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goldenkey

I think all countries should be eliminating real estate speculation ;-)

Xi Jinping’s famous words are “housing is for living in and not for speculation.”

When will American join these other countries?

Netherlands: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28422768

China: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/7/28/in-its-latest-cr...

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People are against the idea because in their minds they won't be able to buy 2-3 homes and rent one or two out.

No, this is about companies owning 150,000 apartments in a city that they simply charge ever-increasing rent for. It's lunacy.

Well to be fair buying 2-3 homes to rent is also undesirable rent-seeking, albeit on a smaller scale.

It matters where the money goes afterwards. If it goes to a local landlord that spends it in that same neighborhood, improving it, vs going into an REIT that will make their investors, and their board, several states away happy. This is an important distinction that between trickle down theory and practice. Getting one person to $100mm vs making 10 people $10mm-airs vs 100 people to be single digit millionaires? Matters a lot in the long run, for a lot of reasons.

We can't abolish rent-seeking entirely without overthrowing the whole system, so we have to realize that there are different shades of damage done by rent-seeking.

Trickle-down doesn't work at any scale. If you want money to "trickle" down to a group of people, simply give cash to that group of people. This means lowering taxes on labour, for instance.

> We can't abolish rent-seeking entirely without overthrowing the whole system

Well we can certainly ameliorate it. Implementing a proper Georgist LVT would be a nice first step.

I can either own 2 apartments worth $50k each, or have $100k stock in a company that owns $15k aparments.

Can't outlaw one without outlawing the other one.

If you ban one entity from owning more than n apartments, they'll just create apartments/n shell companies.

Yes you can. You tie companies back to a specific person who has control over that company. And limit ownership of residential property by those people.

Extending that idea, we arrive from lunacy to a good thing: a city that is completely owned by one company. Where police is the company's private guards, the city council is its board of directors, and municipal taxes are just fees the company charges. And that is a good thing. I'd live in such a city if there was one.

For example: no homeless. This is all a private territory, and if you don't pay your rent, a guard escorts you off the premises. Very little if any crime because crime prevention is all in one hands and these hands are protecting by and large, their own private property and their profits (because if the crime rate goes up, rent goes down and rent is how they make money).

A wall keeping undesirables out.

Guards/police that can check your papers anytime just simply as they can say in a hotel - "what's your room number"? So no "undocumented" aliens.

There can't be any constitutional etc. bullshit that could prevent them from having an actual 24/7 guarded wall and checkpoints with papers check around their PRIVATE property. It can be a functional society where everyone who's there, belongs there.

What would you do when the city decides to double prices overnight because it’s a private company focussed on profit maximisation and has a complete monopoly over absolutely everything

What's the problem? Just move elsewhere. You don't own a place there - you can only rent - so you don't lose anything - it will be about as stupid/unworkable as one hotel in a city raking up room prices 2x just because they "try to maximise profit".

Not to mention, what happens when you get laid off or fired? Ejected from your company town?

Why? A company where one works, rents office space there. You rent an apartment. You can work for another company there, or move elsewhere.

There are contracts. If your contract forbids doubling over night, you are good. If not, it was your choice to agree to it anyway.

What are you going to do, sue them?

Sure, why not? Also, if others see they don't heed contracts, they will start avoiding to do business with them.

I imagine this as a prison-like corporate dystopia

Is this the plot of some diystopian film?

Diystopia - this is what happens when I do a home renovation

We had that in the past. It was called feudal society.

Lmao, I actually heard this one before and the guy was serious.

I give it a few years before your corporate lordship fucks you over and you have no recourse or you simply get bored out of your mind in this perfect city.

But don't worry, the rest of us will provide some quality locks on the outside of your wall, so you can stay there until death.

That's the only potential downside i can see: because the landlord company is big, it will by nature become very conservative with the (working for hire) bosses being too cautious as to not goof up their jobs, with a huge bias on preventing failures as opposed to enabling success. So they may indeed tend to ban more and more "unsafe" or "morally objectionable" activities to please everyone, eventually making the place too boring to stay in.

If the government owns all housing, you have no recourse.

With multiple small private cities, you can change cities.

Actually, with governments, you could also try to switch countries.

That is why I am opposed to mega states like EU wants become, so that people still have some choices left.

> "very little if any crime because crime prevention is all in one hands and these hands are protecting by and large, their own private property and their profits (because if the crime rate goes up, rent goes down and rent is how they make money)."

a) Extortion is how they make money. They control your entire life, job, 'safety', home, streets, food supply, and everything you can do, and they aren't accountable to the public. You have no choice but to give them everything or your life collapses. "Just leave" works if you're a 20 year old single programmer with a six figure salary and no family or friends, it doesn't work if your family is dependent on your income, you have social bonds with your neighbours, limited savings, education and media controlled by the feudal Lord CEO telling you everywhere outside is awful. You may as well suggest North Koreans can just leave if they don't like it.

b) Why do they need to make money? You're a captive slave, their private security force isn't going to let you out of the wall until you've paid your "debts", "citizen". Make your way back to your cell and show up for work tomorrow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTN64g9lA2g - "Adam Something" talks through the development of such a city-dystopia. "Feudalism with extra steps".

Meh. I have friends who lived in a Vonovia apartment in a prefab in East Berlin. It's not for me, but the rent was pretty cheap (~10 Euros/sqm, heating + warm water included) and didn't get raised during the years they lived there.

Berlin just came from a place of super low rent and is slowly catching up to other large German cities. Understandably, Berliners are in shock, but it's more "things are returning to normal" than "Berlin is so expensive, nobody can live there".

It's a dreadful irony that communist plattenbau now cost more than homes further West.

The simple fact is that the people who complain about their homes they rent from those companies are unable to find other accommodation for a comparable rent. Which in turn implies that it is not really the fault of those companies, otherwise somebody else would be able to provide better housing for the same price.

You can not simply charge "ever-increasing rent". You can only charge what people are willing to pay. More people are pouring into the city every day who are prepared to pay more. Simple as that.

Those companies owning 150K apartments are also shareholder companies, so "small people" and their pension plans will still be affected.

People have to live somewhere, if someone's forced to choose between picking up an extra job to afford rent or living on the streets, they're gunna choose the first. I'd argue this is a bad thing and people deserve places to live.

Yes, they have to live somewhere. Not necessarily in central Berlin, or central San Francisco. There are plenty of places with cheap housing in Germany.

Also just because people need something, doesn't imply they have to be given those things for free. That's not usually how it works.

I don't know much about housing in Berlin, but I think the story is that in the time after the Berlin wall was torn down, late 80s, the city really needed money. As a result, they sold hundreds of thousands of publicly-owned apartments to these private companies in the 90s and 00s for almost nothing.[0][1] Now those apartments are worth a lot more, and people are mad because housing is not affordable to many. Hence you often hear demands for dispossession.

The whole story is probably a lot more complicated though, idk.

[0] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/nach-der-privatisierung-w...

[1] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/immobilien/neubau-in-...

edit: if you read [1] for example, the private companies bought 65000 apartments for 400 million Euro. Now the city bought back 14750 apts for 2.46 billion Euro. Considering that these houses probably have barely been renovated if at all, the quality probably dropped significantly.

I wouldn’t use the Netherlands as an example, your link is only a “plan” they’re floating.

The housing situation here is horrible - skyrocketing prices and massive corporate ownership. Real estate is massive money, and the politicians are in on it - so nothing is going to actually change. Plus, they take forever for new builds, so supply doesn’t meet demand at all.

One member of the Dutch royal family even owns about 500 apartments (IIRC) in Amsterdam.

> Did they get ripped off by some owners that refused to sell and haggled upward?

The first sentence of the article says they bought them from two corporate landlords.

Missed that. Thank you good sir.

There you have it (the solution): https://youtu.be/Li_MGFRNqOE

Well if Xi Jinping says so…

Houses can be homes to live in or can be an investment. They cannot be both. Since spending considerable labour and materials building concrete boxes for the ultimate purpose of speculation is silly, then it must be the former.

What is an investment defined as? Because I'm pretty sure someone can buy a home, rent it out and make a monthly return on it, thus satisfying both a place to live and investment.

Or live it in themselves as they ride the speculative wave.

Optimizing construction for investments leads to different houses, apartments and even neighborhoods than optimizing for living - the same way as optimizing your site for ad revenue leads to a completely different structure than optimizing it for actually being useful to your visitors/customers.

> Because I'm pretty sure someone can buy a home, rent it out and make a monthly return on it, thus satisfying both a place to live and investment.

No, they are inserting themselves in the process as a middle-man providing absolutely no service or added value. All they have is capital, a monopoly on capital wrt. the person renting the house. This lets them add a drastic markup on the monthly price of housing for the person renting, as a direct first-order effect, PLUS, as an indirect effect this mechanism incentivises speculation and raises house prices even more.

Renting out a house is a service. Being a landlord means legal responsibilities and liabilities. Houses need to be up to code, maintained, insured, and this is expensive. Grass needs to be cut, pipes need to be fixed, appliances need to be in working order.

The person who wants to rent a house has obviously chosen not to, or cannot afford to, buy a house. They get the upside of having to take no financial risk, ie. fire, tornado, flooding, economic/housing market collapse, etc. The downside is they do not have ownership and make no market gains.

As long as homes are being used there is little difference between them. The important bit to keep speculation rational is to keep occupancy rates high, a simple tax on unoccupied homes seems like the logical solution.

Bullshit. Of course buying your own house is also an investment decision. You speculate that its future value minus your initial investment (and plus the "extra joy" you get out of being a homeowner) is worth more than what you would have paid in rent in the same time.

Building housing for others to live in is an investment and we should encourage it. The problem is that houses don't exist in isolation, they are built on land. Most of the value is in the land.

Land is valuable because taxes pay for public services and you need to be in close proximity of public services to benefit from them. Investing into land is effectively investing in the exclusion of other people, which is why the land owner should compensate the government for the public services he is receiving.

Ah, a fellow Georgist I see ;)

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