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Comment by arturkane7 | Hacker News Reader

Not being snarky but if a rich person owns multiple flats that she is renting out, and you force her (say by jacking up wealth tax or banning buy-to-let) to sell the majority of them, how is that not helping with house price and rent inflation? My point is that you are right the rich don’t consume that much in terms of buying eggs, but they buy a hell of a lot of assets that eventually drive inflation (the more real estate they buy, the higher house prices go, the higher lumber and copper prices go,…) Am not an economist just trying to reason using common sense so might have missed something…

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> how is that not helping with house price and rent inflation?

Assuming they're sold to owner-occupiers who were previously renting, you've increased housing supply in that segment of the market, but you've reduced supply in the letting market, so the net effect will be zero. It won't change net demand or supply across the market as a whole.

If they were keeping those flats empty, that would be a different story.

Wouldn’t house prices go down if you make it harder to monetise RE via rental? Say by increasing rental income tax or banning buy-to-let?

Nope. Houses price will shoot up. The only thing that really brings down prices is build a lot more homes that people want. Increase supply.

Removing any and all gains from “real estate investment” would heavily bring down pricing.

Housing can not be seen as an investment. We can not have it be an investment, and a necessity, at the same time.

Housing can not, and should not ever produce more returns than the most basic index fund. If it does, no matter how many you build it will still be inaccessible to many.

You may argue that well, if there is more housing then there will be less money to make from investing in it. But here’s the kicker: what do top share holders do if they suspect the operations of the company they have shares in is going to make their shares worth less? They work as hard as they can to change the operations and minimize what they can do.

The same is true when housing is an investment. A property owner will act in their own best interest to reduce the ability for their investment to become worth less money.

This could mean toxic environmentalism, where you don’t actually care about the environment, but you’re using it as an argument against building houses. It could mean actively not giving permits to new constructions. It could mean actively lobbying the government to prevent certain classes of homes being built. Heck it goes all the way to actively reducing side walks, public transportation, etc.

And this is why we can’t just say “uh build more”. The “lack of supply” is a symptom. Not a cause.

The cause is simply that we accept that real estate can be an investment vehicle.

So without getting into whether we actually want that, how is that achievable?

In a sense, every house is unique, and land is certainly unique by it's location and also finite. There really are some number of acres within a particular distance of a city centre.

I guess my gut reaction is that your comment might be right (I am not sure) but strikes me as idealistic.

I think we shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

There’s a couple of things that can help here:

1. Right to build. No local government should be able to say no to you building a small multi family home or single family home on their land.

2. A graduated (by year) increase on renting income for homes. Places that had been rental residences for a few years prior to this also should be forced to stay residential for a while.

3. Empty home wealth tax. If a house has been empty for more than six months a year, it should be taxed a percentage of its fair market value based on vacancy months.

4. Mortgages returns on investment should be limited to a certain margin over inflation. Or just match inflation. More than that should be taxed.

Are these good ideas? Maybe, idk. I’m not the person that’s gonna come up with the model of how to accomplish this. But it’s potentially a starting point.

> 3. Empty home wealth tax. If a house has been empty for more than six months a year, it should be taxed a percentage of its fair market value based on vacancy months.

How would this work in practice and enforced?

It doesn't. It is better to charge a fee per square meter of land and rebate the fee for owner occupied plots of land.

We solved it for parking lots by introducing parking fees.

So not for profit? What about healthcare? Food? etc etc etc

But why would rich people or corporations be in the market for a house if they couldn't rent them out? Especially the current above asking price cash offers from Blackrock and the like? That total number of families needing a house might be the same but the demand from entities with unlimited budgets and the ability to forecast not making their money back for ten plus years evaporates.

>Assuming they're sold to owner-occupiers who were previously renting, you've increased housing supply in that segment of the market, but you've reduced supply in the letting market, so the net effect will be zero.

Not really. The net effect would be a distribution of wealth across a broader number of people (former renters, now owners) instead of one person (landlord who is accumulating wealth by charging rents from a number of people).

But the purchaser exchanged money for property. The transaction did not alter their wealth.

I understand that we typically think of owning property as a means of increasing wealth, more so than renting. But this is only true because we let home values increase.

And it might not even be true now, if renters places their savings other investments.

Even if home prices stay flat, it would increase the would-be-renters' wealth. Their payments would not only build equity which can transfer to another purchase, but once they pay off a home, the payments are finished. That means more net-positive cash flows to their own pockets. The notion that home prices need to rise for wealth building is completely and unequivocally false.

> once they pay off a home, the payments are finished

Property taxes and maintenance costs continue forever.

Increase interest rates.

A property that makes 5% of its value a year, when interest rates are paying 6%, is a bad investment.

Instead of 3-properties at $1 million (total) returning 0.05 million / year, you should sell those three properties and put $1 million into the bank and get 0.06 million/year.

That only works if the interest rates are higher than inflation.

Real estate is an excellent inflation hedge since as inflation goes up, the value of the real estate and the rent you can get for it both go up in tandem.

Another way to discourage rent seeking is to tax ownership of land more.

> That only works if the interest rates are higher than inflation.

Not necessarily. Raising interest rates lowers inflation.

So increasing interest rates is a double-whammy on housing. The increased mortgage prices lowers home values, fighting inflation _AND_ causes future profits to be discounted (relative to the risk-free bond rate).

The housing market was overheating earlier this year because low 2.5% interest rates meant that people's monthly payments were much lower than people expected. But now that we have 6% mortgage prices, the monthly mortgage price is increasing (which will eventually force housing prices down).

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This is why rising interest rates is the main tool of the Fed right now. Its not the perfect solution, but its sufficient until Congress enacts lasting change (ie: policy changes that lead to an increased supply of our luxury goods). The bank can only change interest rates so much before it becomes unreasonable.

We haven’t had runaway inflation like this in the US since the late 70s/early 80s. At that time it did indeed require interest rates higher than inflation to stop it. It took a fed funds rate of 20% to reverse 14% inflation.

It's not so much the absolute value of interest rates that matters, as much as the increase or decrease relative to earlier prices that matters.

Going from 1% rates to 2% is in many ways a bigger change than say a 15% to 16% increase.

Why Fed is not fighting with inflation? With 1.5% interest rate and 9.3% inflation it is clear Fed wants to keep high inflation, but why?

The Fed want inflation to diminish (in real terms) the mountains of debt the US government and consumers incurred in the past 20 years. At the expense of the poorest people and savers (because wage inflation is much lower than the goods/services inflation, not to mention bank savings interest rates, which are laughable).

Make no mistake, the Fed are not idiots, they have been trying to introduce inflation for a long time, but initially they succeeded in asset inflation only. With the help of Covid and the war, they got their wish.

But wage inflation needs to match the goods/services inflation, because without it, borrowers will be even less able to pay their debts.

In order to really stamp out inflation, the Fed would need to raise the interest rate to 10%, essentially forcing the US to declare bankruptcy.

The Fed is hoping to introduce a mild recession, which, they hope, would reduce all kinds of inflation, without them having to raise the rates above 3.5% or so.

How do interest payments to the poor help them? They spend way more in interest expenses, heck they even pay taxes which pay the interest on government debt. Oh and finally if you buy a product from a company that borrowed money, the marginal profit of a product is necessary to cover the interest expenses of the company meaning you as a consumer pay interest in the form of higher prices on products.

The idea that the rich pay interest to themselves is laughable.

Or you do more with the current properties, such that they make more than 5% of their value per year.

Of course, the idea of land as an investment in the first place is one of the root causes (if not the root cause) of endlessly-rising cost of living, and we're long overdue to address that root cause (namely: by instituting land value taxes).

Which would be great, but will upset way too many voters, so politicians won't dare touch it.

"My political opponent is attacking the middle class and their investments!"

Not much room to be upset when replacing just about any tax with LVT would represent a tax savings for the vast majority of the middle class (and just about the entirety of the lower class).

But in the real world the old taxes are never removed, despite promises.

The old taxes suppress LVT revenue (since non-LVT taxes suppress economic activity and thus demand for land), so adopting LVT would be further motivation to abolish non-LVT taxes.

Increasing interest rates makes buildings more expensive and land cheaper. Once you add the interest payments you didn't really gain anything unless you are buying everything with cash aka the rich.

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