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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

I mean someone has to rent, to renters right? Not everyone plans to live in the same place forever, and not everyone wants to put up the capital to buy a place. Some percentage of housing needs to be owned by investors to make that capacity available for short-term living. What's the delta between 19% and neutral?

California has a massive housing problem, which is just not building enough houses. Doesn't matter much to me who owns them.

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I live in the (relatively affordable) part of the “hills” in LA, and there are a LOT of houses (single family and some multi-family, not apartments) sitting unoccupied, prices not moving. I’m talking 1+ year on the market. The managing real estate agents do some Zillow dance moves from what I can tell to obfuscate how slow the market is, and avoid lowering the prices significantly, even to 2021ish levels.

This indicates some broken market dynamics to me. Entities with more capital are having property sit unoccupied, decaying slowly, paying property taxes, because they are betting their self-interested reward for doing so outweighs the risk.

I realize this doesn’t generalize to the entire housing stock, but it sure seems vulgar to me.

Reminds me of the crisis Spain had not too many years ago where there'd be giant buildings never completed that banks apparently refused to devalue on their balance sheets. The buildings just sat empty, not being worked on because the money went dry.

Who owns them probably has an effect on whether new housing will be built. A city of mostly renters will vote to have rent controls. Your property taxes are a percentage of the assessed value of your house, usually 1-2%.

If your houses value is increasing but rent is capped, the landlord business isn't going to look very rosy. No new rentals will be built. Of course, I could be wrong.

Interested in counter arguments

This kind of cuts to the problem of conflating housing to houses. Most short term living is almost certainly better served by things other than stand alone houses. Is why colleges are dominated by dorms.

I prefer to rent whole homes and would appreciate that not being legislated away.

I don't disagree? Just noting that that is largely not in this number.

Students stay in dorms "for the experience".

I don't think any middle aged person is looking for any communal living type experience.

Also, what do you mean by "short term"? Usually it only makes economic sense to buy a house if you plan on staying there for 5+ years otherwise closing costs and realtor fees eat away any savings you made from not renting. The period of our life where we are the most mobile and willing to change cities due to job changes (20-40yrs) is also the period in our life when people start families and have children.

I think most people prefer houses

Don't forget that apartments are a thing. And are far far cheaper than houses. Both in terms of direct rental costs, and in terms of upkeep. Heck, the plumbing and electric are probably magnitudes cheaper to maintain for an apartment block than for a subdivision.

Directly to your first, though, most people stay in dorms for college because that is the best that they can afford. New students moving to a city to go to school almost by definition can't afford a house. I don't imagine that would be easy to ever change.

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