Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

This ought to be made illegal, and soon.

Single family residential REIT as a category should not exist. Caps on landlord ownership should be enacted.

Like medical and food, shelter is a fundamental human need and it is very dangerous to introduce a profit motive without very substantial government regulation. The rate of investor ownership is getting uncomfortably close to feudalism, at least in areas and categories and price points of homes.

View on HN

why are you furious on REIT? They are pouring money into housing, at at time when we need more housing. It's not a problem. The problem is that we're not building enough. And a big part of that is zoning

Because they are buying up stocks of that limited housing and holding onto it for rental income and capital gains. Previously, that had been off-limits as part of a generational wealth building process for regular families. Now more houses will be rentals and that money will compound capital for investors. By definition that further concentrates wealth.

We need more low cost apartments and condominiums that are close to jobs. Low wage workers are being expelled from urban areas because they cannot pay rent, and are forced between living in slum like urban conditions or paying high costs to commute from distant affordable areas. Corporate ownership of housing won't solve their issues, solve zoning issues, or increase housing starts.

edit: "off-limits" to the extent homebuilders could make a profit and lenders could make a profit, but not excessively.

How can we reasonably expect the availability of homes for low income individuals to increase if corporate ownership is banned? Under this hypothetical ban, very few houses would become available, and hardly reduce prices. Housing construction would also slow further, thus negating any short term reduction in prices.

Additionally this does not make any positive impact on the construction of new housing.

The problem with hard restrictions like a cap on land ownership is that they would just find a way to circumvent the limit. The best approach is to incentivize them in another direction.

That class of objection is defeatist. Selling unregulated pharmaceuticals is illegal because of the harm is causes. While people may break the law, they at least face consequences and groups that pursue that business are criminal by definition, and face much lower access to capital markets and ability to cause harm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com