Comment by halotrope | Hacker News Reader

Comment by halotrope | Hacker News Reader

Everyone seems to agree that speculation in housing is a global problem with adverse effects on communities and societies. Toronto seems to be a good example of how the end-game will look like. People are priced out of owning a home for good and/or have to leave places where they might have been living for their whole life. Rent controls don't seem to work, and just cancelling (by whatever means) the market for real estate in general might yield a lot of unwanted side-effects. I believe there are 'simple' measures to curb rampant speculation without distorting the market to badly:

- Disallow foreign investment in residential real estate.

- Disallow for-profit corporations to purchase residential real estate.

- Stop subsidizing speculation by bailing out real estate investors

- Invest in infrastructure so that living apart from big cities is more worthwhile. Especially broadband internet and schools.

- Add a tax penalty to vacant residential real estate.

If you have n units of housing and 5n people looking for homes, no amount of rent control is going to help. There is no fixing the market without a substantial increase in construction.

My suggestion is somewhat simple: return to the early 20th century model where if you own the land, you're free to build homes on it. Even if it means the neighbourhood now has reduced parking, you block someone's view of the mountains (Vancouver I'm looking at you), the building casts a shadow in the local playground, etc.

I don't think what the market thinks of the value of the houses is going up. It's mostly inflation and people thinking everything else will go down compared to houses (stocks, fiat, crypto).

If we stopped messing with the market and started using a currency with actual backing in physical resources, maybe we would experience less recessions and crises.

Avoiding all the short term pain is not free just because the government say so, you'll have to pay it sooner or later.

In a market without government actors capable of breaking rules probably owning houses wouldn't be that valuable. There is plenty of unused land in the world and without a government starting a new city or profitable businesses would be way easier than now.

A good list.

Odd that, build enough homes for the population, is not mentioned however.

Yes I forgot that. But just building seems to be not as straightforward either as construction cost and regulation make building non-luxury housing difficult to justify economically. At least in denser urban areas.

Agreed those restrictions should be... restricted. But, even luxury housing gets old. The primary driver remains a shortage in supply, everything else is approaching long tail.

>> - Invest in infrastructure so that living apart from big cities is more worthwhile. Especially broadband internet and schools.

The rest of your list is good, but I don't agree with this at all. American cities need less sprawl, not more. Denser cities need less infrastructure, which means less stuff to maintain and have to rebuild as it ages.

IMO we should strive to make it so that living far from cities is what is expensive, not in them. I know not everyone prefers that, but it's by far more sustainable, economically.

high tax penalty on owning 5+ housing units

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