eventually always be out bid by investors in an uncontrolled market.

There were abundant measures to prevent this installed during the 20th century. They have been eliminated over the last decades and without them the market will naturally come to look like it did before the 20th century.

What I don't understand is, why aren't secondary dwellings taxed extremely heavily? Optimally, nobody should ever have to rent their residence for a prolonged amount of time, which means you need to disincentivize sitting on a property you don't live in. Making it hard to profit over time from such an investment is the only solution I see.

We have something similar here in Singapore. You cannot rent or sell a new HDB for 5 years. And you cannot rent to non-citizen / non-pr till it’s 10 years old. I would say it works but that’s only because the market is entirely different here.

What happens if you need to sell it for some reason? Job relocation perhaps?

You can apply for an exception from HDB (Singapore’s housing authority). Most of the exceptions granted are for cases like divorce and emigration.

A flavour of this exists in Ireland, where the Government help to buy scheme offers up to €20,000 towards your new build house purchase if you are a first time buyer and commit to living in your home for the first 5 years.

That just ended up jacking up every property by 20k to give more profit to developers who were complaining.

Completely short-sighted.

Indeed. Canada does the same. “Let’s make it easier for people to buy a home!”, “Oh wow! Home prices have really gone up, let’s make it even easier!”, repeat.

Ditto in England, hence housing developers like Persimmon making ~£!b in profit (pre-tax, I believe) last year.

I guess we don't truly have ownership of our property.

It's funny because this could be used as an argument for either side. People who are frustrated that buying a home is too expensive because investors want to buy them to rent would also want ownership of their home (that they rent).

This doesn't seem like a helpful consideration. No polity on the planet allows for truly conditionless ownership of property.

€302.000 is the average home price here? Hah! You can buy huge homes for that price just outside the Amsterdam Area (like I did).

I guess it depends on how you define "huge" 100 sq m isn't huge, yes?

No you can't.

Perhaps Almere, but I wouldn't call what you'd get there for 300k "huge", although you'd get a house rather than an apartment most likely.

Almere Poort/Hout, Lelystad, BiddingHuizen, Swifterbant. All <1 hour away from Amsterdam

Lot of countries prevent foreign persons or institutions to own real estate for 100%. There has to be a local partner who owns the place for at least 50.1% This is much more effective than adding a law which can never cover all edge cases. And there are a lot of those which make it possible to buy property anyway even with the new law in place.

One thing not mentioned: the fact that so much work in the Netherlands, especially in tech, is focused in just a few cities. If the work was more spread out over the country, not everybody would have to make their way to Amsterdam every day or live there.

What is stopping buyers to resell the house to another entity and have that entity to rent it out?

Second-hand house wouldn’t be considered newly built, would it?

Just yesterday I came across one listing that worked out to 11,000 euro / sq meter. At that price there are very few rental options that would still work.

Crazy, I did some analysis on large cities in the Randstad in june/july last year. Amsterdam was by far the most expensive, but the most expensive house in price / sq meter was "only" ~9,000 euro / sq meter

https://imgur.com/a/lrV9C5I

I like what you did here. Where did you get the data? Scraped funda?

Yep, I scraped address, price and size from the house overview pages. I ended up with data from Funda going back ~3 months (so April, May & June) of all the 'gemeentes' in provinces of Utrecht, Zuid-Holland and Noord-Holland.

They're preventing rentals at all, not just short-term rentals? That seems counterproductive.

Amsterdam is no longer culturally unique and the current mayor has made it worse.

Perhaps this strategy can bring back the community-minded days of AirBnB?

The decommodification of housing is the only tenable solution.

What I'll never understand about complaints about 'affordable' housing -- if the housing supply is so unaffordable, how come vacancy rates are so low?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

This summons the image of modern day Anne Frank trying to find a long term rental through Airbnb, not finding any, and shaking her head.

We need to have higher interest rates to let the market come to its sense. Then the prices will drop for both buying and renting.

It must be noted that this applies only to new homes, which are sold, temporarily.

Amsterdam builds around 5k homes a year (or about 1% of total stock). Of those 5k, about 40% are sold, 40% are rented to as social housing, the rest rented at market rates. So we're talking about a law that applies to about 2k homes per year, or <0.5% of the homes in the city, and likely only for the first two years. (there's no legal instruments or interest to restrict an person's use of his property long-term).

No huge impact, mostly symbolic. Plus, one can wonder whether it's effective. There's a lot of criticism on investors buying homes at market value and renting them out at market value, when really it has absolutely no bearing on the available housing stock to all citizens. There's a lot of rhetoric aimed against investors, which is kind of weird. Amsterdam is a transient place for many, so a strong non-social and non-purchase rental market has its place. Investors buy homes and rent them out to meet this demand. It pushes up prices, yes, but only because they're meeting this real demand from real people. And this higher price point is generating construction business that wouldn't exist (due to lack of economic feasibility) at the price levels of five years ago. This is what is creating new homes which actually solves the underlying problem: a housing shortage, which you can't solve by restricting use of property, capping prices or taxing investors, but by increasing the housing stock.

I appreciate a it's not as black and white as 'just let the market figure it out', but the current policy maker for housing is a member of the socialist party. I've enjoyed their impact on local politics generally, but I think some of their housing proposals aren't effective. Especially not in a housing context which is already extremely distorted by national housing & welfare policy and where market forces very are limited and produce weird outcomes. I'm not against this particular idea, but I also don't see it as a big win either. It's small at best, and ineffective at worst. We'll see.

This is genius.

good

This is a great idea and I hope more cities take the hint and fight housing speculation.

I hope more cities tackle the actual cause and build/repair more housing.

There's no unlimited supply of land. And there's a limited distance that citizens can travel before that impacts their lifestyle or behavior.

Also, if you wanted to build higher buildings to accommodate more people in the same space, good luck doing that in a city center, because there's no space for such thing.

> Also, if you wanted to build higher buildings to accommodate more people in the same space, good luck doing that in a city center, because there's no space for such thing.

I have seen a three story building knocked down in Hong Kong and a 20 story building rise in its place without any damage to the structural integrity of its neighbours. Engineers are really good at building things if they’re allowed to do so, even under significant constraints.

[gestures at London as a prime example of the same]

The problem is not a technical one, but a legal one. There are very few empty buildings in most euro cities, and people is typically reluctant to get out because of the hassle it causes them.

If there is a run down and empty building, then sure, but you won't find many.

There are already more houses than people. Building more of it isn't going to solve the problem.

Housing cannot simultaneously be affordable to everyone and a good investment. Society needs to pick one and write laws accordingly.

This idea is absolutely going to backfire and drive up rents because they are about to massively constrain the supply of rentable houses.

It depends if current tenant/investors are impacted or not. If they aren't, the supply of rentable houses won't change, or at least not decrease.

It can only decrease. As in someone buys an existing lot, knocks down the house and builds a new house on it. Or a house burns down, or any other house destroying event.

Or you could build apartments. The law doesn't say you can't build rental property, just that you can't build houses as an investment.

The law doesn't mandate building apartments either, so if the same people who build/buy houses as rental properties are unwilling/unable to invest in apartments (because building a 400-person complex is a lot more expensive than a house), then rental property supply can only be constrained by this law or concentrated into the hands of management companies (who have a vested interest in constraining supply)

Furthermore, I'm not completely convinced that restricting rental property ownership to property management companies who can afford to build apartment complexes is inherently more equitable than letting a middle class person with good credit buy an extra house and rent it out. Where I'm from originally (Alberta), it was common for electricians/plumbers/tradesmen to buy an extra property with a combination of credit and wages and maintain it. It's a relatively simple and time-tested path for moving from working/lower middle class to being upper middle class or even wealthy.

You can build new apartments and sell them. I see no problem in there.

The limiting factor is, roughly speaking, wages. Assuming landlords actually want to rent their properties out, the rents will go up to the maximum people can afford/are willing to pay - I'm not sure the distinction matters - and then go no further.

(And it's possible they are already at that level, or near enough. It is after all the price point that a seller always tries to hit...)

I think the correct solution to fighting housing speculation is increase property valuation to real world prices, eliminate extra taxes on vacant apartments, and drastically increase (to about 5% - 7% of valuation every year) the property taxes on everyone.

At 7.2%, the doubling period is about ten years.

This should cool down the market.

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