I live in my car: Parking lots open for those who can afford a car but not rent

Unfortunately a lot of folks think that housing doesn't follow the same simple economic rules that we've observed for all other physical goods. So they don't allow supply and we continue to spiral deeper and deeper into a housing crisis.

If housing were abundant, we wouldn't be reading articles about the rise of living in cars.

If more houses are built, prices will go down.

To discourage speculation, governments should impose land value tax, but not property tax, to encourage efficient use of land. You'll also need to pair with other reform, like changing how zoning should be done, how transportation is planned, and so forth.

No, it's driven by supply and demand.

When two things happen concurrently, it can be hard to tell cause and effect apart.

In reality, real estate speculation is driven by the simple fact that prices always go up, making it one of the best investments there is for those with enough cash.

If you legalize massive housing construction, housing prices will start going down, and the speculation money will have to go elsewhere.

Commuting to the office wouldn’t be so bad if it just meant taking a train for 20 minutes while you read HN.

I’m lucky enough to live with my parents in a rural area, but if I ever move out to San Francisco or NYC for work I will probably try to find the smallest possible apartment. I don’t need a kitchen or table. I just need a bed, wardrobe, and lockable door. I’ve spent enough time in hostels around the world to know I could make it.

It's weird that this is such a common thought in a world where Tokyo exists.

You can build an almost unlimited number of floors on that limited land, and it has been done with brilliant results!

Unavoidable realities include, bathroom availability, no privacy, and little control (outside of moving) over neighbors in parking lots and weather conditions; which affect the mood more than you would think - rain is a real bummer in the heat.

True!

That said, the material foundations are a bit different when building a safety net vs spending it.

Then you realize just how difficult it is to build. It takes just as long as the build sometimes and costs thousands and thousands upfront just to get to the point where you can start.

We need a streamlined process that allows standardized housing to be built with minimal upfront costs and on small affordable lots.

ADUs are up to 1200sq feet — for most people this is a whole dang house not an accessory dwelling unit.

Want to see how easy improvement could be made? Imagine if you could write off 50-70 percent of the total cost of an ADU over 15 years as long as it’s rented out to no more than 3 tenants during each year — and eliminated the ability of cities and counties to block their development as long as they fit on the lot. You’d have a massive increase in affordability in just a few short years.

It’s the laws and the zoning that are the problem. You’re spot on.

The problem with modern US building codes is that there is still too much over-regulation (e.g. AFCI's required in essentially all residential splits), combined with the dangerous interconflict of builder's EGO -vs- inspector's EGO — particularly egregious when the inspector feels a one-off homebuilder "deserves" differential treatment.

I think the dumbest jurisdictions (AHJ's) are the ones which prevent homeowners from (e.g.) installing their own electrical outlets, not even in owner-occupied structures. Homeowner maintenance becomes illegal, in certain stupid AHJ's (e.g. Chattanooga); and is thus done unpermitted by a helpless-to-stupid-regulations policy.

/rant

But yes, it's true that many people who dislike rent may be happier owning a single family home.

After all, the apartment building will inevitably come with some sort of political process to decide things like how much this year's residents ought to put aside ready to replace the roof in a decade's time. And while such payments may not technically be rent, they'll smell very similar.

But land ownership as in subletting and sub-subletting and sub-sub who knows how many levels up, that is not a necessary consequence of the concept of land ownership. What if only personal use was allowed? Sure, you would definitely see hoarding and countermeasures would not be without their own problems, but there is definitely room between unbounded capitalism and "property does not exist" level socialism.

so for most of recorded human history society did not function?

the only reason we're allowed to buy land is because it was commodified during the industrial revolution as the process of capital extraction from labor had moved from the land to the factories.

Since governments are in the business of governing, not real estate, they'll almost definitely outsource that work (or big parts of it) to private contractors like they do for defense.

The end result is that your landlord is now an even bigger private entity (that might be a conglomerate of smaller entities, which might or might not look like the institutional landlords that exist today) with the near-infinite financial backing of the government and the insanely slow processes that come with that (such as having to go through an intermediate to get that Tesla Powerwall you want to install approved, only to be told that Tesla isn't an approved supplier and that you should use this battery from $VENDOR_THAT_WE_DONT_HAVE_RELATIONSHIPS_WITH_WE_PROMISE).

Before buying my first house in 2021, I was paying $2k / month in rent in a 2 family house my landlord bought 2 years prior for $350k. There was another person paying an additional $1k/month in the same house for a total of $3k/mo of total rent for a $350k house the landlord purchased through a LLC the year prior.

When I ended up buying a house, the monthly mortgage payments were about the same as rent except the house is 2x larger with 5x more property (on the same street as the apartment I was renting).

In other words, for mobility to really be worth the cost of renting, you really gotta be taking advantage of that benefit and moving around a lot. If you’re renting a house like I was for a long period of time, it makes absolutely no sense.

Unfortunately, I think most renters do so out of necessity (not able to afford a $75k down payment, for example).

At least when you rent, you can easily move elsewhere and hope for thicker walls. I don't know how it is elsewhere, but in France, selling and buying a new house is a very expensive ordeal. The state gets to tax you 7% of the price of the new home. And with housing prices being absurdly high, 7% is quite a sum.

That is an excellent question.

Because you lose reputation and assets.

It's completely fucked up that companies can bakrupt any time, but people can't. It helps nobody that people are stuck as modern slaves in barely survivable conditions. It's insane that people like you consider this better than the alternative.

I was in a similar position once. My attorney couldn't reconcile why I was filing for bankruptcy when I was still actively paying my debts. The expectation is that you should have long ago stopped paying the debts you're trying to discharge, because it conveniently frees up more than enough money to pay bankruptcy fees.