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Comment by jeffreyrogers | Hacker News Reader

I worry about something like this happening with housing. PE firms are sitting on a bunch of cash currently and I can imagine a scenario in which the recent damage coronavirus + lockdowns have done to the economy leads to a bunch of foreclosures. If PE firms step in to buy these homes and to manage them at scale that will just lead to further concentration of housing wealth.

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I forget the name, but there was one company that bought properties throughout the US after the 2008 market crash - we are talking about hundreds of thousands of properties here, massive scale.

I remember (2014 or so) looking for apartments in some places in NYC - I went to multiple buildings before it struck me that they were all owned by the same company. I've been a renter all my life and the situation is not good for renters.

I don't care if the super rich have mega mansions and million dollar cars. It is when they start monopolizing essential resources like water, housing etc that it becomes a serious issue.

Another thing I noticed on HN - HN doesn't seem to like landlords being criticized, I guess many people here are well off and are landlords themselves. I do not understand why a person should be allowed to own multiple houses, just because they can afford it.

There is a German town that bought apartment buildings from private companies to take charge of the out of control rent. Maybe it is time for such measures.

After healthcare, housing (mortgage or rent) is how you keep a large percentage of the population chained to their jobs and control them easily. It is also the reason tiny house movement is taking off in other countries. In the US, legislation is a bottleneck for tiny houses. Who wants to be a slave to banks for 30+ years just to have a roof over one's head (assuming one can get a loan in the first place)?

> In the US, legislation is a bottleneck for tiny houses.

It’s not just tiny houses. On average, large developers in San Jose pay > 20% of the price of new home construction for government overhead (unnecessary work, permitting fees, rubber-stamp yielding consultants, etc).

On top of that, they often add a year or so delay to projects because they intentionally understaff the permitting offices, and created a system designed to block new construction.

We’re building a house, and it took over a year to go from architectural plans to permit. Twelve offices had to approve the plans.

All in, it will cost >2x the price of the house to complete construction. Of course, now we’re up to our eyeballs in debt and have pushed retirement out about 10 years. (Backing out by the time we realized we had been trapped would have been even worse, financially.)

The reason house prices are so high is that local voters restrict new development, which enriches old homeowners at the expense of new buyers. Different regulatory regimes give different results, e.g in Japan.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-housing-crisis-in-japan-ho... (paywalled)

> I don't care if the super rich have mega mansions and million dollar cars. It is when they start monopolizing essential resources like water, housing etc that it becomes a serious issue.

If you're a billionaire, you quickly run out of mansions and cars to buy for yourself and your money has to go somewhere. This is why you hear statements like "billionaires shouldn't exist" - mass acquisitions are an obvious use of that kind of capital and allow for rent-seeking behaviour on owned assets.

Water monopoly is a problem. Shitty companies like Nestle are prime examples. There are private corporations thinking of all kinds of ways to control rivers and even ground water. With water shortages being predicted all over the world, this doesn't look good. It takes a special kind of evil to control something as basic as water.

Yes, this has been going on for a while.

From 2013:

Wall Street played a central role in the last housing boom by supplying easy — and, in retrospect, risky — mortgage financing. Now, investment companies like the Blackstone Group have swooped in, buying thousands of houses in the same areas where the financial crisis hit hardest.

https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/behind-the-rise-in-h...

Blackrock is already raising for their next purchase... there will no middle class in 2-3 years as they become renters.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the world, it is my honour to be here tonight to present to you ...drum roll.. your new landlord:

Private Equity USA — Your friendly local parasite, serving you with a smile!™

Is this the last stage of US Imperialism? Will US foreign military bases be used to show up on behalf of our new landlord to say: 'pay your rent now, bitch' [1]?

[1] https://twitter.com/funnyordie/status/1167799200538484736

Greenhorn about private equity/microeconomics here, do PE firms ever have a noble goal in mind of creating a stronger company or do most of them just roll-up and mark-up companies to the next highest bidder, regardless of the health of the company or whether it is even worth that much? Housing already seems troublesome as a late millenial/old zoomer.

I have a few acquaintances in PE and my impression from them is that they are only interested in making a high ROI. It's a game for them. Sometimes on HN and elsewhere you get people saying how evil or malicious these people are. I don't think that's accurate at all. They just aren't focused on the second-order effects of their industry. In any case, the real problems are with the owners of these firms and with the politicians and regulators who are creating the incentives these firms respond to.

> "Sometimes on HN and elsewhere you get people saying how evil or malicious these people are."

you're making a fundamental attribution error. few people say that people in PE are evil. most criticisms are leveled at the industry, its ruthless practices, and the willful ignorance of widespread harms while chasing marginal dollars to stuff in already abundant bank accounts.

I'm not making an attribution error. Both things happen.

It's already happened...kind of.

Warren Buffet has had a near monopoly on new mobile home construction, sales and leasing.

https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/w...

Individual homeownership still carries a bunch of tax incentives in most places; I'm not aware of anywhere mega-landlord companies have popped up (although there are a few mega-landlord individuals, usually heavily leveraged).

Does it? The major tax overhaul a couple years ago capped the property tax deduction at a low enough level (while increasing the standard exemption) that, at least in high-property tax jurisdictions, there is no benefit to being a homeowner.

I pay something in the range of $15k-$20k in property taxes and mortgage interest, but receive zero deduction/exemption on my federal taxes for it.

If in the US, property tax got lumped in with state income tax to create a cap where property tax benefit went away for a lot of people, but the mortgage interest deduction is still there, no (on the first $750,000)?

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