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Comment by yonran | Hacker News Reader

I’m surprised by all the anti-landlord talk in this forum. If we “increase in property taxes for home which are not the primary residence”, or prohibit “own[ing] more than one property in which they do not reside”, these are policies that give an advantage to homeownership over renting but do not stimulate new supply. So they may lower house sale prices but only at the expense of raising the rent, exacerbating the problem that the article is about.

If you want the rent to go down, you should make it profitable for investors to build lots of supply of housing, rental or ownership. Lots of non-owner-occupied houses is a good thing if you rent.

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With limited supply that means every single landlord is keeping renters from owning.

How about people invest in businesses and not things we need to exist.

Again, the article is about rents being too high. If you force investors to sell existing housing stock to owner-occupiers, what direction do rents go? Up. If you are anti-rental property investor, then you are also anti-renter.

Instead of pitting renters against homeowners, think of policies that reduce costs for both renters and homeowners by adding supply. E.g., relax zoning to raise height limits and allow apartments, allow more worker visas and encourage people to work in the trades, subsidize construction loans.

Again. Housing should not be an investment full stop.

Every single landlord is stopping somone from owning a home. If people need to rent we can offer apartments.

This isn't rocket science.

I see now that you are making the distinction between single-family homes, which are primarily owner-occupied, and multifamily homes, which are primarily rental, and you are saying that the shift of some single-family homes to rental is a bad thing. First, there’s nothing wrong with a household buying a condo or renting a single-family house, so I don’t see why one should be banned.

But to explain the increasing share of rental housing, the book Kevin Erdmann, Building from the Ground Up explains that the problem is not investors overinvesting in houses, but residents who are locked out of the mortgage market due to post-Great Financial Crisis regulations that killed the homebuilding industry across the country. If residents had the same access to credit that they did before the GFC, then they would be able to outcompete investors. There’s no point in suppressing rental investment just because we mistakenly suppressed mortgages.

But whether you are looking to buy or looking to rent, more supply helps, so that is the underlying problem to address.

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