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Comment by hanoz | Hacker News Reader

Western leaders had better start coming up with radical solutions to housing market driven inequity or there'll be ructions.

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There is a single solution for this – build more housing. Yet that option still remains unpopular, even among people who cannot afford housing. Blaming leaders is pointless. Instead organize and convince your neighborhood NIMBYs to change their minds.

"Just build more houses", yet alone when framed as "it's up to you to convince your neighbors to let you to build more houses" just doesn't cut the mustard any more.

We need serious changes that are actually going to make a difference, along the lines of (for residential property):

* Outlawing mortgages for non occupiers.

* Sharing of capital gains with tenants.

* A complete end to no fault evictions.

* Universal right to buy for tenants.

* Putative tax for rental income.

That would basically kill the entire rental market and force everyone who wants to move to a new place buy a place instead of having the option to rent which would make changing jobs super painful.

I moved across the country after college for a job and my brother has done that like 5 times changing jobs. Buying and selling a place is a huge pain and has an extremely high transaction cost compared to renting.

Many people seem eager to screw over tens of millions of renters if it means they think they’d get a better chance to buy a place.

Many people think landlords are really just slumlords and yeah, it isn't hard to see why.

If there's a problem with a slumlord, you address that problem.

We don't ban restaurants because some of them have health code violations or food poisoning outbreaks; we get the individually offending restaurants to fix their crap.

There's an inherent power disparity though. There's a high probability the slumlord has more resources than you, and he's not beholden to his 'opponent' providing his housing. So it's not likely your average renter has the capability to address these kinds of problems, which means you need some sort of power structure that has a mandate to enforce such things. Thus, laws and bans on certain behaviours and actions.

Yes, there are already laws against slumlording in most places already. It's not on an individual renter to hold the power, but on a licensing or health/building code enforcement government agency to prevent uninhabitable or sub-standard housing from being rented without recourse. The tenant just has to complain to them and the government comes down with the power.

Not counting college, I've rented at 7 different places, representing about 13 years in total. None were slums. All were far better than me having to buy an entire place each time I wanted to move somewhere.

Remove slums? Hell yes! Remove rental properties? Hell no!

We are. Tons of new SFH and apartments.

The problem is lack of diversity of housing. There are no more rural suburbs and there's no urban housing centers. There's suburban SFHs, townhomes, and apartments, and nothing but. And no one likes it, but we all have to live with it.

Not to mention the potential walkable areas might as well just be a open door prison with the amount of crime and drugs.

Why do residents of potential walkable areas keep voting for politicians that tolerate high levels of crime and drug use?

Lol seems like you have never tried to do it in real life, easy to say impossible to do. This is a complex problem that has many stakeholders who want to maintain status quo. Don't forget all the tax evasion and money laundering it supports.No one is asking questions till the market goes up. Only way for a serious change if prices dropped overnight by 30-50% and people realize a house is just a place to live and make memories in, not a money machine.

Do you think it's any better in "the East"? It's not a 'western' problem/.

Singapore has become so expensive for non-multi-millionaire foreigners to live in that many are now forced to leave.

70-100% rent increase in a year. Starting from already a several thousand dollar base.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/housing-rent-price... https://sg.news.yahoo.com/singapore-tenant-slapped-75-rent-0...

The increasingly well funded and empowered militarized police forces seem to be the solution they're going with.

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