Job vacancies surge past one million in new record

Something that is hard to understand is how taxes influence the price of homes and land. People have a fixed budget. The rule of thumb is that they will spend at most 30% of their income on housing. Popular cities usually have an inrush of educated people getting high paying jobs. The existing residents see their % rise beyond 30% as a result but the rule of thumb still applies.

When you have a fixed budget then adding more taxes won't lead to spending more, it means the government siphons money off the purchase of the home. That money cannot be used to purchase homes. When people talk about how taxes make housing expensive they are dead wrong. Taxation does not change your budget. When the government drops taxes on housing what happens is that a bigger chunk of the budget is being used for actually purchasing housing rather than paying taxes. This means house prices will rise and you will not be better or worse off than before. However, the rise in home prices fuels speculation. People buy houses expecting that they go up. The reduction in taxes created a gap and speculators simply insert themselves in that gap and take their profits.

The problem isn't the speculation in itself but rather the expectation that housing will always go up. It's not only investors that want to make money. Homeowners see an opportunity to create a big gap by voting for restrictive zoning or making new construction a legal minefield. The real problems begin when even grandma and her dog are speculating.

It's a bad mad, especially considering how much the Tories have relied on there being homeowners. Their whole thing is that that group is the sensible middle, who work for a living, but also appreciate that suppliers of capital have limits.

Odder still to not protect flat owners with cladding (I'm not one, FWIW). Higher-density housing is happening, and you've just told your next cohort of supporters to a) never invest in this asset class, we will render it worthless, b) never vote for us either, even as homeowners we won't support you.

The phrase is usually used to stop people fixing problems like this, which are the kind of collective action problem that only government action can solve.

The government intervention you mention is actually just the voters with property using their vote to protect their wealth. And that worked exactly as intended.

The falling of interest is purely market driven. There is no government intervention there. Interest rates have been falling for a long time, far longer than 20 years and the reason is pretty simple. There are people out there who do not spend their money. The interest rate simply moderates between saving and investment. If saving is going up relative to investment then the interest rate must drop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28373304

You say higher and higher mortgage amounts have driven up prices but if you spend $360k what is wrong with getting a $360k house out of it in the end? What's so good about paying interest?

I am not sure what to suggest...

- Buy-and-hold rental property investors buy properties using Excel, and are vastly less susceptible to hyped and emotional pricing than the public.

- More landlords = more capital available for home-builders = more houses built

- Supply and demand - more houses and more landlords, with the same number of tenants, shifts pricing power to the tenants

How can you say you "own" something if you're not allowed to sell or rent it to anyone you want?

This.

Every boomer thinks he's a genius investor for simply blocking all residential development and looking at the price of his house go up. The government knows it and wants to keep the votes coming in so they prop up real estate as much as they can. Notice the same parties will simultaneously try to push some sort of virtue signaling (pro-diversity or whatever) to the younger demographics at the same time. They can't afford to pander to them via housing policy so they have to find something else...

This isn't creating any kind of value, nor innovation. Apple, Google and Facebook, like it or not, created a tremendous amount of wealth for the country. Housing didn't.

Standards of living have increased the most at the bottom of society.

- Labourers used to work seven days a week (12 hour days), then six, now five times eight is standard, with some exceptions.

- Workplace safety have gone from a laughable concept to the first priority.

- 100% of Western populations can read and write. This used to be a rich-person thing

- How many poor kids have you seen lately with their faces covered in coal dust from the mines?

- There are thousands of other examples. Poor people today live longer and better in many important ways than rich people even a hundred years ago, never mind a "couple hundred years."

If I was, then I'd say a system where the government basically gives you free money/tax breaks if you buy a home, is the root cause behind the things you mentioned which then drives house prices.

The point is, without fixing that issue, you can't solve it by wage rises.

People who don't even want homes are buying them, either as outright investments that they can sit on for years, or as something they also live in, but need to treat as an investment, rather than a home.

I believe banks in the UK don't lend you more than 4.5x - 5.5x of your income, regardless of interest rates.

There's little to no regulations on flippers. They can be DIY people that have never swung a hammer or people that cut every corner possible to squeeze out every cent of profit. Often, buyers of flipped properties are doing major repairs in the first 2 years as things behind the walls was not done correctly. It's a very common tale of people completely renovating their newly renovated bathrooms and kitchens (yes, the most expensive rooms in your house) because the flippers did not take the time to properly waterproof behind the tiles. Or they did not properly mortar the tiles for adhesion and they are now popping up.

Nimbys are simply protecting an investment. In a captalistic society we have to change the incentives to drive action.

Allow renters vote on local zoning regulation. Hell, remove stringent zoning regulations in general. At the same time, put limitations on what HOAs and local.commitees are allowed to impose.

Remove the exorbidant costs/regulations towards building multi family homes. This has been driving the rise 'premium condos' because affordable housing isnt affordable to build.

Impose larger taxes on rent collected on 3rd+ homes. Impose large taxes on vacant properties. Start gently discouraging additional housing as an investment.

Lastly, I strongly support sensible gentrification. Give long term renters first dibs and zero-additional-cost pathways to home ownership.But after that, gentrify and gentrify heavily. A revitalization of innercities is the easiest way to solve the housing problem in our current political climate. (For those who complain that condos arent suburban single family homes.....thats how we got here in the first place)

These are just some ideas .

Oh they are real - it's just that 90% of them reside in Zürich, Switzerland.

For many people, 100% of the available properties in that estate agent's window are too expensive, not just the 12 bedroom places. These people will probably never be able to buy anywhere useful, and they are not renting the places in the window either. They rely on a less formally advertised market of lower price rentals.

Then there are the people for whom a maxed out mortgage would only just cover the bottom rung prices if they could get such a mortgage, but they can't so they have to rent, perversely at a monthly price higher than the mortgage would be. They don't gain equity for their payments, which harms their financial and housing security later in life, and limits their access to other credit. They don't know what they will do at retirement when they can no longer afford the rent, which is currently 50% of their income.

Then there are a few people who can afford the not-bottom prices. These people mostly already have a home, and are a minority.

For the first two groups, renting is their only option, and renting in some countries sucks for many reasons. Insecurity, no location stability (random evictions are common and new options limited), no equity, regular home inspections, often not even allowed to decorate, no home improvements (solar, windows, kitchen etc).

This distorts the market and forces people into buying property. If someone could just rent for a few years then they probably would, and then we could write laws that support rrenters and owning and renting buildings would just be a boring business.

Instead, people do the sums and realise they are rewarded for buying that property and getting the free money as the area is developed. So we are all nudged into buying property and then we get laws that benefit people with property.

If there was a land value tax, then people living in low density homes in amazing locations in cities would be taxed out and high density homes would be built in their place. These would likely still be expensive, but by splitting the tax among several people, would be able to afford the land tax.

https://www.cedefop.europa.eu/files/images/graph_month-stat_...

2) Fertility is heavily influenced by the availability of housing. Without immigration, house prices will fall and wages will rise, providing a boost to fertility until the population equalises.

https://www.nber.org/digest/feb12/impact-real-estate-market-...

With mass immigration you shortcut that, and simply end up replacing the original population, probably with negative overall effects if the incoming population is not genetically (average IQ, predisposition to violence) or culturally (respect for women etc.) aligned.

Why do foreign countries not simply develop themselves instead? Build your own ladder, so to speak!

Something's gotta give.

People would come in, live on site and be feed on site, work hard for 3 months (maybe moving sites as demand came and went) then leave and go back home.

The 3 months of hard work and bad conditions was worth it because of the buying power the wages had comparatively back home.

UK people simply wont put up with that because they have to use the wages in the UK.

Interestingly (can't find the reference right now), I've read that the high cost of labour in the UK contributed to the push for mechanisation of farming, which resulted in the industrial revolution (something we have all benefited from). In China, labour costs were (are?) so low that there was no reason to invent a farming machine, when you could pay a peasant to do the job for less.

So if this runs long term, we will see further automation of farming?

But they are the ones getting the higher wages, so it doesn't matter.

It's those people not getting wage increases that end up taking the loss - which is the middle class and the public sector.

If you go back just 15-20 years ago, the Democrats universally understood this fact of labor supply/demand. Large amounts of low skill labor hurt their middle class and lower class labor voters, hurt their wages. And the Democrats used to be against such vast low skill immigration, because they had a large labor vote to protect. You can see this in action by looking at speeches from decades past (including by still prominent Democrats like Bernie Sanders). Their position now? Crickets. They've gone radio silent on the matter vs a few decades ago. That specific labor vote is no longer what they view to be the future, how they are plotting political dominance for the next 50 years.

A lot of EU immigrants come to London to work in tech/finance because they offer higher wages than pretty much anywhere on the continent (I was one of them). But the working class is pretty far removed from the effect of professional-class immigration.

The UK has many other structural problems so collapsing the whole Brexit discussion into one dimension is a bit of an over-simplification, though if you asked me to do the PCA, I'd say the main cause was "protest vote". (Pre-BJ governments weren't Euro-sceptic.)

Usually nationalists. Conservatives love wages being lowered, and employees that can't complain without being deported. They're anti-immigration when it comes to law, but very pro-immigration when it comes to enforcement. Ideally, for them, they would have draconian immigration laws that would only begin investigations based on a tipline that only employers would have access to.

Profit in Year 1 is better than most of the startups I read about on HN.

Just because there aren't any monetary profits doesn't meant that we didn't become wealthier in the process. Profit and wealth is not the same thing.

The cost increase over the last 10y at every fast food place and restaurant near me has vastly exceeded 35 cents. Wage increases are inevitable and stagnation is only sustainable until normal people are priced out of living entirely and decide to flip the table.

They can easily afford it. If you dig into any of these companies finances you will see that payroll is generally less than 20% of their overall costs. In my area most workers are flocking to warehouse work as a major american retailer has bumped their starting wage to $25.50/hr plus benefits and is literally hiring people without any sort of phone screen or face to face interview. You will out a web form and get a start date by email.

I heard the dot com bubble "garbage" was full of companies with no revenue, no customers, etc. I'm not sure many of the high growth tech companies burning $$s are cut from the same cloth though as they really do have products and customers in the present; it's just that the market expects an insane number of new services/customers in the near future...

For example, I'm guessing customers can't just cut off Snowflake easily (time wise and effort wise) so the cashflow would remain stable for a while. As long as they don't need to do a secondary offering (and have some cash), wouldn't they be able to weather a storm? Perhaps at the cost of some massive layoffs/refinancing but would still prevent an actual collapse?

I also heard that there is a separate minimum wage for tipped jobs - something in the region of a paltry $2.50/h, if I recall correctly?

If these days a house listed for x gets offers at x+10%, after average wages increase it will receive offers at x+20%. Is there any historical precedent of house prices not rising faster than inflation, absent external factors?

I think a major correction of house prices can happen in two ways:

- economic catastrophe (everyone's unemployed) / war / natural disaster / ... - we wouldn't want to buy a house anyway in that case;

- major increase of interest rates or minimum deposit required - we wouldn't be able to afford the mortgage in that case.

First of all, consider direct energy consumption. A suburban or rural home can probably get >50% of its energy use (including cars if they are EVs) from solar power directly off its own roof and property. This is year round in the sun belt and at least 2/3 of the year elsewhere. Batteries are getting cheap enough that home load leveling or even fully grid-free homes are now approaching middle class affordability.

EVs are now 100% practical as replacements for gas cars even in rural areas. I have a 200 mile range Nissan Leaf which was very affordable and would suit me just fine even if I lived way out in the exurbs or countryside, and they're building fast chargers everywhere where I live (Ohio) even along highways in the country. The next generation or two of cars (or a Tesla today) might even drive me to my destination, allowing me to read on the way the way I did in the subway when I lived in the city.

Secondly, the vast majority of your land use and probably more than 50% of your energy use is not direct. A huge fraction of your energy use is in the embodied energy of the products that you purchase and their transportation around the global supply chain. An even larger fraction of your land use is in farming and resource extraction to support you and your lifestyle.

Where you live changes none of that. A cheeseburger or laptop purchased in the city has exactly the same footprint as a cheeseburger or laptop purchased in the country.

In fact, I can see a future where dense cities are actually worse due to being harder to power with renewable energy. To power a dense city you might have to gather a lot of renewable energy from far away, which means more transmission infrastructure and more transmission losses. If we shifted to local farm-to-table eating patterns food in the city may even have more embodied energy due to a longer supply chain to get it there. Then consider that city dwellers eat at restaurants more and restaurants waste a lot more food than cooking at home usually does. (Seriously... look into how much food most restaurants throw away!)

Cities are hands-down superior to suburbs and the country in a fossil fuel powered world. In a post-fossil-fuel world it's very debatable.

Last but not least, we new urbanists (Gen-X and younger) have discovered that big cities are real estate cartels that make it impossible for the middle class to accumulate wealth. That's already pushing people away. For young people today I would recommend not going to a high cost of living city for any reason other than to level up your career and then leave. Big cities used to be fun centers of art and culture, but that's being driven away by real estate hyperinflation. I'm seeing more and more cool stuff happening in small towns across the country where creatives are settling so they can afford to live without spending >50% of their income on rent.

Also, while there are certainly very rural areas in the US, most of "flyover" country is not actually in the 100+ miles from a grocery store, Walmart, or hospital category.

My impression is anybody visiting for more than a week will likely do a few days in London then move on to someplace else (of my friends, that’s usually Scotland for camping/hiking).

Many of these consequences were completely predicable.