Come to England, we've already done that! One of only two countries in the world to completely privatise its water, the other being Chile.
https://www.bmj.com/content/378/bmj.o2076
Just wow. Also, English water is 70% foreign owned apparently. That sounds unsettling. Also, didn't Liz Truss's cabinet not have a single English man on it recently? Out of 22 spots not one English male. Also isn't London property like 40% foreign owned?
Interesting times we live in.
Having to buy 1000l of water for £1 and sell it for £1.20 gives a major investment to not throw the stock away through leaks. Other company have incentives to do things like building more storage (to buy supply when it's cheap and sell when it's not), and the consumer gets to choose which supplier to use. Same with sewage.
The main problem is the last mile would have to remain in public ownership as you couldn't have multiple companies providing pipes to each premises, and that I believe is where most of the leaks go
It does seem like if you have the government and industry working together on something, it's the worst of all worlds rather than just one or the other.
Basically the local road (the fibre) is paid for by the local city and run on behalf of the residents, the local road transports people (packets) to the airport (municipal data centre), where the ISPs pay landing fees to take people where they need to go at different rates for different services, with competition between ISPs, and pretty easy entry costs, ensuring high standards, low prices, and plenty of choice.
Is there an exact definition of an "English man" you know that we aren't aware of? Most of them are born and brought up in England, they seem pretty English to me. And why do you specifically point out males, what about English females?
Rather than people whose parents came to England because it has a good economy.
Boo fucking hoo. 1/6th of all British forces in WW2 were Indian, of course you don't count them. All this is ironic considering Britain murdered and raped the rest of the world to be where it is today. India was the cash cow of the empire without which Britain would not survive the war. And economic migration has been happening throughout human history, it is a fact of life. Immigrants today are actually saving the country by keeping the economy afloat and maintaining values of hard work which the "multi-generational English" people seem to have forgotten. Stop being a miserable old racist c*nt, go outside and actually talk to some brown people and fix your pitiful existence.
Now you're just rationalizing what's going on in England today. Every country on the planet fought tooth and nail for all of our existence.
> 1/6th of all British forces in WW2 were Indian
I like how you make the distinction between Indian and Britain.
> values of hard work which the "multi-generational English" people seem to have forgotten
All that hard work only seems to matter in the context of European and North American and Australian countries for some reason.Why isn't India the greatest GDP country on the planet if what you're saying is true?
I'm a huge fan of brown people and all people in general. I'm just not a huge fan of the billions of a singular culture subsuming the world simply because they don't have ecologically responsible numbers of children. Indians are fleeing India but you can't flee the planet.
> Every country on the planet fought tooth and nail for all of our existence
Ah yes. Killing hundreds of millions and siphoning off trillions over couple hundred years, only to "fight for your own existence". You even worship Churchill as a hero who was worse than Hitler. You are a joke.
> I like how you make the distinction between Indian and Britain.
Asians were considered as a different class/caste in your own English legal system and denied certain rights back then. So yeah.
> Why isn't India the greatest GDP country on the planet if what you're saying is true?
Yeah, and why can't we solve nuclear fusion already? Surely it only takes a few years...
> because they don't have ecologically responsible numbers of children
Poverty leads to high birth rates, not culture. If you had the slightest clue about anything you would understand that fundamental fact. Read up on demographic transition, and how it has been delayed in Asia/Africa because of European imperialism. I recommend the book Factfulness by Hans Rosling. Birth rates are falling everywhere and human population will hit the peak in a few decades. As for fucking the planet, read up on which countries have the highest cumulative emissions and continue to have high per-capita emissions because of their greedy lifestyles. There was a time when London had worse air than Delhi today. Things change, unlike your static worldview.
I'm really starting to question the quality of your education system, maybe that's why your country is failing. No worries, we're here to take the wheel. Signing off from London, UK.
It's clear that some of the Indian people flooding into England have minimal respect for the British culture. It's just something they have to memorize to get the immigration paper. I wonder how many Indian people in power have the same views.
Its just sad to see an entire culture that gave the world so much...subsumed by a culture that has ecologically irresponsible amounts of children.
To be fair the British are opening the doors to let it happen.
For Indians*. It's not hard to understand, Churchill caused more harm than Hitler in India.
> people flooding into England have minimal respect for the British culture
Wrong. I respect rule of law, democratic institutions, scientific rigour, equality, secularism. That I believe is British culture. I will always root for these values, and indeed these are also the fundamental values of the Indian constitution. My problem is only with people like you who have forgotten these values. I consider myself more British than you. Well tbf I consider myself a global citizen.
What I do not respect is denial of your own history, weird unfounded superiority complex and meddling in other countries affairs. US and allies have a history of supporting non-democratic genocidal regimes in many parts of the world including the Indian subcontinent, all while claiming a moral high ground.
> subsumed by a culture that has ecologically irresponsible amounts of children.
You don't learn do you? Go read the book I mentioned in my previous comment.
> To be fair the British are opening the doors to let it happen.
There are many Brits smarter than you who see the bigger picture.
Good for you Indians. Keep up the good work of turning Britain into your home literally.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Yes-th...
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040215/how-does-law...
Edit: And downvoted, follow the Science^TM except Economics, in that case follow randos
You can draw a set of supply and demand curves which keep prices the same under a supply increase, but not bc “large corporate interests keep prices pinned.” More important is that that special case is not relevant to housing markets.
There is also relevant empirical work on this issue. Increase supply and prices will fall. I’d bet you a billion dollars on that outcome.
yes, because JP is investing in a depreciating asset, lmao.
Edit: Folks blaming Capitalism, Sauron, etc., but none will open up a spare room vin their home for the homeless for free (due to "reasons"), lmao.
I agree that there is no guarantee that building housing lowers prices, other causes (like increases in demand) may cause prices to go up (and the increased supply would lower the upward pressure). But I have a hard time to understand how increased supply would not have a downward effect on prices.
We can build housing much more efficiently and cheaply than we could 60 years ago, yet it's never been harder to buy a house.
The law of supply and demand only works as expected when used in an extremely simplified model.
If you account for all the other real factors (corporate greed, governmental intervention, NIMBYsm) that are skimmed over by economists, it becomes clear that the law of supply and demand should never be used alone to forecast future economic conditions.
If that was true, buying a house today would be as easy as it was in the 60s. In fact it isn't.
It does, if that is the only thing that happens. If land owners or existing home owners willingness to sell, prospective renters or buyers willingness to buy, or any number of different things also change then those effects can overshadow an increase in supply. As they frequently do.
Starbucks keeps opening new locations but that doesn't say much to the effect that the price of a cup of coffee will decrease.
The housing price could keep rising forever but the demand will always be high, it's not like people can just "give up on housing for this year".
Being a mega-landlord will also allow JPMorgan to influence the general market price.
So no, it's not really as easy as "the laws of supply and demand".
Edit: lol, never ever touch the dogmas of neoclassical economics on HN. Running into a church during mess and shouting profanity would get you a better reception.
If I produce 100 widgets and am perfectly happy selling them for $10 and barely think I'll sell 10 of them.. but then they are highly popular and everyone wants them, you might see me constantly increasing the price because people like them and want to buy them. But that is literally greed in action. I did the math that I would make a nice profit at $10. But now that rich people decide they will pay $50 for each one just because they have the money and don't care, the people that could only afford $10 are priced out. And now the price has been increased and only people with a lot of disposable income can afford it.
Yeah, look at that "supply & demand" in action. Greed and and an excuse of "but wut could I do, the curves I plotted forced me to increase my prices even though I could have left them alone!"
The above is exactly a ticketmaster type example. We let "the market" set the price because people are willing to pay more and more, but those are the small percentage with a lot of disposable income that then get to have all the fun while people sit back and say "no one has a right to go to the concert [except those that can afford to keep on paying more and more]".
Economics is literally based on the assumption and ACCEPTANCE that everyone is a greedy asshole like yourself.
If you’ve cornered the market in ‘luxury’ widgets, someone else will make a ‘bargain’ widget and sell to those with less money.
Hotels are a good example. The luxury brands are competing for the wealthy. But, you don’t have to be a Ritz-Carlton to make money… indeed, you can often make more by selling rooms to the less wealthy (as there are more of them.) And, on it goes, all the way down to the Motel 6’s and the mom-and-pop motels.
Edit: Agreed @cloverich, it's possible I did miss the point. At the same time, automotive price increases seem disproportionately higher compared to other fungible goods. It's possible the supply chain and labor issues have hit this sector harder than e.g. farming. It'd be interesting to quantify what the differential would be without the capacity from new factories.
This is the most naive take. JP morgan is going to sqeeze as much profit as possible, why would they do anything to lower rents?
Everyone in this thread is acting as though anyone building new houses is Sauron and that any action will make house prices and rents always go up.
Being single-family homes complicates the issue, too. We're not talking about high-density units, so the growing housing supply is fairly constrained. I don't see it being enough competition to lead to a pricing war. Meanwhile, it's taking away land that could have been used for home ownership, which will likely raise the value of other single-family homes in the area, movin home ownership even further out of reach for many.
I get that not everyone wants to own a home, but it's nice to have the option. If you're laying down roots, you can lock in a fixed-rate mortgage and have an asset. When renting from a megalandlord you're subject to the whims of quarterly earnings and your one year lease might not afford much protection. I think you're also discounting the cost and hassle of having to move when JP Morgan raises prices above the competition. It's very unlikely people will exit en masse, causing the landlord to adjust the rental price back down.
You might be fine with all of that, but ridiculing people because they're uneasy with the situation is not helping the discussion at all.
That may be higher than today, but it is lower than an alternate future where we ban building houses.
JP Morgan is building more housing though, which is always a good thing because it increases supply. Governments need to ensure that building more housing remains an accessible and profitable venture.
Why does anyone? To capture market from people who don’t.
JPMorgan can squeeze as much profit as possible AND lower rents.
Companies will extract as much profit as possible. But this isn’t always a bad thing as it can be quite profitable to service customers in a mutually beneficial way.
This is pretty simple supply and demand and if you increase the supply, then prices will drop.
So, if I have 4,000 units and I let 100 stay empty to raise rents 8%, I win.
Rents aren’t chosen arbitrarily by the landlord. They can’t set to whatever they like, else they’d increase 100%.
This is different is a single landlord has a monopoly or there’s a cartel. But in a typical city there might be 500k units for rent. So if a landlord raises rent by 8% on their 4,000 units, then people will likely choose other units that didn’t go up.
Not to be dismissive, but this is basic econ101 and any intro text will have lots of examples and evidence of these principles at work.
I mean, you could write it as "better to have X% units empty instead of lowering rents by Y%, given Y >= X + Z, where Z is positive number determined by several factors" if you like
No, clearly not. Housing isn't a commodity and moving is a pain. If I offered you $10/month in a rent reduction (or off the mortgage if you own) to move across the street to an identical home, would you? How about saving $10/month in return for increasing your commute by 10 minutes a day?
Obviously, both of those become worth it at some level of savings. And decreasing rent by 0.05% to double the units occupied is worth it (probably). But there's a huge overlap in the middle where it's not clear what the effects will be, and that's where the real world is.
It's definitely true that things are more complicated in the real world, but that fact doesn't have-wave us into "Z is non-negative" territory.
That is, not only is Y=X a bad deal, but Y=X+Z is a bad deal for a good deal of positive Zs. Up to Zmax which is a positive value. For all values of Z < Zmax (including negative Zs) it's bad for JPM
Thankfully everyone else who is currently in the rental business is NOT donig this already?
Speaking of naive, you fail to understand JPM will have to compete with the existing landlords or their units will remain empty.
housing never goes down. rent has steadily increased from 800 for a 3 bd in my area to 1500 in 6 years. (rural Utah).
this isn't apples and oranges comparison. rental markets aren't the same as consumer markets.
And sure housing goes down, check out prices after 2008. Condos in Miami could be bought for $30,000. They couldn't give them away.
After that there's diminishing returns. You are correct.
If supply was able to grow to meet demand, then that would put downward pressure on prices, but it isn't allowed to grow, and everyone other than the lord of the land suffers.
But would at least buy a hundred years or so for other cities around the country to develop solid economies so I'm all for it.
Sure, still technically finite, but even just at the Netherlands' population density, we could fit the world population into 1/10th of the world's land area, so it isn't a real constraint.
London density could easily be that of Westminster (the borough with large open areas such as Hyde Park, Green Park, St James Gardens, most of Regents Park etc -- imagine all London boroughs having that much public open space).
Westminster isn't even particularly dense, but that alone would allow an extra 6 million people to live in Greater London.
Go for Manhattan density and that's 3 times Westminster, allowing 45 million in Greater London.
The article says:
> The first installment will include a purchase of 250 homes in three communities around the Atlanta metropolitan area.
Corpos that compete with me when I am buying housing for my family can go suck a big fat dick.
Why? If they're willing to overpay for properties it will benefit the current homeowner and will encourage new development
In my opinion, housing is the final frontier for this. If housing is bought up by corporates and rented back, we are both feet into corporate dystopia. Land should be between citizens and the states that write the titles.
Providing rental properties is a valuable service
Carpenters and bricklayers provide a service. Plumbers and electricians provide a service. Simply holding a deed is not a service.
I don’t believe my case is particularly uncommon. In ~20 years of renting, ~$500k of rent paid, the total maintenance done on the units I’ve rented probably cost under $100. Toss in the most expensive paint and cleaning regimen after I’ve vacated, and let’s call it a cool $1,000. If the value landlords are providing is “maintaining properties”, their margins here are colossal.
My point is simply that these things don't take care of themselves and need to be managed one way or another.
I’ve had all appliances replaced, a new roof (and a new ceiling when this leaked), the parking lot resurfaced twice, and a new water heater, endless bits and bobs (sink disposal, all new light switches, door knobs, fully new shower enclosure and faucets). Maintenance shovels snow, cleans up leaves, and de-ices. I have never mowed a lawn, shoveled snow nor done any physical labor at all- I’m still in good shape, there’s a gym and pool on premises.
My apartment is small, that’s why it’s inexpensive. But I won’t have kids and don’t need >1 bedroom. Already married for the whole time as well. Depends on how one wants to live their life.
- Property taxes
- Hazard insurance
- Debt service
- Some utilities (water, trash, sometimes even electricity and HVAC, depending on your rental agreement)
- Maintenance and repair of exterior and common spaces
- Repairs and updates after you move out, and before you move in (assuming you have not been in the same apartment for 20 years)
The value provided to you in the owner's margin includes:
- Someone to call if *anything* goes wrong. (Oven broken? faucet dripping? window stuck? Disposal burned out? All problems have one simple solution: Call this number.)
- Flexibility of movement. Want to move at the end of your lease? No problem. (Need to sell to move? That will be a long and/or exhausting process, and will cost you 6% of the property sale price!)
- The security of knowing that you will never be hit by surprise maintenance costs. $30K for a new roof? $20K for a new furnace? $250K for a seismic retrofit? Never going to be your problem.
- The ability to live where you want to! In many locations, there are no apartment-equivalent units for sale.
But as an exchange of cash for services, the equation is more balanced than you might realize.
In exchange for a fraction of what the real maintenance cost of a large repair will be, you get peace of mind that you will never be actually responsible for fixing it or footing the whole bill. The landlord gets to collect profits but one day will have to fix a major problem (and this is guaranteed -- houses wear down over time) that will require them to dip into said profits.
And then you have risk. There are levels of damage that will render the unit or units uninhabitable, wiping out possible years if not decades of gains. The margin is to (theoretically) protect against that.
Not saying this is the perfect system, and definitely greed has inflated these margins while reducing the value of services rendered, but this is the core idea behind it.
But it’s illogical by any standard economic model that any supplier will not build more units if they see it can bring in more money. Either they build more or someone else does.
Crazy real estate prices are caused by NIMBYs blocking new builds - heavy interfering.
Check out this graph of new builds in the States. Zoom out to max. Note how it’s basically flat with some ups and downs. It should go up exponentially with the population. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/housing-starts
Here’s a sheet from the gov that seems to show something similar: https://www.census.gov/construction/nrc/xls/starts_cust.xls
We need millions of new units. The capital for that can come from individuals or corporations, but corporations are just a way to pool capital and seems like a quicker and more effective approach.
No corporation in any industry has ever cared about community and affordability. And yet these things have emerged multiple times wherever sane, free markets exist.
Are you saying that regulation (market interference) is universally bad?
The dream would be that individual ownership is cheaper, but maybe if the prices were lower building towers wouldn't be lucrative to developers. I am sure there are a bunch of edge cases like that.
I have owned single family homes and condos and rented apartments and condos. There are good reasons for all of these choices. Those proposing to allow fewer choices are not convincing me that they have thought it through.
The possibilities here are endless. We don't have to keep living the way we do in the USA.
Large buildings require lots of maintenance and specialized management skills. Laws can be updated so that individual apartment owners have similar rights to SFH owners who own both land and structure (a 3D model of land ownership?) Developers could be compelled to provide maintenance service but allowed to collect a small fee in exchange.
Society is a construct, so we can really just construct this however which way we want. Only our imaginations limit us.
Why aren't they all corporate owned yet? I think a lot of renting is not profitable but if all you need is a place to live that's no problem. Perhaps I'm a bit ignorant here?
The issue I forsee is deep pockets cornering specific markets and dictating the price to people who haven't got as much flexibility. Corporate scale slum lords, in other words. It is already happening with private real estate investors.
Anyone can ship in and sell potatoes, I can even buy them online. The market forces work because I have so much flexibility. Not everyone can move, nor should they have to move just because money moves in. People live in communities not investment potfolios.
But within a given city you have a choice of hundreds, or even thousands of landlords? Any specific building might only be owned by one landlord, but you don't exactly have to move to the other side of a city to get away from that landlord.
Columbus has recently found itself to be the new largest city and center of economic growth in the state, and changed rapidly and radically over the past couple of decades. As a result, it's nowhere near as seasoned and well-established as many other major metros, and the massive influx of new monied interests into the area quickly cornered their respective markets.
Moving back to the Cleveland area, which was quite the boom town a century ago but has infamously been in near-perpetual decline ever since (with many residents, like I had, migrating to Columbus), has much healthier competition in the rental market.
Perhaps in a few decades as new assets are built and today's ones slosh around the economy, Columbus will have healthier, more diverse competition and see your point ring true. It's certainly healthy in other sectors—one of my favorite things about living there was the great wealth of hole-in-the-wall bodegas, ethnic grocers, restaurants, and food trucks around me that meant even on my last dime I could always try new cuisines—but at least for those of us for whom even a high five-figure income is a distant dream, options are very limited.
[1] https://perc.tamu.edu/PERC-Blog/PERC-Blog/U-S-Farm-Subsidies...
The thing that's really worrying is this - real estate is inherently unproductive. Investment capital ought to be steered into areas that yield technological progress, not into the equivalent of gold stored inside a mattress.
That's the real reason that policy that keeps housing affordable is needed. It's not only good social policy but also good technological policy.
All land should be owned by the public. To use it you would rent it for the market value, that money would be distributed to the citizens as a basic income. As the land becomes more valuable (society shifts to urbanization and cities become more valued), the cost of that land increases, but so does the basic income.
That's what happens now, except the people benefiting from the cost of the land isn't the public, but the land owner.
On the other hand, if a new power plant is opened up, land value reduces, and the land occupier pays less. Currently they just lose out, hence the NIMBY problem.
This is not about buying existing homes. This is a joint venture to build new build-to-rent housing developments.
> The build-to-rent trend initially emerged during the Great Recession as a way for homebuilders to continue adding supply at a time when consumers were not buying homes. It refers to a process where developers construct an entire community of typically detached single-family homes that are later rented out by an operating partner.
In my opinion, this strategy and investment makes sense to large institutions like JPMorgan because interest rates are high while property values remain high. Building new rental housing increases overall supply, which is something that should, at least in theory, help people like you.
Recently, for example, the arguments around off-shoring jobs have changed completely due to the supply-chain crisis and its impact being greater than situation previously, when the only consequence had been that the people that dont matter lost their jobs.
I agree that most people can't, and we need to do something to ward off a populist uprising
Now where does the average person find the initial capital, such that they can enter the game of capitalism..
The average person gets the initial capital to enter the game of capitalism by living like a poor person and banking the difference. That's how it works: this "capital" that earns a return is simply the difference between what people earn and what they consume. If you get a positive return on it you might eventually start being able to earn like a rich person and live like an average person.
But that's not enough Lords!
Strong, "let them eat cake" energy with this one.
I think you're spot on with this.
This seems to be the public establishment of a neo-feudalism, where the new barons are the megacorp capitalists, who can afford to strategize long-term and implement land grabs, while lobbying with governments to strenghthen their stranglehold on the people by capturing natural resources. Capitalist piracy, in a sense.
Now, I'm not a (neo-) Marxist in the strict sense, but this is too much in line with the Marxist understanding of the state as an institution that looks out for the interests of (big) property owners, rather than those of the people.
Fast forward a couple of decades, and we can project with some certainty an outright voiding the social contract that understands the state as a neutral institution that cares for the interest of the people, and reverting to such feudal-esque configurations.
And, for the record, no, I don't believe for one second that playing it the capitalist way and buying shares in megacorps has any possibility of having a positive counter-balancing effect. It'd be more like buying shares in slaveships, and partaking of the profits of the trade.
Because of inflationary currencies that punish anyone that simply accumulates money instead of investing it. They want to make everything "efficient" by incentivizing everyone to either spend their money or lend it out so that someone else can spend it. Under such a system, people must allocate their capital just to break even. To fail to do so is to lose money to inflation.
After a certain point, personal wealth is nothing more than a highscore showing how good you are at the capitalism game. There is no need to accumulate an ever-growing pile of money - you could just spend it on stuff and let trickle-down economics do its job. It's not like you are going to need it when you inevitably die.
It creates the incessant need to offset those losses. This turns housing into an investment and prices everyone out.
> After a certain point, personal wealth is nothing more than a highscore showing how good you are at the capitalism game.
What? No. Money is a form of power. It's hard for mere mortals like us to even comprehend the extent of the power wielded by the truly rich individuals and corporations.
With enough money, you can buy laws by lobbying the government. If that doesn't work, you can often just ignore laws and buy yourself out of trouble once it catches up with you. Fines? They're nothing.
Want to see something happen? Just invest some money into it and things will start happening immediately. Want to change things in the world? Just buy whatever you want to change and remake it as you see fit. Use money to incentivize the behavior you desire.
There is no point after which it's enough. The more you have, the more powerful you are. You're limited only by your dreams and ambition. There are rich people out there who bought military fighter jets just to fly around in a highly maneuverable aircraft. How many children out there dream of doing that?
> It's not like you are going to need it when you inevitably die.
My children will. My parents worked hard to give me a good life. I consider it my personal responsibility to honor that effort by going even further in life than they did. I want my children to be even more successful than me.