Hacker News Reader

Comment by johngladtj | Hacker News Reader

>Housing doesn't follow the simplistic supply/demand model

Yes it does, and I'm tired of pretending that it doesn't.

If I want to build a house in Portugal, if I am even allowed to do so, I will have to spend about half of the cost to the government.

From VAT, to real estate tax, to licensing fees, etc... That's a significant portion of the cash spent going directly to the state for no actual practical reason.

And that's not even mentioning the time spent dealing with all that, or the fact that housing is essentially banned in the majority of the country.

My family has been in real estate for generations, and Ive listened to multiple generations on both sides of the family for years struggle with these politically inflicted issues.

There is no housing crisis.

There is a political choice to make housing unaffordable and unbuildable. Anything that doesn't address that issue will only make things worse.

View on HN

>Yes it does, and I'm tired of pretending that it doesn't.

It doesn't, because the housing market is not the "free" market like the one for commodities, but is an asset heavily manipulated by government, banks, NIBYs and institutional investors to maintain a steady increase in value of their investments above inflation, and incidentally above wage growth. The bigger the growth of their investments, the better for them.

Again, that's a political choice, not a housing crisis.

Housing is not a commodity. [0]

[0] https://ggwash.org/view/10809/housing-is-more-than-supply-an...

Except it is.

I can assure you, if you build 1000 times as many houses as there are people who want to live there, housing prices there will decrease.

For a lot of these places there are enough houses for the people who want to live there. Or it's a whole hell of a lot closer. The issue is there's not enough houses for the people who want to live there and all the tourists who feel entitled to be able to stay in a house on their vacation. A house that takes away from locals, and destroys any culture of the neighbourhood.

So there aren't enough houses.

Also, why do you think you should be the arbiter of what "enough" is?

What right do you have over the property of others?

> So there aren't enough houses.

There are close to enough for the locals. The problem is when tourists feel entitled to houses, like I said. Stick them on the periphery, and let the locals actually live where they work. Instead, we're doing the opposite, and destroying cities and neighbourhoods and pricing out locals in the process.

> What right do you have over the property of others?

I suspect this is where we're going to inherently disagree. People don't own their property in a vacuum, nor do they (nor should they) have unlimited 'rights' to do what they want with it. We don't let people dump toxic waste or oil on their properties for good reasons, and I think extending this to short-term lets is perfectly sensible due to the overwhelmingly negative benefit it has on residents. Doubly so when its corporate landlords in question doing it.

Again, it is not that simple as you can see from London's issues with drip-feeding new housing from developers. [0]

[0] https://blog.shelter.org.uk/2019/08/more-planning-permission...

It really, really is that simple and anyone making the argument that it isn't either hasn't thought this through, has never actually looked at the data, or is outright maliciously lying about it.

[This chart on it's own with no further context is enough to disprove any argument anyone may have that attempts to claim housing prices aren't solved by building more housing](https://twitter.com/JeremiahDJohns/status/161535236504076697...)

It's really that simple.

A Twitter chart vs the arguments of people working with research in housing departments in some of the largest cities in the world. I guess I know what source I'll actually trust a bit more.

The cities that built 1000 times more houses are actually more expensive. Does anyone think that Manhattan-like density in San Francisco is going to lead to Houston prices?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com