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Comment by dathinab | Hacker News Reader

it's not a Australian specific problem

we have a nearly world wide city housing crises (if you ignore cities which are falling apart and consider affordability)

and as far as I can tell a major driving fair is how in recent years a lot of people with a lot of money increasingly did invest into residential land not for self use or for substainable renting but instead as speculative investment or land bank

giving his a crisis of affordable housing in the population centers can easily lead to civil unrest and even be a thread for democracy I would argue both should not be allowed (for residential land/apartments)

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Two laws will solve a lot of problems

1. No more non-human purchase of houses. No companies, corps, trusts, funds etc. should be allowed to buy houses.

2. Ban Airbnb and other short term rentals less than 30 days.

The vast majority of rentals are owned by companies. Your proposal would make it difficult/impossible for anybody to rent.

Yes, and my proposal will transform all the renters into owners, thereby not requiring so many rental companies in the first place.

This wouldn't work because not every renter wants to be an owner and have 20+ years mortgage that ties him down to a particular place after he has put all his cash into the deposit.

The problem is with the supply. Fix the supply and the market will balance itself.

Land supply in desirable locations cannot be increased; you can zone for increased density in those locations, but developers are not incentivised to release new supply as quickly as possible (as that would reduce prices). See for example https://www.fresheconomicthinking.com/p/a-housing-supply-abs... and other articles on that blog which explain this phenomenon.

The property market has too many inherent and imposed monopoly conditions that prevent it from acting as a hypothetical free market where supply and demand are the only factors that influence price.

Actors not motivated by profit can increase supply faster than the private sector's preferred absorption rate (e.g. mass state housing projects like in Singapore and Vienna), in which case sure, if the government massively increases supply consistently above demand and only rents or sells in a manner preventing monopoly acquisition then prices (rents or purchases prices) can be pushed down. There are other alternatives (e.g. Georgist style land taxes combined with liberal zoning laws, so efficient use of desirable locations is encouraged and enabled).

It's not easy, but without building more the situation would get even worse. Low-density houses are nice, but in Australia it's not the most efficient way to absorb the large number of new arrivals clustering in the 3-5 major cities.

Cities with higher densities exist and they're not as nice as suburbia, but it's much better than no housing at all.

BTW, after thinking about that more I'm sure that there isn't anything fundamentally challenging with building more supply.

The highly parts of existing cities are limited, but as history shows - you build new cities. Population has moved from one place to another for centuries and new cities sprang all over the world. If this was done before it should be done now. Overregulation may be the culprit.

You can build lots of housing in remote locations, sure, but people have to want to live there. Even existing cities can have massive surplus of housing if people don't want to live there anymore (see Detroit for an example). Most people want to live in existing cities, and particularly the biggest cities (hence them being the biggest). Tokyo is huge because people want to be there; there are cheap houses available outside of Tokyo but people don't want to be there as much. Most of the time, each state or country has a single large city that grows much faster than all the other cities, because people want to be there and not somewhere else.

The main "successful" new cities these days are when governments create one for their headquarters (or move their headquarters to an existing smaller city), like Sejong in South Korea. This is because it induces demand quite successfully for government employees to move there. You need a strong inducing of demand to create a new city; existing cities already have strong demand via jobs, other people, and services, so new cities need to outcompete them.

During the longest stretch of time that I rented a house, I was one of between four and two young men, most of us broke. The owners of the house were a married couple who lived about a mile away. Were the state to have expropriated them, we could not have paid anything like fair compensation.

I don't say that we represented the most common case, but I do think that such rentals reduce friction in the housing market. Towns with decent economies will have such transients who need a roof but aren't ready to commit to staying.

Good, they can sell them to humans

Many renters couldn't afford to spend $5000 for a house. So should we sell houses that contain >$100,000 of raw materials for <$5000? Who would ever build a house again?

Sounds like that would bring down the average house price though, which would be of benefit to the majority of the renters.

People who build houses aren't going to bother building housing if they can't at least recover their costs, let alone make money.

With falling prices of houses, rental prices will also fall, making the entire real estate business unappealing. That would have the effect of reducing building material cost significantly, if there's no demand. Builders and developers get paid for their other contributions to the process though, so while their revenue will decline, so will their costs, which will keep things stable enough. The ones fucked will be corporate investors who buy from developers to rent them out to individuals (and to some extent those developers who rely on inflated house prices).

If lumberjacks aren’t paid enough for their trees, they will stop cutting them down. Supply and demand will always come to an equilibrium eventually, if demand plummets, supply will follow in plummeting sometime after.

At least in Australia where I live, the problem isn't really the number of houses (despite the Murdochian headlines harping otherwise.) We have ungodly numbers of vacant dwellings. New houses aren't the solution, new incentives are. This is where the pushing down of prices is important. If companies don't want to build new places, fine, let them rot. In the mean time the multinationals and leveraged-to-the-teeth speculators will be forced to make those empty homes available to the market.

That's an oddly alien view to me. I'd build a house so I could live in it, not to make money from it.

People used to build their own houses, you could order a kit from Sears. You aren’t going to get away without an appropriate amount of resources to buy land, buy the kit, and labor (your own or purchased) to do all the work.

> You aren’t going to get away without an appropriate amount of resources ...

Of course, that's assumed. No-one seems to be saying otherwise.

I'm not sure how you would go about selling a 200 unit apartment building to humans? I guess you would demand that all apartment buildings go condo? This is often used as a way to get out of rent control, so the companies are already doing it in some markets.

"Oh no, but what about the companies and their shareholders...."

It's funny because I used to work for one of the largest corporate owners of real estate globally.

Companies should be allowed to own properties, sure. What doesn't work is bringing corporates into the residential rental market. Housing cooperatives should be allowed though.

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