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Comment by 999900000999 | Hacker News Reader

It wouldn't bother me if the richest had tens of trillions.

The issue is no normal people can buy homes now. You need to make, what 300k as a couple to buy a home in LA. You can't buy a home you can't hedge against rising rent.

You can't leave your family a dime.

If you can keep housing and food affordable, Zuckerberg can declare himself Czar and most people would be just fine with it.

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Amusingly, many of the tech rich are very pro building homes. Some of those are liars, like Marc Andreessen, but many of them would rather have the rules prohibiting building removed. It’s normal people who resent new things and oppose more homes being built, and consequently act to make prices higher.

> You need to make, what 300k as a couple to buy a home in LA.

This is almost entirely about California not allowing enough housing construction. Which is decided by the mean California voter, not the billionaire class.

I'd wager it is more decided by people that own a lot of real-estate or at least by people that already own homes. How often is there a democratic vote to zone populated areas that would allow building more homes? Rather than lobbying of local governments by real-estate owners to prevent it from going to a vote.

In most parts of the nation, homeowners outnumber renters. In LA it’s closer but I think it’s like 50-50 and renters vote less. The loss is the votes of “people who would live there”. So any narrow constituency voting will fail since one of the strongest principles of Americans is “I’ve got mine; fuck the other guy” stated generously as “This place is full! Let’s not ruin the community.”

This leaves out the fact that billionaires are acquiring media. All kinds, cf Sinclair vs. eg The Washington Post or Twitter. If we assume those billionaires are somewhat rational, then IMHO the simplest conclusion is that those billionaires think there is material value in influencing the mean voter's opinion.

Not really. Although it seems like building more will help, the primary reason is that all the extra money created since covid reserve requirements going to 0% has been parked in safe assets real estate, instead of devaluing the reserve currency. It is still inflation, just manifested elsewhere.

The two issues are directly related. You can’t have extreme wealth and affordable housing.

"There is one rule for Industrialists and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible. Nothing can be right in this country until wages are right. The life of business comes forth from the people in orders. The factories are not stopped for lack of money, but for lack of orders, Money loaned at the top means nothing. Money spent at the bottom starts everything." -Henry Ford

Why not? Why can you have extreme wealth at the same time that everything other than housing remains affordable?

Wealth is stored in assets.

And you can devalue any asset if you can sufficiently increase its supply. Used cars are also an asset and you don't see billionaires gobling them up (with the exception of rare collectibles).

No (actual) investor sees used cars as assets.

An asset is something that produces income such as a bond, a piece of real estate that you rent out, or a company engaging in the market.

Used cars can generate income if you lease them out. And there are firms that will do this including dealerships and rental car companies. What you don't see though (unlike real estate) is random general investors (who are not car leasing specialists) buying up large chunks of the used car supply in order to lease them out. And the reason they don't do this is because new cars get manufactured fast enough such that older cars just keep getting devalued making it a relatively low margin business. The suggestion being made by YIMBYs (of course) to continuously allow constructing high density housing such that there will always be lots of brand new units on the market in order to help devalue the older units. I would suspect at that point that general investors would likely leave the apartment leasing business, selling them either to individuals that will choose to live in them, or to firms whose specialty is home leasing - the only type of business likely to be able to profitably lease used housing at low margins at that point.

If housing is viewed as personal property vs an investment it's possible.

How much of Zuckerberg's wealth was created from buying up single family homes and renting them out at 10% over what a mortgage cost ?

https://orchard.com/blog/posts/how-much-the-typical-home-cos...

If housing prices remained consistent with inflation you'd be able to buy a home in California for 120k.

Imagine, for a second. You buy a starter home after high school working as a secretary for Amtrak or something. 10 years later you have a positive networth. Starting a family in your 20s, is possible.

At 45 the house is paid off, the kids are in college. Your able to put money in your savings. And if you're really lucky you'll be able to watch your grandkids grow up.

That's how things used to work. Not everyone wants a family, but I don't think anyone wants to pay 40% towards rent well into their 50s since they never had a chance to buy a home.

It's a massively complex issue with no clear solution. Liberals are to blame, you need a dozen environmental studies on how you might disturb local caterpillars before building anything.

Conservatives are to blame, Prop 13( CA's fixed property taxes, buy a home for 100k in 1995, you'll pay property taxes on that original value until you move) has horribly distorted property values.

> Prop 13( CA's fixed property taxes, buy a home for 100k in 1995, you'll pay property taxes on that original value until you move)

In the interest of accuracy, Prop 13 doesn't have fixed property taxes. It has (relevant to property taxes):

1. a low cap on property taxes (1% of tax basis value annually)

2. a limit on tax basis value increases outside of sales and other qualifying events (annual increase capped at 2% or the rate of inflation, whichever is less).

Thank you.

I'll remember this going forward. I didn't know the taxes could go up. But the rate of increase is still extremely low relative to home value increases

They aren't in the least related. The reason housing is expensive is that, in places where there is high demand, it is illegal to build housing. Housing isn't expensive where there is low demand.

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