Census Bureau: 3.8M renters will likely be evicted in the next two months
finance.yahoo.com
finance.yahoo.com
1. What is the optimal rate of property value growth and why?
2. What is the optimal cost of housing (a multiple of yearly income?) and why?
3. Are people who own property incentivized to keep supply low?
It's a growing trope that "housing can be either affordable or an investment but not both." I think I agree, but everyone has to see that their growing property value is selfish and that it directly harms their children before anything can be done about it. Georgism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism) gets thrown around a lot, but I haven't wrapped my head around it yet.
The idea that "housing can be either affordable or an investment but not both" is also incorrect.
There is nothing wrong with having profitable housing investments, and that doesn't make it un-affordable, just the same as any other good or service does not become un-affordable just because it is profitable to provide.
As a general principle, something being profitable is a signal that said thing is necessary, and decreasing said profitability will only result in resources being diverted away from providing it. If you think housing is expensive now, you will be very unhappy with how expensive it will get once you make it unattractive to provide it.
The fact of the matter is that the high cost of housing has one primary cause, and it is not due to high profit margins. Indeed the high profit margins are a symptom of the cause.
The cause is a lack of strong property rights that enable property owners to do what they will with their property without anyone else, including the state, being able to tell them "No".
That's it.
It is very simple.
Everywhere you go in the world, you will see that in places where property owners have strong rights to do what they like with their properties, a competitive market forms and prices are subsequently reduced through that competition. You need only compare San Francisco to Tokyo to see this in action.
It is the urge of people like you, who wish to expropriate property owners of their property, either in full by taking their property away from them, or in part by imposing taxes on said property or restrictions on said property and its use, that cause high prices.
And it's inevitable that those high prices arise, after all those things are costs and property owners, investors and society in general will always bear those costs.
If you truly want affordable housing, then you need only do one thing... Nothing.
Tell property owners "We will not tax you, we will not restrict what you can do with your property in any way", and then act according to that.
Alternatively you can keep going on this well trodden path that for millennia has continued to cause the same problems it claims to want to stop.
It’s hard to profit from a home in Tokyo outside of being a developer. That’s a good thing. But you’re implying you can have your cake (affordable housing) and eat it too (profitable housing). Not true. You can have largely affordable with only a few making profits, but not the majority.
It’s less about lack of regulation on the individual level than for developers, which I think is important to distinguish. Both are good, but being able to build more / rebuild easily are more important than say regulations on types of pools.
Why do you believe this? There is a functional rental market in Tokyo and I don't believe it is any less profitable than any other investment on a risk adjusted basis.
The same applies to the home ownership market in Tokyo.
If it were, the market would shrink until risk-adjusted return parity would be achieved.
Edit - median rent in the USA is above this, rent in Vancouver seems stablish actually?
I’m seriously considering learning French and moving to Montreal. Learning a new language is less painful than Vancouver rent
Vancouver is artificially limit housing supply through zoning (like many large cities), keeps price high and gets higher every year with increase in population.
> So basically.. showing that supply and demand works. Lots of people left SV due to remote jobs and COVID, demand dropped, price went down.
It may have worked for him, but rents have still increased in the South Bay over the last couple years-- just less so than the rest of the country. It's still one of the most expensive rental markets. Vacancy rates have fallen, too.
Only SF itself has lower rents than it had before COVID-19 (and fractionally so).
Pretty tough being a baby in the US I suppose, gotta learn to walk, talk, and pay the rent.
Landlords are not social security, and should not be expected to subsidize your wants.
Empathy is good, and perhaps we could use more of it, but dismissing someone as “heartless” for questioning the intent of some renters also strikes me as naive.
This is just supply and demand though, rents will hopefully be on the way down as a result of this.
There's a pretty strong upward trend and very low vacancy rates. This will obviously create some vacancy, but I think we're talking about some of the upward pressure being removed, but not necessarily rents falling.
They likely can raise the rents for new tenants, because tenants in process of being evicted (formally or not) may rent a new unit with a longer overlap than usual before relinquishing the new unit, and often there are lengthy repairs necessary on units where the most recent tenant was evicted, keeping that unit off the market for even longer. 'Cash for keys' can often get the unit rentable faster, the departing tenant will leave on a schedule and hopefully take better care during the move, or at least allow for inspection prior to moving out to allow for scheduling of necessary repairs and maintenance.
And guess the condition tenants like this leave the apartment
But sigh, policymakers aren't dummies, and there's gotta be a reason they chose moratorium... my guess is that rental agreements are private contracts not directly reported to the government and therefore impossible to support. There's better reporting on your local coffee shop than your average rental.
IMHO this lack of direct reporting is insane given the $ involved but I'm also not sure how you fix this... let alone in the couple of weeks that the govt had in 2020...
But expecting private property owners to eat it is absurd
There was no way this was going to be allowed to happen during the worst of covid.