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Comment by km3r | Hacker News Reader

Im hopefully for a rental class backlash. Hopefully enough people will vote for YIMBY policies and actually start building enough housing. I hope the backlash is strong enough that all the landlords squatting land and voting against housing get left holding the bag.

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.

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How can you make housing not an investment? Require set constant purchase and sale prices on land and houses?

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.

How about.. increasing the property tax rate exponentially with the number of properties held. Few people are arguing that a mom-pop rental business needs to be shut down. These conglomerates with > 10,000 properties are the serious problem, even the data from the article points this out clearly.

I really like your idea but I don't know how you'd reconcile it with organizations simply forming a shell over many smaller companies with a few properties each.

FTC, IRS, and the whoop whoop sound of da police

I mean the simplest solution would be to tax the holding company as well.

Or just increase property tax across the board. An increase in property tax will drive housing prices downwards.

I don't want it to be harder for someone to buy their first house (I also want to buy my first house haha). I want it to be harder for some thing to buy it's 10,001st house.

Not sure this is feasible. A) People can hide how many houses they "own" rather easily. B) People with 10,000 houses have 10,000 times the economic incentive to run for office and/or press elected officials to make things easier on them.

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.

Homestead exemptions can keep property taxes low on one house per person, allowing property taxes on investment properties to skyrocket without any effect on first-time buyers, or really any homeowners. In theory.

So you're basically now paying rent to the government.

Want to really address the problem (and many other problem with today's economic system)? Prohibit interest bearing loans.

How do you handle the risk of defaults? If you never charged interest wouldn't anyone who offered loans just go out of business?

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.

By prohibiting interest bearing loans, loans become relegated to purely an act of charity, and as you point out, there will no longer be businesses that are built only or mostly to lend money and profit off of usury. And that's a good thing.

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.

Where I live, they lop off a large value for tax purposes if you live in your property:

"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.....

I want to agree, but at the end of the day the corps doing this are taking crappy properties and renovating them. They want to fix it up and resell it or charge higher rents than the current owners. That's how they make their profits.

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.

> but at the end of the day the corps doing this are taking crappy properties and renovating them. They want to fix it up and resell it or charge higher rents than the current owners.

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.

One solution is to force depreciating by selling “leases” to land rather than land.

Cities could roll out such a policy directly when making unused land available or other activities.

Hawaii does that and it wrecks the housing market, because it creates two tiers of housing: leased land and owned land housing. All you will end up with is all the expensive property is going to be on "purchased land" and all the cheap properties will be on leased land.

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.

All land should be leased from the government. That's what a land value tax is and there are many, many reasons it works much better than our current land system.

In effect it already is: we lack allodial title in the United States anyhow, and all land is subject to taking by eminent domain and taxation by local governments.

A high level of land value tax.

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.

High property taxes based on land value. This makes the land itself a liability that is offset only by the owners to extract value from the property by improving and using it.

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.

What does that do for an existing single family house that someone inherited / moved into as their parents moved out? It wasn't bought as an investment - its a place to live.

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.

If someone inherits a single family house and don't view the property as providing enough value as a residence or rental to cover the land taxes, then they should sell the property or redevelop it at a higher density that better matches the value of the the land.

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.

Buying a house to live in while you save for something bigger is different from buying property for the sole purpose of renting it out.

The latter are financial vampires, sucking money from lower classes, pushing housing prices higher, locking more people out of ownership.

Are the developers of apartment buildings financial vampires too? The people who literally are adding supply to the market (and therefore lowering prices, because supply and demand)?

Build more housing (remove NIMBY-style policies that lead to less housing being built).

The communist answer is to not allow anybody to purchase real estate.

single family housing is not an investment in japan, they tear down and rebuild. https://robbreport.com/shelter/home-design/japanese-homes-ar...

> How can you make housing not an investment?

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 agree that housing shouldn't be a speculative investment, but cutting demand for building housing will decrease the amount of housing.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11119259/Hundreds-q...

From your linked article:

" 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.

> The problem is when housing is allowed to become a speculative investment

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.

> move to a gentrifying neighborhood in the hopes of moving again in a few years when your property is worth more

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.

Forbid buying existing stock for rental/speculation. Only build new if you are leveraged to the brim.

Build social housing and maintain it at a level that far exceed market price.

> 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.

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.

Either deregulate to allow for developers to build more, or have the govt step in and build more. (Maybe even both)

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.

There is no problem with property being an investment.

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.

In some places rental prices are increased even more because properties that would be rented otherwise are now just AirBNBs.

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.

There's nothing wrong with airbnbs. The problem is that airbnbs increase the demand for housing while local governments make it impossible to build new housing. Let supply follow demand.

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.

I mean sure. But land is limited. If you really want to build more homes you're going to have to bulldoze entire neighborhoods of single-family homes in places like Phoenix. Which is fine with me, I prefer a denser place, but I'm guessing that'd be a non-starter. And many places have sprawled so far that unless we densify it's not really all that helpful to keep carving out desert or farmland depending on where you live.

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.

Housing being an investment is the inevitable consequence of a free market around real estate. Land is scarce. Land near job centers is scarcer. There are far more people that want to live in nice neighborhoods near high-paying jobs than could possibly live there. How do you allocate that real estate?

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?

i'm there with you as far as LA is concerned, but too bad most people here are focused on all the manufactured media distractions instead. for instance, abortion issues[0] affect literally no one here in LA (because CA law), and yet, so much talk centers around it here instead of the housing crisis and other stark disparities.

[0]: i'm pro-abortion via the absolute right to bodily autonomy, but no, i don't support the current media rhetoric or focus.

Abortion laws affect everyone in this country. Every unwanted child grows up to be a citizen here that you and I and everyone else will have to interact with. The econ literature has shown that about 40% of the reduction in violent crime since the 90's has been due to the proliferation of abortion.

first, if you truly believe that, i have a bridge to sell you in arizona. economists make unwarranted claims buttressed by biased models all the time.

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.

Nothing racist about wanting less unwanted children. Mothers have abortions for a reason. They know the time isn't right.

I agree with your sentiment, but why does that coincide with stopping leaded gasoline production?

The removal of lead from gas is the other major factor.

Agreed about the other disparities. But I don't think you'll find one starker than abortion.

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).

that's arguing semantics (about "absolute"), not addressing the overwhelming experience of the right to bodily autonomy. we live in a complicated sociopolitical world and one contrived thought experiment doesn't a refutation make.

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).

The harm in this case is death (which definitely impinges on the bodily autonomy of the child). The cost to the mother is gestation (9 months of intimate support). There is no other who could provide this support. The child did not place themselves in this position of dependence, but were placed there (by the mother and father, but most of the time this is not _intended_ either, though it could be).

there's a gradient between 'nothing' and 'human', and things toward the 'nothing' end can't invoke bodily autonomy, especially against actual humans with real, functional bodies.

The child has a real, functioning body. From the moment of conception there's a separate self-organizing organism performing processes that will improve their body. The mother also has one. Both of them are human bodies.

it's pretty clear in the real world what is and isn't a separate human. i can't hang out and play paddycakes with a bunch of barely differentiated cells in a womb. it's like calling our gut bacteria a separate being because they have their own functioning processes. some even argue that gut bacteria have some sort of community sentience, but even that doesn't make them a separate being with any claims at all on the human's body.

You must not mean "separate human" in the sense that biology does (because a distinct individual of the species homo sapiens exists from the moment of conception). What does "human" in this discussion imply if not "distinct individual of a particular species"?

it's 'separate human' whether you're speaking in terms of biology, sociology, politics, or anything else. biology happens to be the most brutal of these, considering human only those who reach viability, which for humans is long after birth unlike most animals. again, a group of cells doesn't an individual make.

I must be misunderstanding something. Are you saying that a one-week post-birth child is still not a separate human from your perspective because they are not "viable" yet?

you were making an ontological claim, which simply doesn't hold true in any practical or reasonable sense, in any and all domains.

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.

Yes, I assumed that since we can talk about categories and kinds we must be able to talk about a shared truth based in objective reality. Either "human" is a category we can talk about which is based in objective reality (and our understanding of that objective reality in biology, physics, and metaphysics) or we're not going to make any progress because we're discussing "taste" using the language of "truth".

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?

yes, objective. bodies (i.e., independent beings) are required to invoke bodily autonomy, which brings with it the direct corrollary that non-bodies cannot invoke bodily autonomy. that's rational and objective, as in, it's beyond culture, beyond 'taste', towards 'truth'.

you countered with a subjective opinion hanging off an ultimately irrelevant legal triviality (that's also cultural, not objective).

The child in-utero is most certainly an independent being (or else the mother is not unless she's living in a universe she created herself ex nihilo). Is there some way to define "independent" that isn't driven entirely by subjective desires for one outcome or the other? Or must we leave bodily autonomy as being too subjective a principle?

a clump of fetal cells is the textbook definition of dependent and inseparable. you're otherwise projecting what they might become if everything goes well, not objectively perceiving what they are in the present. if we projected every human that way, we're all dead, and therefore worthless.

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.

A zygote is most certainly independent of the mother in the sense that the child and the mother are distinct members of the species. The child is not a part of the mother, but an independent (distinct) entity. The mother and child are distinguishable by biologists, by information theorists, by Thomistic philosophers, and by nutritionists in the south of France.

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.

Housing should also not be finite… and yet it is. You can only stuff so many people into a city. At some point, people must accept that they will have to live somewhere else, potentially less desirable but very affordable. The only way to fairly distribute the limited supply of housing is to the highest bidders.

“Sell to the highest bidder” and “fair” rarely belong in the same thought.

The places where there are housing shortages don’t even have “sell to the highest bidder” they have miles of red tape that make the land have absurd prices because 20 story condominiums should be being built there instead of a two bedroom bungalow with granite countertops and a pool.

It depends on what the constraints are.

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.

I mean sure, but we’re nowhere near capacity in most places.

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.

> The only way to fairly distribute the limited supply of housing is to the highest bidders.

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.

How fair is it for generations of people to indefinitely hold onto desirable pieces of property they inherited for cheap until the day they die simply because they were born there? Not very.

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.

> 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.

> We don't tolerate people hoarding other scarcities

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.

PPE hoarding during early days of COVID

Notable because the ultimate solution for PPE was 'build more'.

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.

Utilities in most of europe are de-monopolized. You can choose any ISP or power provider. Mobile networks is exception for some weird reason.

At this point I'm at the brink of advocating for violence.

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.

> Land in places with jobs is scarce

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.

i don't think there's a high proportion of transplants complaining. rather, it's those that were already there and already struggling who have now found themselves in deep or deeper water.

LA was not really a HCOL city for much of its history.

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.

NYC is an economic hub and there are many jobs that can only be done in or around NYC. Same goes for LA. Plus, both of these cities need regular people to run the services that a city relies on.

Not to mention that generations of people have lived in NYC.

Housing prices is determined by a lot of factors. The most recent being the pandemic and institutional investors. But we are still reeling from the 2008/9 housing crash. Everyone that went bankrupt couldnt buy a house for 7 years after their insolvency. That caused rents to rise, but also slow home sales. Once those people could buy houses again did, but even those people took time save properly so the buying period was (2008 + 7 years) give or take 7 additional years. Which is where we are at now. Everyone that cannot buy a house right now has the ability to change their lifestyle drastically and save. Move and save. etc.... There is plenty of housing (and jobs) if people were willing to change their lives for what they want instead of forcing the land to bend to their will.

> Land in places with jobs is scarce

This is 100% incorrect.

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