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Comment by eptcyka | Hacker News Reader

Its simple - tax landlordism out of viability.

I don't want to own a home. I don't want to have to sell a house/apartment when I move and I don't want to be responsible for it in the meantime.

Cool, then let the government do it. Your "rent" can even build equity in such a scheme.

How do people who can't afford to buy then survive? I'm in NZ and we've just seen laws introduced that makes being a landlord more expensive and unsurprisingly it's seen rental increases as a result.

Yeah, I guess that's the logical conclusion. I'd naively expect that the decreased profitability of an asset would decrease its market value, but the owner, banks and government are all interested in keeping the prices high, so instead of offloading less lucrative properties at cheaper prices, the rents get increased :/ I've rented most of my adult life, never did the landlords not be assholes. There must be a better way.

> I'd naively expect that the decreased profitability of an asset would decrease its market value

It actually does (kind of), the problem is that the gap between "not profitable" and "affordable" is a chasm. Someone who is currently paying $350/week rent with minimal savings behind them (which statistically is an optimistic assumption) is not going to be able to find a 10% (or maybe higher) deposit on a $500,000+ property.

The other issue is that right now we're experiencing massive inflation of house prices. Median house value in NZ increased 24% in March - that means you'd need to save around $2000/week just to not lose ground. It's madness, I'm glad I bought at what I thought was the top of the market in March 2000.

Spend the money on new houses without asking anyone for permission. (Specially not home owners who financially benefit from homelessness.)

You could even do a construction project and bill the land lords for that directly. In an even crazier universe they would get something in return for the [forced] investment.

You don't make landlordism more expensive. You make it more difficult and less profitable.

House prices will go down, and more people will be able to buy. For others, there is public-ownership rental and even public housing (that would be of much higher quality than today)

> You don't make landlordism more expensive. You make it more difficult and less profitable.

How is that any different? If it's more difficult then it inherently consumes more time and/or money - given that money is (arguably) how we measure the value of labour I don't see any way of escaping this.

Not if you bound the profit. Then it consumes more time without yielding more money, and is thus less interesting of a proposition -> property values go down. You're assuming an equilibrium return on investment (and unchanging prices), and a perfectly stable market, here.

I have no idea. It seems like, in the US with spotty social assistance, people aren't able to conduct typical investments and savings for retirement and spend much more at convenience businesses for life's essentials such that they become trapped in poverty / economic immobility.

That doesn't make sense. You only need to tax the appreciation of the land value via land value taxes. Building housing and renting them out is economically productive, we want more of that but property taxes are paid on the productive part. This makes land value appreciation a far more reliable way of earning money even though you are doing absolutely nothing that is economically productive.

...and what? What do you expect that to do?

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