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Comment by xivzgrev | Hacker News Reader

Institutional ownership is immaterial? Erm, from the same source, 10% of some metros is a lot, and that’s just moving the meter to 100+ homes. If you did 10+ or 3+ it would be even more.

“This share rises to 3.8 percent of single-family homes for institutional investors owning over 100 homes, and up to 10 percent in certain metro areas such as Atlanta.”

Then if you also consider foreign ownership of home, it would rise even more. Lots of wealthy folks have dollars due to it being primary international currency and they buy up our assets

Unfortunately this is a big side effect of internet we haven’t solved yet. It’s made buying a home anywhere easier, which inflates prices (demand is much higher now for same number of houses), squeezing out middle class locals

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34% of Americans rent their homes, and having a good stock of rental units is good for America because it makes it a lot easier to move. Institutional owners provide the vast majority of rental units.

Getting rid of institutional ownership would increase rental prices substantially, and that's bad for the poor and for the mobile.

> Getting rid of institutional ownership would increase rental prices substantially, and that's bad for the poor and for the mobile.

Extremes are unhelpful, we must find balance. Institutional ownership restrictions reduces monopoly pricing power, and rent controls de-risk against rents rising faster than wages. Outright outlawing of institutional ownership is not a solution, but allowing it to operate in a highly regulated fashion (where there are still some, but more reasonable, returns and mobility is enabled for mobile consumers of this service). If the argument is continue increasing supply vs rent price controls, well, it is clear that isn't happening in the short term.

TLDR Housing needs to be pushed more towards being a regulated utility, vs a free for all. If we regulate electricity like a utility, why not housing?

The standard refrain is that the housing market is over-regulated, NIMBY's have made it too hard to build. Adding more regulation discouraging instutitions from building sounds like making the problem worse rather than better.

There are both bad and good regulations. Acting like all regulation is bad (say restrictive zoning or allowing people to block density) allows people to target the good (building codes, not building of garbage dumps or toxic materials) to get rid of

Regulations are not inherently good nor bad so please say what regulations are bad and what regulations should be changed because “less regulation” doesn’t mean things get better and can mean things get very very much worse (hey let’s allow toxic wast dumps under homes because that was too regulated before!)

This is not a "prevent asbestos in housing" type of regulation.

The OP wants to reduce the amount of institutional ownership of housing. This will reduce supply of rental units, increasing the cost of rental units.

Could it simply be over-regulated in the housing generation aspect, but under-regulated in the housing distribution aspect?

These are (strongly?) correlated though, right? Over-regulating distribution should reduce generation because builders can’t depend as much on pricing signals.

I'm not sure. How do you measure "degree of regulation"? At face value it's an abstract concept with a lot of dimensions.

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