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Comment by axaxs | Hacker News Reader

It happens, but rarely. We should really ease pressure by putting in laws to keep prices lower. In three cities I've lived, every 'good deal' is snatched in cash by landlords or flippers. Why not regulate the amount or at least the velocity of how many homes a person can own? My current landlord has 16 houses, that's ridiculous.

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Wouldn't that drive rental prices up? I don't think high housing prices will be solved on the demand side.

Yes, but only because the landlords would sell or default, which would drive the homes back into the bank's hands. The banks would then let most of the homes rot rather than sell them, so they can milk the build&mortgage finance&insurance teat and leave the citizen taxpayer on the hook for overpriced housing & through literal artificial scarcity. This is exactly what occurred during the last housing bust, and it's genuinely sickening that it isn't discussed more in the media: more perverse incentives.

We need to go after these people hard because they are collapsing our civilization. There need to be punitive actions that correct the market and drive it back to something that actually produces people living in homes for a low price and development moving in a resilient, frankly boring manner. This in turn produces a populace with more free time, a requirement for training & education, something that will have to be done with increasing frequency as time goes on. This drives wages up naturally, as more people can choose to work less or not work. This shrinks sustenance & panic borrowing, which is another reason FIRE likes keeping us on their hook. This stops much property crime, which shrinks the need for police forces, jails, & the circus of pornographically perverse incentives that surround our criminal justice system.

In no uncertain terms let me say this: if we tanked the price of housing, tanked the rental market, and got humans into houses instead of some wealth-dreaming deluded landlord or scummy bank that wants to reap what they never sow, we could easily transition into the future we desire. The loss people fear with this action isn't actually a fear of the loss of wealth, it is the fear of losing the ease-of-mind and projected future peace associated with ownership of the asset. We would do well to begin considering how to provide that for one another without harming one another.

You have my vote.

Thanks for articulating this. Well said.

> Why not regulate the amount or at least the velocity of how many homes a person can own?

Why not just eliminate private property all together? Everyone should just rent stuff from the government.

That's what Vienna (Austria) is doing. 62% of people live in government housing - and on average only spend 27% of their income on rent: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/vienna-affordable-housing-par...

That’s technically what everyone is doing. You don’t really own your property. You pay property taxes to keep it.

I love it when taking a position to its logical conclusion sometimes results in the best possible scenario.

Hello stagnation! Seriously that is the implicit arrogance that they will have all of the property ever needed or wanted and nobody else could do better. Not to mention the lack of improvements or investments. To be frank we have that approach in areas without strong property rights and the result is a shithole because nobody makes nice things if they just wind up taken.

Game theoretic ‘Tragedy of the Commons’, if its not yours, you treat it like dirt and therefore investment efficiency lowers.

This is basically how Singapore operates, and their government is an extremely well-oiled machine. I doubt most countries could pull it off, though.

> Why not regulate the amount or at least the velocity of how many homes a person can own?

That is something that could be done, to a degree.

You can increase transfer taxes and offer a partial refund over the course of some number of years, provided that the home has the homeowner exemption in place.

Increase the property tax rate while also increasing the homeowner exemption so that the total tax paid is the same as it was before.

Etc.

The landlord can only outbid others because there is rental demand. So that doesn't do anything but force renters out of the market.

Many renters rent because they can't afford to buy. So landlords or flippers eliminating the bottom x percent of the market forces many into renting, at which point the landlords can determine the price. It's a self perpetuating system.

If tomorrow a law came about that said 'you can own no more than one home, full stop', watch how many renters buy their first home on firesale.

Why don't we just encourage more housing builds instead of stifling supply and contriving reckless policies to force people into doing this or that? (like forcing people to sell property at a loss?)

Or ease the pressure by encouraging more and denser development, especially of less profitable low income housing.

This would require some fundamental changes to contract law. For example, you would need to make it illegal for limited liability companies to own property. Or to have buyers present themselves at a government office and sign a document saying that they are the ultimate owners of the property, with ID verification and pictures taken of their face. Then you would need to centralize this data into a national database.

Wouldn't more velocity actually help the issue? Changing hands for profit repeatedly is how arbitrage works to homogenize prices and availability.

I don't think so. If I had a million dollars in free cash, I can just sit and buy 6 houses at 150k. And because I'm paying cash, those plebs with their home loan don't stand a chance in beating me. Better yet, I can buy foreclosed homes or short sales, which borrowers can't. This ultimately either pushes some down into renting, or some up into a higher priced house, both of which increase their respective prices.

If you limited home purchases to say, one per year or two, it would open back up the lower cost market. Not every house needs to be flipped.

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