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Comment by philliphaydon | Hacker News Reader

Because today houses are not for living in. They are investments.

There's multiple issues that need solving now.

1) Being able to purchase a house without ever setting foot in the country. NZ decided to stop foreigners buying houses. There were websites you can go in and people from China would buy houses without ever setting foot in NZ... The buying power of alot of people from China and India is huge. This drives up prices.

Let's not forget, most countries in Asia you literally cannot buy property if you're a foreigner. You have have to have a spouse or buy via a 3rd party who owns it and you pay them fees to hold it for you.

2) Houses are no longer valued based on your income, they are based on what you can earn.

This is difficult to solve. You need rentals to assist with foreign labour. But you want to remove rentals to prevent houses being investment properties.

Maybe they should cap the number of houses a family can own, and a business cannot rent out a home. It's built for sale, not built for rental.

3) Housing shortages. Housing supply should be assisted by the government via BTO's. Built to Order. Rather than taking huge loans from banks, you can buy a house from the government at a fixed price, that you will pay back. If you don't pay the government takes it back, otherwise you cannot sell that house for the first 10 years of ownership. You cannot rent it out for the first 5 years of ownership. Somewhat similar to how Singapore runs their BTOs.

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The reasons we don’t have enough homes is because governments have made it illegal to build enough new homes to meet demand.

You are essentially say that the presence of car collectors leads to car shortages.

Those things are not the same though!

Cars and Houses do not perform in the same way financially.

Houses tend to increase in value, Cars tend to decline in value.

There are, of course, outliers in both markets.

> Houses tend to increase in value, Cars tend to decline in value.

this is an observation that may be mostly supported by data right now, but also is not super meaningful.

WHY do houses appreciate? why do cars depreciate?

The answer is supply and demand: supply of housing is far more regulated than supply of cars - height limits and zoning are frequent reasons, but any sort of building approval process with unnecessary hurdles can increase supplier risk and cost. Most of these processes aren't set up with demand in mind. whereas if you are an automaker and want to churn out another 10000 cars, there's no laws stopping you (fuel efficiency / emissions requirements notwithstanding).

The problem with houses is that since a large portion of the population thinks they are investments, anything that would increase supply would devalue their investment, so fixing the regulations around them is a political quagmire.

I suppose cars, as machines, also have increasing maintenance costs over time. the same is true of houses, just over a much longer timescale... if houses depreciated instead of appreciated, we might see more torn down after 30-50 years rather than always repairing everything. Certainly the tradeoffs would start to look different.

Houses are basically NFTs

<ducks>

In what way? The public registry of who owns what? The long transaction times? The high transaction fees? The rampant speculation beyond any sensible value? The "buy now or be forever poor" messaging?

> Houses tend to increase in value

They don't have to. This happens when an area gets popular and zoning regulations don't allow enough new supply to meet the demand.

Sorry, but no. Land sometimes appreciate in value. The homes built on the land nearly always depreciate in value.

And when land appreciates in value (aka by being near schools, hospitals, and well-paying jobs), we distribute the higher cost of the land among multiple homes by building taller, denser types of housing. This is presently illegal in much of the US however.

Many SFH's here in Seattle are being torn down to build multiple 3 story town homes with no yards and rooftop decks (I live in one). They still go for a million, but there are plenty of people here with that purchasing power to buy them.

Still cheaper than a 2 bedroom apartment in Beijing.

Yep, tell me about. Part of the reason is that the market is still out of whack from decades of under-building. However, the bigger reason is that new homes have always been relatively expensive. The construction costs have to be immediately recouped for one thing, and they’re often located in more desirable areas.

The beauty of new homes is that they give the Amazon tech bro something to buy instead of coming into your neighborhood and bidding up the price of the older homes. That’s the good things about new homes: They help keep old homes cheaper.

> Part of the reason is that the market is still out of whack from decades of under-building.

In the USA, anyways, many people left the home construction industry after the 2008 crash, and didn't come back when things picked up again. That means...no apprentices were trained up, experience was lost, etc...so labor costs have shot through the roof because experience is quite limited.

And try even renovating an old home! You get quotes of like $150k just to do a kitchen.

Land in desirable areas with permission to build houses on it tends to increase in value. In most cases the house itself is a depreciating asset.

Houses wear down just like cars. They behave exactly the same way.

If there was a car-note interest deduction like there is a mortgage interest deduction, you can bet that every car owner would apply pressure to shutter car factories, effectively shifting value to the spare parts market to remain sustainable.

> The reasons we don’t have enough homes is because governments have made it illegal to build enough new homes to meet demand.

> You are essentially say that the presence of car collectors leads to car shortages.

The price of a old car, a new car, a cheap car, and an expensive luxuary car, all vary greatly. Cars are more or less open for purchase by everyone.

Houses a fixed in a location, you cannot pick it up and move it. Let's look at each point.

1) If a house in a street costs $200,000. And you have a ton of money and go online and find the house and for you it doesn't even tickle your bank account. But you want to get some money out of your own country and into another country as a safty net or investment. Or maybe you move to said country and your buying power is much greater than the locals.

"Oh, its ONLY 200k? Heres cash"

The house next door is like "huh, the market value of this street is 170k and he sold his house for 200k? I'm gonna list mine for 220k"

"Oh, it's ONLY 220k? Heres cash"

The house next door is like "huh, the market value of this street is 170k and he sold his house for 220k? I'm gonna list mine for 300k"

"Oh, it's ONLY 300k? Heres cash"

Mean while the locals are like "oh I only needed a 20k deposit, now I need 30, 40... 100... 200k deposit"

Locals are getting priced out of their own country. This happened in NZ and Australia.

2) This I don't know how you can dispute. It's a fact that 100 years ago, houses were an asset, not an investment. Why do people need to own more than 2 houses? There are people who own, 5, 10, 30, and even more. There are businsses setup around buying property to rent it out.

What has happened is people got into the market early, with houses that cost 100k, 200k, maybe even close to 1 million dollars. And each time they buy and remortgage the house to leverage buying another property, to rent it out, use that to pay the mortgage payments, which in alot of cases rent is MORE than the mortgage.

Yet the people PAYING Rent are not in a position to get a loan to buy the same house. You often here "oh just buy a house, because renting you're paying someone elses mortgage". How to you do that when you cannot get a loan to buy the same house? How is it fair?

3) Housing Shortage. 100 years ago, people would buy property, and pay a builder to build a house on it. At some point this more or less got flipped and its builders and property developers who buy property, build a house, then sell it.

You do not need governments to build houses to solve the problem. People are simply priced out of being able to build houses. It's MUCH harder to buy an empty lot, and get a loan from a bank to build a house on that lot now.

Can governments assist with housing shortages, ABSOLUTELY. But you cannot simply blame the government on the housing shortage aspect because they aren't building enough. There are much bigger issues causing the problem.

> It's MUCH harder to buy an empty lot, and get a loan from a bank to build a house on that lot now.

No it’s not

https://www.lendingtree.com/home/fha/getting-an-fha-construc...

This appears to be the US? It’s not as easy in NZ/AU. While you can do it, the average joe would probably throw in the towel on the whole process.

Also the US still has states you can find good jobs in with houses that are still 200k. In the likes of NZ You have Auckland and wellington and prices that far exceed majority middle income workers.

While getting FHA 203(k) might be easy, the details are a pain in the ass. I got one to get a new roof on my first house.

Imagine all the usual shitty mis-communication and last-minute paperwork of dealing with a mortgage agent... plus last-minute fun with contractors, who are used to answering on a very different schedule. E.g. "Oh, I need 2 more competitive quotes for the same work in the next 2 days, even though you've already found your contractor" or "Oh, these quotes don't specify exactly the same work, so need to be redone."

At the end of the day, the process requires you to waste a lot of contractors' time soliciting bids for work you're never going to hire them for.

Hindsight 20/20, I would encourage finding any other method of financing work. Make your mortgage as simple as possible, so there's a chance the agent might not @&$# it up. Then deal with contractors on your own timeline.

Opposite anecdote: I walked into a model home, talked to the builder, chose a plot of land in the community, chose a floor plan with the options I wanted and had a brand new house built on it within 6 months.

I did that twice…

Both times in metro Atlanta.

Ironically, this was in metro Atlanta as well. I'd note that it was for reno work (roof and some deck) rather than new build.

I'd hope the new build market is a little more professional.

Although I saw a couple strip-to-frame-and-rebuild houses worked on and then failed code (word on the street was improper framing nailing, ouch) near another house in Kirkwood, so I guess there's dipshits the world over.

Your’e confused about this specific conversation and the US housing market in general. I read your post several times, and can’t make heads or tails of what you’re trying to say. Sorry.

I will make one point: in the US, it’s never been the government’s job to build homes. That’s always been left primarily to the private sector. Right now however, governments won’t allow the private sector to build enough homes. They’ve made it illegal, especially apartments.

It’s like if the government banned the production of new cars. In a few years time, a 1995 Honda accord would be worth $20,000.

The US obviously has its own problems, and I absolutely don't know the US market well enough. My comments are based around canada banning foreigners from buying homes and my knowledge on similar issues in NZ/AU.

The US however is a huge plot of land with varying housing prices across the country, even if you had foreigners buying properties, it doesn't have the same impact on the country as it does in NZ/AU/Canada.

Populations:

Canada: 38m

Australia: 25m

New Zealand: 5m

US: 332m

The impact hurts us more than the US.

Yes, I agree that NZ’s much smaller size makes it a more challenging case. NZ will be more affected in the short term by large swings in demand from foreign buyers.

> I will make one point: in the US, it’s never been the government’s job to build homes.

That might be technically correct on the build part, but the US government used to subsidize home ownership through loans as described in [1], e.g.

> GI Bill benefits that guarantied home loans helped many Americans buy houses and move into the suburbs.

[1] https://www.exploros.com/summary/The-Growth-of-Suburbia

I think you are more right than you realize. The US Federal government still to this day subsidizes and promotes home ownership. The mortgage tax deduction, the Home Sales Tax exclusion, and even the fixed rate 30 year mortgage itself - without which most of us could never buy a home in the first place - subsidizes home ownership.

But the actual building of homes is left to the private sector, which is frequently banned from building new homes by local governments.

It’s a strange situation: the Feds promote home ownership, while local governments make home ownership difficult by limiting the number of homes that can be built. It’s little wonder the housing market is so dysfunctional.

> How to you do that when you cannot get a loan to buy the same house? How is it fair?

if they cannot get a loan to buy a yacht, or a lambo, how come you don't make the same argument?

Owning a house is not some natural right. Being able to afford shelter is, and renting accomplishes that. If rent is skyrocketing, then there's a problem and the gov't needs to address it. But rents have not grown in relation to the cost of the house - in fact, rent is cheaper in most cases.

> You do not need governments to build houses to solve the problem.

no, but not because of the reason you said. It's because the gov't (or more correctly, the local councils) is preventing new builds via zoning, as well as cultural preferences for standalone house, rather than dense living in high rises.

> "Oh, it's ONLY 300k? Heres cash"

i dont know if you've been misinformed, but foreign buyers haven't been a problem in australia (and NZ and canada) for a while - ever since 2018-2019. Most of the demand for real estate are from locals. Using foreigners is a scapegoat.

> if they cannot get a loan to buy a yacht, or a lambo, how come you don't make the same argument?

> Owning a house is not some natural right. Being able to afford shelter is, and renting accomplishes that. If rent is skyrocketing, then there's a problem and the gov't needs to address it. But rents have not grown in relation to the cost of the house - in fact, rent is cheaper in most cases.

Its in your best interest for someone to own their own property. Owning property is one of the key aspects of retirement. If people have no money or property at retirement then you end up as a tax payer, paying for the persons retirement. That causes you to need to have higher taxes to fund peoples retirements.

Owning property is also a safety net, if you lose your job, atleast you have a roof over your head. If not, well, youre gonna pay for it as a tax payer by giving the person the benefit or dole.

> i dont know if you've been misinformed, but foreign buyers haven't been a problem in australia (and NZ and canada) for a while - ever since 2018-2019. Most of the demand for real estate are from locals. Using foreigners is a scapegoat.

Just because after 2018 they didn't influence prices doesn't mean the market didn't get inflated because of them. I've met people in Singapore who are not PR or Citizen in Australia who own property in Australia and just rent it out to make more money. I've met 1 person from China who owns multiple properties in NZ and AU. Who had holidayed in AU but never been to NZ.

------------

The main problem here is people don't want to pay taxes, but want the government to bail them out at every possible road block. They want the government to protect them when it suits them, but 'fix' it if it suits someone else but not them.

So if you remove the government then you need property ownership to go up, if you want more government involvement, you need higher taxes and more rentals at lower costs.

Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes everything worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thanks for cleaning up our comments so we don't lose all the discussion.

Car collectors don’t turn around and rent cars. Thought car rental companies do - and they definitely impact prices for vehicles.

Some car collectors absolutely do rent out their vintage cars, for a variety of purposes including film, ad shoots, events, etc.

And an occasional mansion owner rents out a mansion for everything from movies to porn shoots.

That doesn’t impact the normal market though.

it's tough to engage with this kinda stuff i feel like, its either disingenuous or delusional. the brain rot is somewhere else, this is just a symptom.

Care are not investments, however classic cars can fetch high prices with collectors. Housing has become an investment as many of us have discovered the hard way. The government can address the housing crisis by building new housing at scale together with regulations to prevent speculation.

Please eliminate swipes and/or name-calling from your HN posts. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Your comment would be ok without that first bit.

Apologies

Appreciated! I've followed philliphaydon's suggestion and edited that bit out of both your comments. This way I can mark the moderation scolding off topic and collapse it.

Normally I'd never do that without getting your permission first, so if you object, please let me know and I'll put it back forthwith!

Can you edit out the nonsense bit from both our comments? I didn’t think there was anything wrong with his comment and think it prompted good conversation.

Ok, I've done that. Thanks for the suggestion.

> Because today houses are not for living in. They are investments.

The only reason homes can be considered investments is that governments limit supply so much that prices are forced to increase.

If it is just a matter of supply and demand, how come that increase in house prices have outpaced population growth by huge margins in many places? I mean look at places like, e.g. Germany which has a pretty stable population (it would be contracting if it wasn't for immigration), but house prices increased significantly over the last 10 years, pretty much throughout most of the country.

I don't know details about Germany, but you can't just look at national population trends. In the US for example, the problem is made worse by a trend of people moving from rural areas into cities.

And re the "huge margins" the relationship between supply and demand isn't linear. If you have 10% more households than homes, bidding wars will drive prices up way more than 10%.

Inflation-driven real asset appreciation.

Because the fed (and most other countries) have been printing money like no tomorrow for over a decade now.

There are several reasons; here’s a few, some US specific:

1. While the overall population may not have increased significantly in some countries, people have been migrating to cities from rural areas. This influx puts price pressure on urban housing. The US, for instance, likely has enough housing overall, it’s just spatially misallocated. A derelict, vacate home in Detroit doesn’t help someone in SF.

2. Many forms of denser housing are now illegal or have been torn down. Boarding houses are gone for instance. Boarders now compete for studios or one bedroom apts.

3. Smaller family sizes. It’s no longer common for a six person family to live in a three bedroom house. This used to be commonplace. Those six people are now two couples with a child each.

4. Related to point three, governments have made it illegal to reconfigure or replace larger homes with smaller homes more appropriate for smaller families or empty nesters. Think of the retired Boomer living in the 6 bedroom single family home, or the childless couple in a three bedroom condo with two of bedrooms being an office or guest room. Closely related, people often demand more space than they did 80 years ago.

5 This a big one: higher urban wages. After decades of wage stagnation, wages have been going up, especially in places like SF, NYC, and Boston. This is a GOOD thing. Not so good, is that these same places have kept their housing supply relatively static, forcing those with good jobs to compete amongst themselves for housing. The old joke: VC $$$ ——> Startup —-> Developer ——> Landlord, has a lot of truth to it.

One clarification:

“The old joke: VC $$$ ——> Startup —-> SOFTWARE Developer ——> Landlord, has a lot of truth to it.”

Homes can be considered investments because people's incomes have historically increased faster than inflation.

Nah, gov’t can also print more cheap money, like they did for the prior decade.

1) I agree here but I have a feeling it would be unpopular policy on the democratic side of the asile if it tried to be done here in the US.

2) I am unclear why one would cap the number of houses or prevent rental. Or how that would solve the problem. Affordablity is only one reason people rent. There are alot of people that do not WANT to own. Hell I am a home owner and have often thought about selling and going back to rental. I might if I ever need to move cities again

3) Price fixing and having government take over the housing market is not a solution to what is largely a government created problem in the first place. Zoning, non-saftey based building standards (i.e min square footage, min lot size, bans on Multifamily, etc) and other government actions are the direct cause of the housing shortage. Change Zoning Laws and allow builders to only have to adhere to actual safety based building standards and housing shortage would be over.

Government putting its hands on the scales of the market for over 50 years is the root cause of the problem, everything from FHA to Fannie/Freddie, to Zoning laws all created this problem.

2) I think the vast majority of people want to own their own home, have somewhere to live when they retire, or something they can sell for some money and move to a smaller place.

There will always be a need for rentals. Moving to another city/state/town/country, etc, will require rentals so people can live. What I'm against is people owning MANY homes for the sole purpose of renting them. If you had a balance of people owning 1-3 homes, or people who rent their home out while they live somewhere else maybe for work or they retired. It would be ok.

When I was 20, just before I left NZ, I bumped someone I went to school with who had just bought his 7th house, he had quit his job because the rent income exceeded his day job and he was beginning to look for an 8th house. I'm not considering moving back to NZ as I have a family now, and looking at the prices I'm questioning if I can afford a house at all... Looking at the prices over the last 10 years, houses that wer 190k are now like 1.3 million...

3) Governments just building (or in this case not building) houses isn't the problem. Theres many government level issues to resolve. Absolutely fixing zoning laws, development laws, etc. 3 is a huge topic that could branch out into like 20 different things. I'm simply suggesting in terms of building aspect is taking some ideas from Singapore around the way BTOs are done and restrictions in place to prevent profiteering.

>>taking some ideas from Singapore

Hard pass on that, I want nothing in way of governmental ideas from Singapore. Hard pass on any authoritarianism for me.

I am wary of any arguments that suggest deregulating is the answer. Deregulating has practically never gone well.

The answer might be to have regulations that fit the current needs and constraints, not the ones from 60 years ago.

Well, from my point of view, regulating has never gone well. There are all kinds of example that can be cited, often called "unintended consequences" which I believe are not actually unintended at all

Government: If you think you have problems now, wait until you see our solutions

Houses are only good investments if you can rent them for a price that will yield an attractive return.

People will only rent a house for a price that they're willing to pay therefore this isn't a bubble as you imply (people are only buying because prices go up), so presumably it's a supply / demand issue.

It's extremely easy to say "reee, why don't the government build more homes!!", but where exactly do you build more homes in central London?

Oh no, sorry, you meant build more homes where there's free land? Sure, but people don't want to live there.

The issue is actually far more to do with urbanisation than anything. For example here in the UK there are plenty of places that are extremely affordable to live, the issue is that they're in rural and generally undesirable areas so no one wants to live there. When people say house prices are too high, what they actually mean is that they can't afford a house in London or some other attractive city they want to live. It's not that an average wage wouldn't get you a decent house in say Middlesbrough where the average property price is ~£150k - it's that an average wage won't get you a decent house in a nice city location. A first time buyer could easily get a two bed house in Middlesbrough for around £100k.

In my opinion the solution is counter intuitively to stop building more houses in cities. The more you build in cities the more jobs and more people relocate there. And that feeds on itself because then more people want to live there because that's where all the action is.

If instead we invested in places like Middlesbrough and offered employees incentives to relocate we could distribute the demand for housing away from over populated cities.

We could also couple this with investment in public transportation and incentivise remote working which would allow people to comfortably live further out of city centres.

Though, I suspect this is understood fairly well by governments. I think they actually see urbanisation as a good thing because it's more efficient for business to have a pool of labour and consumers concentrated in a small geographic area. The only real cost is congestion and house prices, but that's a cost to humans, not businesses.

A lot of this can be solved by simply updating zoning code to allow for more housing. Housing is only a lucrative investment because its been made artificially scarce through restrictive zoning.

I don’t necessarily see a problem with point 2. Renting a house often creates supply. The owner will create a basement suite or a nanny suite over the garage.

If housing shortage was solved then that also kills the profit motive of renting out all but the most ideal houses for renting.

The root cause in Canada is the neoliberal policy that started in the 90s that ended government building low income housing. They left the free market to do its thing. And this is the end result of decades of free enterprise. We’ve built lots of housing for upper middle class because that’s profitable for builders and largely left the poor/young to be screwed.

Is this meant to argue against a limit on the quantity of properties that one individual can own? If corporations were not permitted to own property, and other individuals were allowed only two properties (what real need would there be for more), the quantity of available property for purchase would skyrocket. The prices would plummet, and far more people would be capable of owning their home.

I don't disagree that there is disincentive for developers to build mid-level properties. They want huge expensive homes or the ability to cram many people into one space. I think this is a problem, but is not the only reason for the lack of availability, as described by the grandparent and in my former paragraph.

this misses the point. The root of the housing shortage problem in Canada, Australia and New Zealand is zoning. Zoning plus NIMBYs make housing wasteful by allowing only single family houses in vast areas of prime land.

This is a simple supply-demand problem, not anything complicated. The solution is equally simple - make zoning laws basic and limited in scope.

NIMBYs and zoning preceded the housing shortage by decades. To attribute it solely to those two factors is oversimplifying the problem

>They left the free market to do its thing. And this is the end result of decades of free enterprise. We’ve built lots of housing for upper middle class because that’s profitable for builders and largely left the poor/young to be screwed.

Is that true? I'd imagine building a big block of, say, 100 units to be far more capital efficient than building a few freestanding homes, if zoning laws allowed it.

The plethera of shoebox condos in Toronto attest to this fact. Then people wonder why birth rates are so low when the only options are having a baby while living in a 1 bdrm condo with a galley kitchen, or moving hours away from your job.

I honestly donno a lot about the US and it’s “projects”, but my understanding is large blocks of units in the US or the west tend to be built and left to rot.

Other than Singapore are there any blocks of units that don’t get run down over time and left to rot? (Seriously question as I’m curious)

Cooperative housing where the tenants are the owners.

Every city in Europe?

Oh 100 units are still built. But they are sold as condos targeting upper middle class as those are more profitable for builders to sell. And these are not affordable for many.

We need policy that requires mixed units. Some for the affluent, some for service workers, etc.

Did the free market set the prevailing risk free interest rate in CAN ?

Did the free market supply the homeowner and title insurance ?

Did the free market determine the rules for zoning that plague most large metro areas and adjoining suburbs?

In Singapore HDB flats are still being used for investment and my generation (30s) and younger are still feeling the pinch. IMO there’s (at least) one part missing to the BTO sauce: you got a government subsidy, you don’t get to sell on the open market. I don’t know what the alternative is, whether it’s selling back to the government (adjusted for inflation and depreciation somehow) or what, but currently there’s a significant cash transfer from the government to people who won the BTO ballot lottery, just ten years later.

Yeah it's not a bullet proof system but I think it still works relatively well.

If I understand correctly if you own a HDB, you can buy a Condo? But if you have a Condo you cannot buy an HDB? And then in some scenarios you must pick which one you will keep.

Since I'm not Singaporean I'm not well versed in the ins and outs of the system but I do think on the surface its much better than most other countries.

I think that’s right. I’m in the same boat but it’s hard to talk to anyone my age and not get an earful about the housing situation haha. Definitely better than other places I’ve seen, agreed.

Do you think the situation would improve if they were... bad investments?

Because it seems to me that we can probably find all kinds of ways to reduce a house's market value without reducing its livability. Especially if its owners are on a different continent and not around to stop us. Once they cave and sell at a loss, we've got the local cost of housing going down and whatever the deficit is stays in the local economy.

> most countries in Asia you literally cannot buy property if you're a foreigner.

This makes me wish we had a reciprocity rule. E.g., "A foreigner can only buy a house in America if Americans can buy houses in the foreigner's home country".

Having lived in both NZ and Singapore I can second these comments. Although the 'a business cannot rent out a home' bit would probably not work in practice. There's definitely an ongoing need for commercial landlords, although govt's could do more to ensure this model is sustainable and fair for both landlord and renter, usually it swings in favour of one or the other.

Commercial landlords aren't the problem, per se. Ownership concentrated in a few massive entities is.

Outlawing owning >x% of a market's housing supply (for some low x) doesn't sound like the worst idea.

What we'd want is there to be (a) enough rental housing stock, (b) enough rental owning companies of comparable size to create a healthy market on rental prices, & (c) a sane balance between the number of rental and owner-occupied homes.

Part of the current imbalances are a consequence of low interest rates though, as investors could get a lot more leverage to acquire properties for rent.

I concur.

Finding a balance is very difficult, any way you tip the scale its difficult to stop it from continuing to tip causing new problems :(

It's easy to point out problems, difficult to come up with solutions.

One thing I believe is that mortgage payments, and accessible mortgages should always be lower than the rental price so those who want to own rather than rent, it makes it a easier/better option. (does that make sense?)

> It's built for sale, not built for rental.

Why is there such an emphasis on ownership? Yes I’ve owned five properties - two to live in permanently, one to live in half the year (the other half we travel), and two investment properties. The tenants I had in my rental properties were in no position to buy a home or for that matter to rent a whole house. I rented by the room.

I actively discourage young people from buying homes. They need the flexibility to move to where the jobs are.

Besides, are you really going to discourage building multi unit housing for rents? How is that going to help housing affordability?

You kinda prove my point, you rent out a room, you can afford a high mortgage repayment and combined income from your rentals covers mortgage payments.

Preventing anyone from ever owning a home. Mortgage payments should be less than rental payments.

Also not EVERYONE will be able to afford homes. But when the middle class are priced out of owning a home, as is the issue, thats a problem.

Edit: you also seem to ignore that house prices have sky rocketed while income hasn’t. So thank you for contributing to the housing issue that causes young people to not be able to afford a home.

So, I prevented someone from owning a home that could only barely afford $80-$135/week with all utilities included?

Isn’t that the ultimate “let them eat cake”?

The alternative would be for the eight people to be homeless?

Are all of the people buying property and focusing on student housing also keeping people from buying houses? Were the college students with no income who were only going to be in town for four years and living off of student loans also going to buy houses? Should they have also been forced to buy homes or be homeless?

> So thank you for contributing to the housing issue that causes young people to not be able to afford a home

I assure you those eight people (two houses) were happy to be able to afford to have a roof over their head.

Do you suggest no one be allowed to be renters and everyone buy a home?

Do you think if income grew at the same pace as house prices, those paying $80-135/week would be able to afford a house and mortgage on a smaller home?

Do you think everyone in your perfect world would be able to or should buy a home no matter what their circumstances? Including the recently divorced single guy who found odd jobs, the ex convict trying to get his life together, etc?

The guy with the cheapest room was paying less than $4200 a year all utilities included. Did I do him a disservice?

Are you saying that renters shouldn’t exists or do you think no one should be allowed to rent a single family house under no circumstances and you should either rent an apartment or buy a house?

Providing a service doesn’t change that you’re contributing to a problem. You really sound like you don’t want people to own homes. You would rather houses be expensive so you can provide a service to more than to a few or to people who don’t want to own a home etc.

I sold my investment properties over a decade ago.

But you didn’t answer the questions.

Should everyone who wants to live in a house be forced to buy no matter what stage of life they are in?

What shouid the people do who can’t afford to buy?

I don't think everyone should be forced to buy - I think that the tax code should be changed in order to not favor buying so heavily over renting.

A few ideas to start

1) Get rid of the mortgage interest deduction

2) Tax imputed rent same way that rent payments are taxed (so you would have to pay tax on the money you would have paid to rent from yourself)

3) Get rid of capital gains exemption ($250K per person, 500K for married couples)

or the more extreme version

Land Value Tax.

In Switzerland, 58% of the population are renters. Notably, the tax advantages of owning above are missing in Switzerland, making renting a more attractive proposition. That's what should be fixed. Don't push everyone to buy a home, but don't keep shoveling money in regressive transfers to those who do.

(I didn't even mention prop 13 in California here which locks in your property tax - that is a complete abomination and should never have been passed. It's a regressive giveaway to homeowners)

> Get rid of the mortgage interest deduction

Just a useless talking point. Especially with the changes in the tax law, the standard deduction is so high, most people don’t take advantage of the interest tax deduction.

https://smartasset.com/taxes/how-did-the-trump-tax-bill-affe...

> Tax imputed rent same way that rent payments are taxed (so you would have to pay tax on the money you would have paid to rent from yourself)

So now increasing taxes are going to help make houses more affordable?

And if you do that, and want to start treating home ownership as if you are renting from yourself at “market rate”, you are now back to also allowing deductions from ownership as you would if you were a landlord - interest deduction, expenses, deductions for depreciation where you can depreciate the cost of your house over 17 years, etc

> Get rid of capital gains exemption ($250K per person, 500K for married couples)

If you make it more punitive to sell, less people are going to be willing to sell their house when they outgrow it. That makes for less housing to come onto the market.

> That's what should be fixed. Don't push everyone to buy a home

So now you want more landlords?

> In Switzerland, 58% of the population are renters. Notably, the tax advantages of owning above are missing in Switzerland, making renting a more attractive proposition. That's what should be fixed. Don't push everyone to buy a home, but don't keep shoveling money in regressive transfers to those who do.

I don't know how familiar you are with Switzerland, but if you are trying to paint this as a good thing, it is not. Go to www.homegate.ch or www.immobilier.ch and see how much a house costs. Hint: very few are below 1 mio CHF for a family home in a good area. That's an insane amount of money, even for a good earner. People in Switzerland don't rent long-term because its a great financial decision, they rent because they can't afford to buy.

Interest-only mortgages are common here. That means you take out a mortgage and don't even try to pay it back fully, only paying back the interest your whole life and then when you die, the bank sells the house and takes its share of the capital back. There are also some tax rules around (2) from your point above, plus negative interest rates for a long time, leading to Swiss property prices going parabolic the last few decades.

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