Why rents are still rising too fast | Hacker News Reader

Why rents are still rising too fast

economist.com

27 pointsjcartw83 comments

The USA have added about 2 million people the last year.

That about the size of Houston, TX.

The USA are not building at the rate one city of Houston per year.

Source https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population...

Build one city of Houston where? That's the issue. There are plenty of empty housings, the problem is it's not where people want/need to live.

That's just a comparison to understand the amount of new housing needed per year. Every year.

But it's not "the amount of new housing needed". Housing exists, empty or affordable, just not where it's needed.

Where it's needed you either can't physically build it, or of you can, then it just further blows up the prices.

This is a situation where beatings will continue until morale improves.

There is near infinite room for housing. As long as people keep living in and moving to expensive cities, jobs will continue to concentrate there.

Companies follow the talent, and talent follows the companies. The feedback will continue until one party blinks.

You forgot the third party, zoning laws. The rational outcome for the two parties you describe is for height limits to be removed and extremely dense infrastructure to be built out. It's entirely a policy failure.

Right. The supply isn't increasing where demand exists.

This is probably an ignorant question, but what's stopping states in the US from developing new planned cities? I can see myself moving to a place that's somewhat remote, if I had good reason to believe that I'm getting in on the ground floor of a new >1M population city with public transport planned from the get-go.

... the only problem is that I don't actually see myself believing such a promise, especially given the current disdain for public investments.

It's a good question. I think the answer is that demand is where job opportunities are, and that is extremely hard to create. Because it's sort of the end goal of the system in some aspect. In other words, everyone wants to get rich, there is no formula.

I was under the impression it was more of a distribution problem than a quantity problem? This chart suggests we're building on the order of 1.5 million units of housing per year, which (unless all of those people are occupying a single unit each) should be sufficient in aggregate to keep up with population growth: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ETOTALUSQ176N

But people are moving to the cities, which is exactly where we're not building.

five years ago, i was hopeful that widespread WFH would result in a great geographic population redistribution that would alleviate housing competition in popular cities and revitalize smaller impoverished communities by bringing in good-paying (remote) jobs.

i guess not.

Some people did move out to those smaller communities, but plenty of people like living in dense urban areas, and would prefer to continue living there - just cutting out the daily commute to elsewhere.

https://archive.today/26uEh

a single individual woman in California who inherited her family rental units business in Southern California declared on her IRS returns seventy thousand dollars a month personal income, for the year of 2019. The number of apartment complexes is about a dozen, of varying sizes. It is not clear that she has any real duties on a given week, living far away from the location with no contact details.

Is that from the article?

> living far away from the location with no contact details.

To be fair, if I was renting apartments, I would 100% never give tenants my contact information, and have them deal with some sort of management company. I'd rather pay someone else to receive the "oh shit, the pipes burst" phone call at 3am.

The joyous nature of rent seeking. Best to completely alienate yourself from the people who enable your carefree lifestyle.

You wouldn't want to feel any sort of guilt or regret when you raise rent prices on a struggling family you've actually met, of course.

Business owners don't typically post their home address and cellphone number for customers to contact them directly, either. (With some exceptions, to be fair. My plumber gave me his direct cell number, though that may be a separate work phone.)

I have never understood that attitude. Isn't the ability to deal with broken pipes literally part of your job as a landlord? It's like buying a restaurant when you don't like to cook and don't like to process orders - why would you do that? If you don't like your business's business and want to outsource your core competencies, maybe invest in an index fund instead...

> It's like buying a restaurant when you don't like to cook and don't like to process orders - why would you do that?

It may surprise you to learn that restaurant owners often hire cooks & wait staff.

>Isn't the ability to deal with broken pipes literally part of your job as a landlord? It's like buying a restaurant when you don't like to cook and don't like to process orders - why would you do that?

Because you want to make money. You hire someone to do that shit for you, and you sit back and cash checks.

Most people who own restaurants don't like to cook or process orders, either.

Turns out, a lot of Americans aren't actually the fans of capitalism they think they are.

That it’s economical to hire somebody else to manage it while you both make an increasing profit as rents rise and have your assets appreciate alongside it really goes to show how extractive the process is and how much the cost of rent is inflated in order to protect investment return.

Why would you assume a business owner gets personal satisfaction from their business?

They do it because they believe the effort and risk provides a decent reward compared to other available alternatives.

What value do you provide then?

If you can outsource all of the effort to other businesses, but you still make a profit, then you're essentially just a tax on top of the service.

For what it's worth, I would rather beg on the streets and eat out of a dumpster than take on the hassle of being a landlord, but to answer your question in good faith:

In this hypothetical scenario, what I'm providing is the actual physical place that's being rented out, having put up the money for a down payment and the monthly mortgage payments, taxes, etc.

That's nice of you, but you owning the place means that somebody else cannot.

That's very true.

> That's nice of you, but you owning the place means that somebody else cannot.

If this “somebody else” has the capital, then they should build or buy.

Obviously there is an issue of lack of purchasable land/units in certain desirable areas, but that’s a zoning issue. That’s not the problem and shouldn’t be the problem of someone who had the foresight to invest their capital many years/decades prior.

Yeah I should have bought a house when I was 12 years old in middle school. Still kicking myself for that

Aside from maintaining the building, what landlords are doing is renting access to capital, same as a bank loan.

That is how ownership of a resource works. That is how shares work, how dividends work, how investing works in general. If you own a company, you can have someone doing the basic work, someone else doing taxed, yet someone else clean and someone to sit on reception while you make business decision here and there. Or a lot of them - entirely based on what you want.

> What value do you provide then?

The main value add was capital to build the dwellings in the first place. If that capital didn’t exist, then the dwellings wouldn’t exist either.

The fact that the ROI of that capital is extending to multiple generations may be unpalatable, but it may not be unreasonable (lots of variables).

A secondary value in this case would be hiring a good property management company. Some of those companies really suck, and some are really good. As a tenant, you want one of the good ones. A silent owner who is willing to give a healthy rev-share to the management company is the type of owner you want.

>It is not clear that she has any real duties on a given week, living far away from the location with no contact details.

That's... how investing works? The average S&P 500 investor is probably making even more money than that lady (in percentage terms), with even less work. If you're a landlord you have to deal the hassle of finding renters and fixing stuff, or hiring a management company who take a significant cut. If you're an S&P 500 investor on the other hand you pay vanguard 0.03% and they handle everything for you.

The stock market investor makes money off of other stock market investors playing the game. Landlords are making money off of real working people.

It's hard to take the "stock market is just a game" claim seriously when it's been reliably delivering returns for the past 5 decades. Moreover the stock market pays for the retirement of working people after they've retired, and funds working parents' college fund for their kids.

I really don't understand the anti-landlord sentiment. Folks seem to get this idea that your average landlord has no costs, takes on no risk, and just sails away with the rent they collect every month and spend it on a lavish vacation.

Newsflash but buying property introduces significant costs, complexity and risk. By renting you simply choose to pay a monthly fee to a business that will provide you that same property but will take on all that risk instead of you.

Things like this juice the anti-landlord sentiment: https://www.propublica.org/article/justice-department-sues-l...

> By renting you simply choose to pay a monthly fee to a business that will provide you that same property but will take on all that risk instead of you.

I think the issue is that for many people it's not much of a choice since they can't afford to buy housing. It's pay a landlord or be homeless, and some form of shelter is necessary for humans.

I ask sincerely, have you ever had a bad landlord? Because if you had, you would understand why some people would hate them. Many people do not have the choice to buy a home and so must rent, and often they have to deal with terrible people.

So they would rather be homeless? In a market without landlords, everyone who couldn’t afford to buy a home would have to live in their car or camp on the street.

In a market without landlords, especially corporate landlords, more people would be able to afford to buy a home.

I think that what most people want isn't a market without landlords, but a market without abusive landlords.

The idea is that the person pockets a portion of the money that you make, where if you had the capital you’d be able to pocket the money. As rent increases, a mortgage doesn’t, and rent hasn’t decreased anywhere in a while, so the gap keeps getting larger. There are advantages to renting, but the “choice” of renting vs buying is a privilege afforded to fewer and fewer. There used to be starter homes, but there is a massive difference nowadays between those who own property and those who don’t, and it’s gotten increasingly more difficult over the last 30 years to buy into property on most peoples incomes. This functionally means that property ownership is often the line between economic classes.

Not to mention the corporate landlords who algorithmically raise rents as much as possible while providing as little maintenance as possible.

All of those problems go away if you have sufficient supply of new housing.

And all my problems would go away if I found a pot of gold. Sadly, neither of these things will happen.

Not with that attitude. Lack of housing isn't a law of physics, It is a policy and social choice.

There are many places with abundant housing, including places with high demand and good jobs. There are cities all over the world that grow, build affordable urban apartments, and build starter homes. You don't even have to look that hard for examples.

There are places not experiencing a housing shortage that are still seeing rents go up. When a sizable portion of the landed gentry decide to band together to do price fixing, supply doesn’t matter.

Supply and demand don’t follow closely in the American market. There is a lot of collusion happening.

Yes even if they keep some places empty, which is a cost, they can more than make up for it.

Say you have an apartment with 50 units. If you can keep 25 empty but charge double for the rest, it's all good. Plus the empty ones are not undergoing any wear and tear. It would be more profitable if the place had just 25 units that were all occupied, but what the hell.

Now suppose you can charge triple.

All we have to do is convince a large group of very active voters to vote for uncertainty and change in their neighborhood, it'll be easy!

Probably nobody wants to be the first to do this. Any region that tries to build supply, and bring about lower housing cost, will soon be overrun with migrants I will gobble up to supply.

Housing people is not just putting walls and windows around them. They need transportation. They need water. They generate garbage and sewage.

These are problems that don't go away when you build more housing, but are rather exacerbated.

At least in theory infrastructure should be covered by taxes so more people shouldn't be a problem in the long term. That assumes competent management and sensible voters though.

Primarily I think politicians fear the possibility of real estate prices falling too rapidly. I think residents also fear change since if they don't like the result the cost to move is fairly high.

Taxes don't solve the problem that water has to come from somewhere and garbage has to go somewhere and so on. The very increases themselves are undesirable; who pays for that is not the problem.

Isn't garbage output the same, just in different locations? If anything further centralization of collection should be expected to reduce costs.

Water is similar. I'll acknowledge that in a few specific geographic locations there are genuine concerns about the total available supply but that is not the norm. It also isn't some insurmountable problem unless you're in the middle of a vast inland desert (which departs even farther from the norm).

If the local government is failing to oversee the necessary improvements to infrastructure then from my perspective that's a failure of the political process.

Also water use is lower in dense urban areas so you have to consider that there's a net gain from the move even if there's additional strain locally

As a reluctant one unit landlord (was underwater when we had to buy a bigger place for growing family) I’ve seen my insurance costs triple, property taxes double, and association fees go up 50%.

Then there’s the repairs… And the property management company fees.

It’s not like the mortgage is the only expense a landlord has.

Absolutely true, especially for small landlords. It can be a legitimate job, and as a renter it’s very easy to get caught up in the idea that everyone is just coasting and taking money once you have 2-3 very bad landlords. My current landlord is a kind person, even if my rent has been raised every year.

But also, sorry, if you’re paying for a property management company, you’re not a landlord you’re a landowner, and people pay you a tithe to use it.

Landlords are easy to hate in the way that people complain about Microsoft or their power utility or whatever, but the specific meme you're talking about (that they take no risk and live extravagantly without contributing anything) seems to have gotten very prominent relatively recently.

Some of the specific complaints are wrong (landlords do take risk and some of them don't make much money) but the general sentiment is fair, in the sense that they get more return for less risk than they used to historically. It seems like an unavoidable response to rising inequality caused by capital getting most of the productivity gains over the last 40-odd years.

When did the establishment start referring to developed nations as the “rich world”? That reeks of the kind of globalist elitism that conspiracy theorists go on about. Many an undeveloped nation is undeveloped because of the people who live there and their culture. They should not be considered some sort of baseline.

not enough housing, too many landlords.

Isn't the issue about there being too few landlords?

I recall growing up in a time when it seemed that pretty much anyone in the middle class could become a landlord as a venue of investment, and many would. But nowadays, at least where I live, it seems that very few people choose that, and the ones who do make it almost a second job, with multiple places they rent out. And at the same time, it seems that more and more properties are owned by firms.

TFA briefly mentions regulatory barriers to becoming a landlord; I wonder if that could be a significant part of the issue.

I think the ease of becoming a landlord was a big part of the problem. Or at least how it started. If middle class households buying rental properties can outbid lower middle class households trying to buy a home, the lower middle class household will often be stuck renting in the long term. And if it makes financial sense for a middle class household to become a landlord, rich individuals and institutional investors will eventually notice it and outbid them.

Market-rate rentals should be the exception, not the norm. Some of them are necessary to house people who have recently moved in the area, especially if they don't expect to stay in the long term. But because market-rate rental units largely displace owner-occupied units, having too many of them is bad for the society.

> outbid lower middle class households trying to buy a home, the lower middle class household will often be stuck renting in the long term.

If the market is working properly then additional units will be built until the price begins to drop. If there are buyers at a viable price then you should expect there to be sellers.

What you are describing is a lack of liquidity. That shouldn't happen in the typical case unless there is bad policy.

Bad policy seems to be the typical case. People can't even agree on what is good policy. Expecting them to implement good policy consistently is just unrealistic.

Meanwhile, as we wait for the elusive capitalist utopia, there are real-world issues that should be solved. The solutions will likely involve policy changes. Which will likely have both positive and negative outcomes. And the negative outcomes will probably require further policy changes in the future.

> The solutions will likely involve policy changes.

We're in agreement. My point was that the issue is due to policy. Landlords aren't the problem. Getting rid of landlords would at best be a tiny bandaid and you'd have to change policy to do it so you might as well just address the root cause.

Both types of landlord have their own problems.

Personally I’d prefer the state to own more properties.

I've had some annoying landlords, but I would take every one over Trump.

People tend to imagine a counterfactual where the state is idealized instead of looking at the state they have.

in the Netherlands the state managed housing is the best. While private renters skirt their responsibilities, and enforcing a contractual is hard.

>too many landlords.

Unless you want "buy" (as opposed to "rent") to be the only option for housing, you need landlords. If there's going to be landlords, you want more of them, because more supply translates to lower prices for consumers. Nobody complains about there being too many farmers, for instance.

I'd like to buy. My father bought his first house when he was 23. He came from poverty and had a middle-class job.

I'm ten years older than he was and I still can't afford a house.

Your beef isn’t with landlords, it’s with the single-family homeowners in your area who use every available legal and extralegal angle to block any new construction, because “it would change the neighborhood character”. They fuck you over and get to absolve themselves of blame and guilt by talking about evil developers and landlords as a smokescreen to keep you from seeing that they are the problem.

As much as I'd like to agree, nationwide the prices of housing has skyrocketed. In the last 5 years, there's been a 50% increase in home prices where now $450,000 is the median home price.

Can it be that the issue you're describing explains what's happening in every single state? Has development stalled all across the USA (and abroad) simply due to regulation?

>Can it be that the issue you're describing explains what's happening in every single state? Has development stalled all across the USA (and abroad) simply due to regulation?

I mean this is pretty trivially true, excepting some markets like Japan. 100-200 thousand dollars of wood and drywall and concrete sells for 0.5 to 2 million in much of the country. People (builders) haven't started hating money, they just aren't allowed to build.

Heck if it were legal I'd personally find some investors, buy up a few 1 million dollar sfh's and replace them with 8 500k condos each.

It’s not just zoning restrictions that caused housing prices to increase.

1. There was a lot of money circulating during the COVID pandemic as a result of very low interest rates and other practices intended to stimulate the economy. More money chasing a limited supply of assets means that those assets cost more.

2. WFH during COVID made many areas of the country more desirable since those with remote jobs were not limited to the locations of their employers. I’ve seen exurban areas in California face skyrocketing home prices in 2020-2021 due to WFH demand; Los Baños is a prime example.

3. There may have been increased demand in second- and third-tier cities from those who have been priced out of first- and second-tier cities. For example, Sacramento (my hometown) always gets a large number of former Bay Area residents whenever housing prices in the latter place spike.

All else equal, more supply of landlords means less supply of housing. So you are just shifting demand from buying to renting. I wouldn't expect prices to lower.

Population is still rising to fast.

https://www.census.gov/popclock/

17:53:01 UTC One birth every 9 seconds One death every 10 seconds One international migrant (net) every 23 seconds Net gain of one person every 19 seconds

>Population is still rising to fast.

Says who? Malthusianism was canceled decades ago. Housing might be scarce, but that's due to political factors, not some sort of resource limitation. There's plenty of land to build with in the US.

> Says who?

The link provided, from the USA gov. You may check other sources as well.

> There's plenty of land to build with in the US.

And within Canada or France. But here we are.

>The link provided, from the USA gov. You may check other sources as well.

I'm questioning the "too fast" part. Not the specific numbers.

>And within Canada or France. But here we are.

"Housing might be scarce, but that's due to political factors"

> I'm questioning the "too fast" part.

You have to define what is too fast for you. For me 0.5% yearly is too fast. Percentage wise the USA, Canada and India are growing at about the same rate according the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio...

> "Housing might be scarce, but that's due to political factors"

That's not changing the fact that population grows while housing does not at the needed rate.

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