Maybe the housing crisis is related to the lack of legal security that owners have, which severely reduced the offer and obviously increased the prices.
The housing law that the current government passed wasn’t very clever…
The housing law that the current government passed wasn’t very clever…
It's very much not in evidence that this is affecting supply more than demand.
The clear answer is you'd buy one if you know how to handle squatters. In other words, you are well connected and have enough capital to take preventive measures described in the article.
In other words, rich can get richer by having lengthy security apparatus to protect their property. Middle class investors, who might want to buy an extra house to have a stream of income from rents gets that ladder pulled away from them.
One might believe that renting itself should not exist and making money from housing is immoral. If so, let's pull that ladder away from everyone including the rich (though that won't end well since not everyone can be a homeowner).
The clear answer is you'd build one when you know how to handle squatters.
> If so, let's pull that ladder away from everyone including the rich
Yes!
> not everyone can be a homeowner
Why?
> Why?
Criminals who were behind the bars for 20 years, just came out and have nothing to buy a house with.
Families moving to another city for 1-2 years because one of the parents found a lucrative job assignment (I literally have some extended family members in this situation).
People who declared bankruptcy recently and cannot have any assets in their name by definition.
Grad students who are in a university town only for 1-2 years (I was one and I know dozens of my classmates who were in the similar situation).
and on and on. Society is just too complex to make everyone a homeowner. Lot of people need to rent.
Criminals who were behind bars for 20 years, just came out and have nothing to pay rent with either. This isn't logic.
We shouldn't be releasing people from prison with no way to house themselves because that's practically guaranteed to push them back into crime. Solutions to that unavoidably involve giving them housing in some way: if your solution gives them rent, all your solution does is add landlords as middlemen and ensure that criminals never become homeowners. Giving them housing that they can work to buy is a much better solution.
> Families moving to another city for 1-2 years because one of the parents found a lucrative job assignment (I literally have some extended family members in this situation).
Why can't they buy a house for 1-2 years? Why are you assuming that housing liquidity would remain just as bad as it is now, when rentals and speculation removing liquidity from the market?
> People who declared bankruptcy recently and cannot have any assets in their name by definition.
That's... not how bankruptcy works. Many bankruptcies do not result in homeowners losing their residences, because that's obviously bad, so there are options to not do that. You may not be able to buy a new one... but maybe that should change, i.e. if you're selling your house to buy a newer one, that should be allowed, even encouraged if you're downsizing.
> Grad students who are in a university town only for 1-2 years (I was one and I know dozens of my classmates who were in the similar situation).
See previous.
> and on and on. Society is just too complex to make everyone a homeowner. Lot of people need to rent.
Well, right now your examples just sound like lots of people are forced to rent by current systems which are designed to maintain rental properties as investments.
Rather, right now your arguments seem to be based on some idealized utopia with fancy assumptions - perfect liquidity in housing market without any friction of transaction costs, perfect society with ideal treatment of prison population, perfectly rich grad students who can buy housing etc. If such things were possible, other initiatives based on ideal human nature would have succeeded as well (eg. communism).
I will flip your argument back to you - show me a place where the system is NOT designed to maintain real properties as investments.
No, this is just a perfect solution fallacy. We don't need perfect liquidity, frictionless transactions, or rich grad students to make this work. We need no landlords and no speculative investment in housing: the rest will take care of itself, due to basic free market principles because that's massively increasing supply with a demand that's bound by population. And it doesn't have to happen perfectly, just well-enough. If you don't believe in supply and demand I'm not sure you have much grounds for accusing me of communism.
> I will flip your argument back to you - show me a place where the system is NOT designed to maintain real properties as investments.
I am truly confused how you think this is flipping my argument back at me.
The housing problem is an issue of supply and demand. Currently demand is bigger than supply and that leads to problems, no matter what you do. Either renting prices go up until many people can't afford to rent anymore, or if some law is put into place such as restricting rents or reducing owners' rights, supply will become even smaller and demand even bigger.
To solve the housing crisis the government has to either decrease demand or increase supply, or both.
Letting people get rich off holding people's basic needs for ransom is never going to be part of the solution to homelessness.
The whole thing is complicated by being geographically unequal: for example I think even Spain is full of affordable houses, only they are not in Madrid or Barcelona or Valencia, which is where people really want to live. So if you have a second house in an unpopular town you actually have not much - thus you are not rich - and you have often an empty house (nobody wants to rent/buy it) which is an easy target for squatters, and therefore you will become "one of the poor people ruined by squatters", while othen you are somebody who accepted the narrative that using houses as investment was a good idea, both an investment house cheaply in a town that never attracted enough people, thus "lost the game" and is now also losing the house to squatters...
As an example, we bought our house for $280k in Iowa seven years ago. It held steady for a bit, but jumped up to close to $400k shortly after Covid. YIMBY policies in my area could cost me as much as $120k of wealth that I now possess. What percentage of home owners are going to willingly give up tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in wealth to support more equitable housing? Even for a liberal, $120k is a hell of a lot of money and it's only growing year after year under our current system. With that equity continuing to grow, maybe I have some hope of retiring in the future? That's a hell of a lot to put on an individual to ask them to support more equitable housing. Other people's suffering is their only chance to not suffer constantly until they die. And when you think in terms of not just my suffering but my family suffering, it becomes a lot easier to slip into NIMBYism.
How do you decouple primary housing from investment without fucking over literally millions of homeowners who have done the best they can under the existing rules? It's something I'm personally interested in. But I also don't want to be working until the day I die. What is the compromise that satisfies the majority of people?
So the speculators set up a company, buy the property and list it on AirBnB at several times the market price. Now it's not an empty property, it's a business. Business is slow so they only have to bother with guests during spikes in demend.