Why is rent skyrocketing?
thehustle.co
thehustle.co
2. People with access to #1 take it and buy properties (either as rentals or AirBnB).
3. From #2, use properties for collateral on other loans, rinse and repeat (even scarier, banks will rehypothecate that collateral).
4. Charge what you want because there's no competition as everyone needs a place to live.
The implosion of this will be when a combination of new debt not being available to service old debt collides with properties being left unoccupied due to exorbitant costs.
I'm currently renting while I build my house and the development I'm living at was fully rented last year (near a college), but this year I've been counting and there are ~3-5 empty town houses for rent here and the school year just started. My rent went up ~$150/month, too, arbitrarily with no improvements/added services.
I view it as a short-term cash grab that will find a lot of Grant Cardone types scrambling when it (predictably) blows up in their faces. My bet is that if you can live modestly and squirrel away cash, things are going to get super cheap for a short period and then the dollar will hyperinflate when none of the debt can be serviced (assuming this drop off triggers a massive QE run). Then: CBDCs and a new serf class will be born.
2. QT is also going to affect interest rates on MBS, which will reflect in mortgage interest rates.
Yet I'm still part of this squeeze, the segment of America that cannot buy a home because I cannot outbid others because I cannot afford to save up enough to put down more down-payment, despite the many grants/programs meant to help people like me. Sellers just won't sell, since they get better offers.
In the meantime, I rent. If you gave me one year of not having to pay rent (hello eviction moratorium, wish I had met you), I would be able to be barely competitive in a LCOL area for a home that would need me to bribe an inspector to qualify for those grants/programs.
Around here it's not a supply and demand issue, either; there are plenty vacant places, both low and high end. It's just that owners (corporate and individual alike) don't feel any need to take on any risk. Same with renting. Risky tenants without hefty deposit and/or collateral aren't worth it, not one bit. The rest of us suffer for those who can't behave, as usual.
It'll work itself out, though, or it won't, and I'll age out of it all and it'll be a problem for my kids to handle. That's how it goes.
Everyone SHOULD pay their fair share. If the laws suck then the lower and middle class should focus on the rich and put pressure on the puppets in the office. However, it seems many love voting against their own interest.
Edit: If you have a problem paying taxes and are in the middle class. I suggest you think about starting a life somewhere without taxes, you will quickly realize that your middle class life is actually made possible by the infrastructure in place.
They may be going after more people in the 2-25% income group, but the 1% is just as immunized as ever, hiring 80k non specialist agents won't change that.
Housing should not be an investment. If it is we can never have affordable housing. Developing, renting out, and managing properties can be profitable without requiring the mere act of owning a house to be an investment that grows. A house should be a capital expenditure. It's shameful that for many, leaving the apartment or house empty can still make significant returns.
Land in places with jobs is scarce. We don't tolerate people hoarding other scarcities, land should be no different.
Lots of people buy a starter house with the intention of selling for more when they, for example, start having kids and need a bigger house.
"shifts the tax burden within the residential class from owners of moderately valued residential properties to the owners of vacation homes, higher valued homes and residential properties not occupied by the owner, including apartments and vacant lands."
https://www.mass.gov/doc/living-with-the-residential-exempti...
It hasn't seemed to help, but maybe it has a little.....
The best approach is to press for over-development of housing. It doesn't matter if someone owns 1 house, or 1000 houses, so long as there is more than enough homes for everyone.
Idea: have a property tax line item that's based on the ratio of population / housing units. The higher that ratio, the higher the tax. The tax revenue is used to cover the costs of constructing more housing units, which lowers the tax.
Want to really address the problem (and many other problem with today's economic system)? Prohibit interest bearing loans.
I do think credit scores are a scam (as are overdraft fees) and that rates should be reasonable, but no interest would make nobody lend money.
I like having a car loan - I was able to buy a car with current safety features. Without it I'd have to buy some unsafe (or unreliable) clunker in cash.
There's no reason why the car manufacturers won't be able to offer 0% interest on moderate term loans (a few years long). They already do today when they want to sell cars. This will drive prices down actually.
You can also have longer term leases without interest, effectively paying for depreciation and the company can profit from leasing the car.
Usually they have a maintenance staff that takes care of the property as well or add additional services.
Mom and pop landlords don't do any of that usually, and just hand someone a key w/ a call to the occasional contractor to fix something instead of an actual company. Most need a warm body to pay off their mortgage so they can sell it in the future and pocket the cash.
We need to fix the supply side, if the corp takes the properties that are broken down and fixes them that's a good thing. The problem comes when people who are around there now cannot afford the new rents they either become homeless or leave.
How far they have to leave depends on the supply of housing in the surrounding area, which b/c of the shortage is pretty low. With a huge supply of housing, it's possible to move next door or down the street and not much changes.
If we build more rents will go down, regardless of who the owners are. Prices to buy homes too for normal people.
Getting people to build more is the problem, high construction costs, zoning/permiting, local opposition etc.
Could it be the reason that those properties are too expensive for a regular Joe to fix up because of investors in the first place.
The latter are financial vampires, sucking money from lower classes, pushing housing prices higher, locking more people out of ownership.
If the family home you aspire to wasn't also climbing in price, you wouldn't need to sell your starter home at a profit.
This is the problem though. Capital gains for the seller represents inflation on an equivalent lifestyle for the next buyer.
First time buyer programs, lower mortgage rates, etc, are all just smokescreens to try and grow the pyramid one more level before it becomes evidently unsustainable. Exponential growth is too powerful: if housing is a good investment for long enough, it becomes unaffordable, period.
I think if it's an investment, that's fine. The problem is when housing is allowed to become a speculative investment, and the investment activity on housing begins to seriously threaten the actual housing activity. So for example you could do one or more of the following:
- Adjust mortgage rates on homes owned but not lived in (eg: triple them)
- Completely ban owning more than one home
- Implement a sliding tax on rental income (the more units you collect on, the higher the tax you pay)
- Bring back (or implement) rent controls and have them geared to cost of living
Basically anything that makes it less feasible to profit off of people who just want a safe place to live.
I don’t think the distinction you’re drawing makes sense; there are plenty of ways to speculate in an otherwise healthy housing market (e.g. move to a gentrifying neighborhood in the hopes of moving again in a few years when your property is worth more).
It seems like the common theme for the ills you identify is housing being un- or under-utilized while the owner is expecting or reaping the rewards of capital appreciation. More straightforward policy responses to that could include imposing a surtax on unoccupied property or taxing imputed rent regardless of occupancy.
I didn't leave it just as speculation being the problem. You ignored the second part where I said "and the investment activity on housing begins to seriously threaten the actual housing activity". The speculative investment features intensify the use of homes for purposes other than housing. In your example, the purchaser is using it for both speculation and housing. Not so bad. But someone who owns a home, then leverages the equity to buy another that they don't intend to live in but rent out, then does that again 2 or 3 times, now we have a problem where this person is just massively leveraging and speculating, supported by the government and the banks, "the system" if you will. And then higher rents are in the best interest of these more affluent people. Rather, "the system" could disincentivize this kind of activity.
> ills you identify is housing being un- or under-utilized...imposing a surtax on unoccupied property
Not really something I was talking about, no...but that problem would be addressed by the first two suggestions I offered. Of course if for some reason it was still a problem, or you didn't want to be as heavy handed, you could go ahead and impose a surtax like you said.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11119259/Hundreds-q...
" The unprecedented number of refugees arriving in Ireland has put pressure on the country's housing crisis, despite generous offers to host Ukrainian families. " I'm not sure how that results in cutting demand for building housing. The article is basically saying there's a crisis with few reasons offered.
How / why / what would be cutting demand for building housing? Demand is the last thing I'd be worried about. People need a place to live, and they need the housing to live in, so there's always going to be demand for building it.
Build social housing and maintain it at a level that far exceed market price.
Nothing should stop housing from being an investment in the same way that any good effected by supply and demand is, but there's a difference with the price of housing going up at at slightly over the rate of inflation and what we've seen the last couple years across the entire market. (Or even the decade before that in the bay area.) 10-20% a year rises in the COL is insane, and encourages rent seeking by current housing owners to the detriment of everyone else.
Public policy should favor the former, and punish the later.
Cities could roll out such a policy directly when making unused land available or other activities.
Hawaii has a good reason for doing this because land is scarce and there is no place to go. Basically anywhere else this would be idotic IMO.
Prices are constrained by people's incomes and over the 20th century incomes have grown faster than inflation (people have got richer). This leaves space for positive returns without necessarily hurting affordability.
Now, in many places construction has slowed a lot and capital is cheap, which is really what has caused prices to skyrocket.
Eventually, incomes will still constrain the market, though, especially in lettings.
This property is still an investment via improving the property to enhance income potential, but less of a speculative bet on the overall state of the market.
A high property tax based on land value would suggest that all the places people need to live would need to be generating income, have a high income for the family, or they'd need to move into a place where that land value is distributed across a wider base of households.
Of course land should be producing economic value. If it doesn't or thr value produced doesn't match the land's value, then something is wrong.
Just look at this map of registered short-term rentals in Scottsdale, AZ: https://eservices.scottsdaleaz.gov/maps/registered-rentals. I know it's a vacation destination, especially in the winter, but I'm sure something like this is going on everywhere rents are skyrocketing. And guess what, the short-term rental lobby got the state legislature in Arizona to pass a law that cities and counties couldn't restrict short-term rentals to a greater degree than the state does.
I still think the best solution (that'll never, ever happen) is something like an exponential property tax increase for additional properties you own over 2 or so. After you own a few properties that's a cost that can't simply be passed on, so it locks out giant investors and local monopolies.
This is like saying "uber increased dmeand for cars and that made cars expensive". No, the car companies just built more cars. We need to build more homes.
So I think there is a problem with AirBNBs. Even discounting quality of life issues that they can create for people actually living near them, they take a valuable resource for locals and turn them into pure investment plays that stay empty long stretches of time. Death to Nimbys generally, but I think you could get them on the same page as housing advocates if you went after short-term rentals.
Who gets to buy the next housing unit built in Manhattan? (This is equivalent to the question: you are selling your housing unit in Manhattan; who are you allowed to sell it to?)
If "investors" are not allowed to buy housing in Manhattan, who will develop the high-rises that house people who can't afford to buy their own apartment? Or do you institute price controls, so that instead of paying with money, you pay with generation-long wait times?
[0]: i'm pro-abortion via the absolute right to bodily autonomy, but no, i don't support the current media rhetoric or focus.
The right to bodily autonomy is not absolute. If it were, you could (morally) deliberately drop someone you where holding off the side of a cliff. After all, they don't have a right to your arm. (But they do in this circumstance).
by right, people get to choose what to do with their own bodies when harm to others is small not simply zero (e.g., smoking).
then, i put forth a separate observation (perhaps too tersely and obliquely) that biology is the most brutal (ultra-objective, yet ultra-complex) and so the least reasonable domain to be employed in pursuing your line of reasoning (which is wholly subjective and cultural).
biology isn't subject to human reasoning, emotion, or culture, which is where ontological arguments like yours squarely reside.
To put it another way, either there's something objective which can be said about dropping children off of bridges in the moral realm related to bodily autonomy and our understanding of the duties and rights around bodily autonomy or else there isn't an objective moral realm. I presume, from your previous comments that you hold that there is an objective moral realm. Did I mistake your meaning?
you countered with a subjective opinion hanging off an ultimately irrelevant legal triviality (that's also cultural, not objective).
neither our subjective nor objective experience of those cells today is equivalent to that of any human being around us. you just can't get to the conclusion you want with only biology and objectivity, because your key premise is neither an objective nor a biological axiom.
The child is most certainly dependent on the mother in the sense that this distinct, independent member of the species Homo sapiens cannot survive without constant support from the environment (another living person) that the child finds themselves dependent on. They are, as you point out, inseparable. But even birth won't solve this problem. From a societal perspective, even adulthood won't solve this problem for 99.999% of the human race.
second, that's ultimately a racist argument disguised behind safetyism, neither of which have a leg to stand on. every unwanted child still wants to grow up, be they poor or brown or whatever. let's welcome them rather than paint them over with disgust and wanton disposability.
besides, the point was not to debate abortion, but that it's an (wedge) issue used to distract and divide, rather than focusing the populace on the most pressing problems we face. covid, mass shootings, or climate change (as opposed to pollution) are suitable alternative distractions to consider in place of abortion.
How is it fair to distribute the supply of housing of a city, a place that people have roots in, generations sometimes who actually have a history there, just to the luckiest and greediest? Instead of, let's say, the people who have actually built that city which those rich folks seems so desirable to move in? I really don't understand how you can use fair to call a system like that.
And someone buying a property could easily be the beginning of new generations of people who will have long history there. Do they not deserve a chance too?
Paying for things is a fair exchange.
Only if you have money. No, it's not fair that someone with more money can take over land, it's the market and the way the world is but it's not fair. The only way this would be fair is if everyone started from the exact same spot in regards to resources: money, education, intelligence, etc. which isn't realistic at all.
Say I could ignore zoning laws and had a billion dollars to blow, I could just buy up a bunch of the $1.2 million 1200 square foot single family homes in San Francisco, bulldoze them and roll out a bunch of 10 story apartment buildings and I’d make an astonishing amount of money.
It seems that the construction of most new housing is blocked by people who have a clear interest in maintaining the status quo for mainly monetary reasons, as well as not wanting new people to come in. Here it seems that current residents have every right and reason to maintain the form and substance of their current housing situation until they, their children, their grandchildren, and who knows how many generations after them, decide it is time for a change.
The "people must accept" can also be used to keep supply limited ("you want to be a lawyer, but we, current lawyers, don't want you"), wages low ("you don't want to make two dollars an hour? Get another job") or anything else that is currently regulated or unregulated, depending on what the people in power currently want or don't want.
There is no Bible, nothing is written in stone. It's an ongoing struggle—-and I'm not speaking from a Marxist perspective, please, just a human one--between people who have power now and other people who would like to have a say and currently don't have one, and who, after they get some power, will probably block other would-be newcomers to the party.
There is no perfect "market-dynamics".
Where I currently live, there is no reason to have entire neighborhoods scarcely populated, or areas that could receive hundreds if not thousands of new units not developed. They are not because there are people who fight tooth and nails to keep housing limited for the reasons I explained above, and the city is either kept hostage or is in cahoots with those who do not want new housing.
Can you give me an example of something we don't tolerate being hoarded? I genuinely can't think of anything. People seem to be allowed to accumulate whatever they can afford to, if they choose to. If it's on the market, that is.
Outside of a few token busts on random idiots, and a few temporary limitations on Amazon purchases, anti-hoarding measures weren't the effective solution.
I can't understand how people is so relaxed talking about this issue, seen large swaths of people in the west becoming poor and homeless.
It's not like we don't know what to do. It seems our elites don't really think it's a pressing issue. As long as they keep extracting wealth, they're fine.
Since the poor has no effective tool to overturn this situation, I think it's time for people to take justice in their own hands. It's the best way to send a message.
Maybe realizing their investments and their safety are in high risk will make them move their asses so we can have social peace.
We can't have millions of people becoming homeless and be like it's nothing.
The part that I don't get is with the pandemic you heard about folks moving out of the major cities. With that said you would think that prices in the cities would go down because there is more supply; however, looking at the numbers it seems quite the opposite.
I heard of many folks my age (mid 20s) moving to "lifestyle cities", places like Miami, NYC, LA, etc. These people aren't coming there for work, rather they are just there for the lifestyle. I can't really feel bad for this group of people because they did it to themselves. No one is putting a gun to your head and telling you that you have to live in NYC, LA or Miami with some of the highest cost of living in the country.
Don't move to a HCOL city and then bitch about the HCOL.
Also these cities could be much lower COL with better housing policies - that’s the point. It really does not have to be either or.
Not to mention that generations of people have lived in NYC.
This is 100% incorrect.
In the UK mortgage application controls were increased after 2008. This meant it became particularly difficult for first-time buyers to get a mortgage, locking them into rental properties for longer, and further increasing demand.
In London and most cities in the UK we have an extraordinary amount of foreign investment in property. Entire blocks owned by foreign faceless corporations (many of which are probably offshore shell companies for wealthy entities in the UK) who are happy to let their properties remain empty in order to maintain the average price(s) and sit on the capital gains with little to no maintenance requirement because they just don't have any tenants.
For decades now, "buying to let" has been promoted as the easypath for those fortunate enough to invest for their future. Ultra low interest rates, coupled with ever increasing property prices, and charging rent that covers your mortgage repayments, and maintenance, _and_ some extra passive income on top, means it's certainly an attractive option for those who can afford it, and by God has it been taken. News articles of landlords with _hundreds_ of properties in their portfolio is not uncommon. Entire towns owned by a single landlord in some cases.
And our political parties treat "house price" like a hot potatoe through fear of being the ones to pop the bubble, cause lots of defaults, and ultimately lose the homeowner vote. In fact most MPs are landlords themselves.
Wages has not changed here since the 80s and tech also underpays people for the same role. Meanwhile condo sales sees no sign of slowing down, everywhere real estate is on the decline, here it seems to continue.
I wonder if this is sustainable, there is a large number of multi bedroom condo units asking well above $5000 CAD / month
https://www.scotiabank.com/ca/en/about/economics/economics-p...
Canada's biggest problem is that we didn't lock out immigration policies to our infrastructure and housing policies. Bringing up that fact though often spirals into someone trying to claim that being concerned about the policies makes you a racist or anti-immigration which is nonsense.
and this just highlights the issue in Canada: we can't even agree as to what the underlying issues are, instead we scapegoat minority groups because it has worked since the 80s.
I'm not "blaming immigrants" - I'm blaming immigration policies that have Canada leading most of the developed world in net immigration while also being in last place for it's housing stock.
That situation causes a supply and demand loop that makes it profitable for corporations to flip units (the corps doing this is a SYMPTOM not the CAUSE of the problem).
I have no issue with immigration and I'm not scapegoating minority groups (seriously read next time please), what I'm saying is the policy that allows one needs to be directly influenced by the policy of the other or you get knock on effects like we are seeing now.
You are correct that we can't agree on the underlying issue, but not because anyone is scapegoating but because so many people want to concern troll and try to avoid having a discussion for fear of being labeled as insensitive.
*lock out -> lock our(?)
<upupandup> but you are literally blaming immigration for the housing situation
No, monkeywork is saying that housing policy and immigration need to be tied together. If we have slow housing growth, immigration must be restricted. If we want high immigration, we must allow fast housing growth.
So while it's one factor, it's far from the only factor.
For example Downtown LA and Koreatown are putting up large apartment buildings like crazy, because the zoning allows them to, and rents have not increased nearly as much as other popular LA areas that are mostly single-family zoned, such as Santa Monica.
This is why Minnesota and now recently California basically upzoned the entire state, because upzoning with local ordinances neighborhood by neighborhood is almost always defeated by NIMBYs, which are generally a combination of of local homeowners and local small-time landlords.
Don't forget that a huge portion of US landlords are "mom and pop" landlords, which have a massive portion of their net worth wrapped up a handful of rental units and don't have the capital to build net new units. These people are more economically opposed to new housing than a large developer who can stomach the capital outlay for a new building.
When they are allowed to developers can profitably build dense housing, which produces net new units into the market, which helps combat rising rent.
From a purely practical point of view, as a landlord your tenants can cause a lot of financial damage. If you force out a good tenant by raising rents then you're gambling that the next one isn't going to be a nightmare.
Obviously, these represent two extremes of selfishness and selflessness. So, what is a rule of thumb for an asset owner to not be considered greedy? Price 10% below market for example or allow 3 missed payments per year?
Greed is an easy label to assign until until you have to get concrete about it.
Take two hypothetical tenants. One is a young software developer earning $15k/mo, the other a retired widow on a fixed pension of $3k/mo. The social reaction to either party's rent being raised from $1k/mo to $2.5k/mo is going to be very different.
> your choices are to maximize its net present value or to price the lease under the market in order to benefit someone else
This leaves out the fact that in the majority of cases the lessor is benefiting either way. It's purely the extent to which they benefit that changes.
> Greed is an easy label to assign until until you have to get concrete about it.
All sorts of labels are difficult to assign objectively. What matters is personal opinion and societal consensus. Both of those are fluid and have changed throughout history.
Don’t let those economists tell you lies about how goods with inelastic demand will dramatically rise in price when supply can’t keep pace… they’re just covering for the greedy people.
The article could probably have just been this repeated 1400 times.
5. Investors Bought a Quarter of US Homes Sold Last Year (pewtrusts.org)
18 points by ParksNet 13 minutes ago | flag | hide | discuss
6. Why Is Rent Skyrocketing? (thehustle.co)
15 points by paulpauper 28 minutes ago | flag | hide | 29 comments
How much money people have on hand in aggregate and how much of it they ready to pay for rent matters!
People on the supply side always adjust their prices to maximize profits (price * quantity). Prices are climbing because some tenants agree to pay.
Eviction moratoriums and increased renting risk being passed down to the renter.
So many tenants were taking advantage and abusing the system, but a few bad apples creates an outsized perception, which results in skyrocketing rents.
Which is why it's being challenged in Supreme Court.
Probably lasted a few months too long also.
actually, just yesterday I learned about a website for exploring eviction data: https://evictionlab.org/
Also the article mentions "rent control", something that terrifies landlords. So they hike the rent to protect of a possible future rent control. Landlords paid for the property and took a huge risk with a possible real estate bubble and rising rates (in case of variable adjusted mortgage).
People like this make me think it's on purpose to make half the population hate the other half. And then double down. Divide and conquer.
- Why is rent skyrocketing? (thehustle.co)
- Investors bought a quarter of US homes last year (pewtrusts.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32568858
Seems like the second one is very much (part of) the answer to the first.
I recommend this article, The housing theory of everything, as an introduction on why housing is not just another problem: https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-e...
Of course, young adults living with roommates or parents have absorbed some of that difference, but I'm sure many of those people would live alone if housing prices were still at 1970 levels.
Property prices basically doubled over the last 2 years, but rental prices have yet to catch up.
Unless you assume housing prices are going to crash, and I don't think there's any serious expectation that's going to happen, it seems pretty safe to assume rental costs will take a nearly identical trajectory
But here you have people being irresponsible with what they're willing to spend on rent. And in doing so, force everyone else to also be irresponsible, else be left homeless. It feels like a giant jenga tower just waiting to collapse...
Irresponsible how? Rent goes up the most in places with good paying jobs. As rent goes up, generally the people without the good paying jobs have to move out. This process of low income residents competing with high income residents on housing and subsequently being displaced is called gentrification. It’s an example of a negative externality in a supply-constrained housing market where all players are acting rationally.
But there are a ton of areas not gentrifying, just turning the screws. One can see rent prices rise even in areas with a declining population, for example. And as long as enough people are willing to just pay more, everyone has to pay more. I'm not really proposing unionized renters, I don't know what the solution really is. The free market sounds nice on paper, until things crash ever so often.
It's not just rent, it happened with house prices, too. You had/have a sizeable amount of people out there willing to spend the absolute max the bank would approve them for, to compete. I was watching the RealEstate/REBubble subs over the last two years, and the number of people living outside their realistic means seemed insane to me.
This in turn made more competition, driving prices higher. A reasonable person who say, wouldn't try to buy a 500k house on a 100k salary was left with no choice(area dependent, of course).
Gotta love pie charts that don't add up to 100%. Zach you are fired.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILQepXUhJ98
Here is a quote from that video:
"But there's a reason. There's a reason. There's a reason for this, there's a reason education sucks, and it's the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It's never gonna get any better. Don't look for it. Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don't want: They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. That's right. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don't want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they're coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people -- white collar, blue collar, it doesn't matter what color shirt you have on -- good honest hard-working people continue -- these are people of modest means -- continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don't give a fuck about them. They don't give a fuck about you. They don't give a fuck about you. They don't care about you at all -- at all -- at all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That's what the owners count on; the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes everyday. Because the owners of this country know the truth: it's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it."
Also, here's an article to explain modern-day economics:
https://www.alternet.org/2014/06/5-reasons-rich-are-ruining-...
Very rich tyrants have been destroying economic stability since many decades ago by increasingly hoarding their money and oppressing people to the point where they fend for themselves. Which has been causing the collapse of civilization.
https://michael-hudson.com/2022/07/the-end-of-western-civili...
https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/inequality-kills
Con artists and people with rose-colored glasses say things have drastically improved for people because of technological advancement. They don't talk about the ugly reality of increasing inequality that is happening internationally because of very rich tyrants. Which this increasing inequality is negatively affecting average people's standard of living and quality of life while very rich oligarchs live comfortably in their fancy houses they own. Rent is a euphemism for feudalistic serfdom these days. I hope people wake up to that ugly reality.
In something at least vaguely resembling a free market, detached homeowners such as me would have to compete with other land use that generates much more utility, and thus income from rents, on the same land area, with something like a high-rise. But I am insulated from that, by laws that effectively entrench the upper middle class's preferred land-use pattern of detached suburban housing. Zoning bylaws that prohibit constructing anything else effectively subsidize the suburban lifestyle.
[1] http://www.datalabto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/toronto-0...
* Foreign ownership * Greedy landlords * People who own more than one house * AirBNB * etc etc
When the solution is much like you just said, it's a policy decision that is limiting the housing supply (well that plus record population growth in the GTA). https://www.scotiabank.com/ca/en/about/economics/economics-p...
If people spent half the effort on holding their provincial and muni reps accountable for this rather than belly-aching online about all the other items I listed above (which are really symptoms not causes) maybe something will change.
It's not a free market. Look at how hard it is to get land and approvals to build new housing.
If we had a truly free market in housing, we wouldn't have these problems. High prices would incentivize more construction which would bring down prices.