Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

These problems stem from private property. That is, we allow the hoarding of a basic necessity (ie shelter) and we treat housing as an investment vehicle. This incentivizes every aspect of society and government to do what they can to increase property prices. Homeowners think it's good for them. Investors love it. How do we do that? By limiting supply.

In most of the US it's illegal to build anything other than single-family houses. We build our cities around cars. We make it impossible to build any form of public transit because that might let undesirables into our nice clean neighborhoods.

The single biggest factor in homelessness is being priced out of housing.

Expensive housing is an input into everything. It means wages need to be higher. It makes everything you buy from a business more expensive. It's why that $2 coffee 30 years ago is $8 now.

What's the alternatie? Personal property and social housing. Personal property (as distinct from private property) is that you can still own property you personally use. You simply can't hoard housing. Social housing means the government provides affordable quality housing to anyone who wants it. The poster child for this is Vienna, where over 60% of the housing is soial housing.

If you buy a house for $300k and it goes up to $800k. You haven't made $500k. You think you have but you haven't. Why? Because what would you do if you sold it? You'd still have to live somewhere. And if every other house is also $800k, you still only have one housing unit of wealth.

Expensive housing is simply stealing from the next generation. It's also a way to keep you in debt, to coerce you into working with the threat of violence (eviction is violence) hanging over you.

Landlords are parasites.

I couldn't have less bandwidth for people who want to villainize landlords. Want to reduce the influence of landlords? Let more people build multifamily housing. Who's keeping that from happening? It's not the landlords. It's the people who live in freestanding single-family housing.

Social housing is what people who own houses say they want, because they know it's never going to happen. It's a safe way to genuflect to a totalizing class conflict without staking anything on it.

Every landlord I've ever met is a lower-middle class Black person who owns an apartment building, that they also live in, in Lawndale or Austin. Miss me with this stuff.

> Every landlord I've ever met is a lower-middle class Black person who owns an apartment building

Any black American that you know with wealth over $350K is in the top 5% of black Americans. Any black Americans that own a three-flat in Chicago are well into the black 1%, which to white people still looks poor.

Black people pay landlords far more than they are paid as landlords, because rent is a reward for already being wealthy.

> Want to reduce the influence of landlords? Let more people build multifamily housing. Who's keeping that from happening? It's not the landlords. It's the people who live in freestanding single-family housing.

A lot of landlords live in freestanding single-family housing. Your description of every landlord you've ever met is quite at odds with my own. I know very few landlords who live in their properties. They have a nice big house for themselves and rent out apartments or additional houses.

If they own an apartment building, how can they be lower middle class? Even if it's not fully paid off, unless they are upside down on the mortgage, they have wealth. And even getting a bank to approve a mortgage means you're probably not lower middle class.

Do you mean they look and act like lower middle class, because that's how they grew up?

Or do you mean the margins are very bad so they have to do all the maintenance themselves and the profit is actually very low? Why is that?

I’ve seen 8 unit apartment buildings where each unit rents for $400 a month. A few of the units are chronically behind on rent. The building is in bad need of repairs, and the owner does as much of it as he can himself. The property taxes consume about half of the rents.

In that example, the building was paid off, so the owner could use the rest of the rents on repairs and maintenance.

Another 6 unit example recently sold around here for $40,000. If I recall correctly every tenant was delinquent, so the buyer was going to have to deal with that.

That depends on how much equity they have and the economics of the building. My dad bought an apartment building and lost his shirt.

“Social housing” already exists; it just isn’t very desirable and it seems many people who live in it aspire to get out of it.

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