Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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.

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.

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