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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

You have that option, it's called buying a house and getting a mortgage. You just rent from the bank for 30 years first. But you're not thinking x=30 with any responsibility other than writing a check, I bet. If I had to guess, I'd say you want x<10 and you still don't want to pay for maintenance, or property taxes, or have the value reassessed as soon as you take occupancy, or be forced to stay there if you decide to leave. You want all the benefit with none of the cost or risk. It's fine to want that but let's not pretend "rent should be illegal" is a serious or reasonable policy proposal.

There's a reason why a mortgage with very little down payment is a lot more than comparable rent.

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> You have that option, it's called buying a house and getting a mortgage.

A landlord will happily swallow 50% of your income but a bank will start to feel bad about a ~30% debt to income ratio, so no you can't really.

Reminder that a 300k mortgage over 30 years at 5% costs you 600k in the end, so you're fucked either way, at best your kids might benefit from your investment.

Housing got way more expensive since the 2000s, most people are priced out of buying a house, most can't even qualify for a mortgage to afford an average house.

https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/34534.jpeg

The average Joe, well, median Joe in that case, living alone in say France/Germany/UK can barely qualify for a 200k mortgage over 30 years, and that won't get you much unless you plan on living like a student your whole life

> A landlord will happily swallow 50% of your income but a bank will start to feel bad about a ~30% debt to income ratio, so no you can't really.

It's almost as if the banks know they're very likely to lose money by approving loans people are statistically unlikely to be able to make 360 on-time payments for.

> Reminder that a 300k mortgage over 30 years at 5% costs you 600k in the end

100% true and stated this way makes it sound like it's the evil bankers, but really it's just the way math works.

> most people are priced out of buying a house

I don't think "most" is accurate here, especially if you include areas don't have insane NIMBY restrictions on building like SF and NYC.

This[0] shows there are absolutely places more affordable than others. My one complaint is that if everything gets more expensive the map doesn't really change so it could be better.

And I've heard the rebuttal before about "that's where the jobs are" (false) or "that's where I grew up." I get it, but living in high-demand places is not a constitutional right. Not having your own home in a major downtown metro is not a violation of your rights. If you can't afford to live somewhere, you should move. I'm in the 4th state I've lived in in my life right now. I might be here until I die, I might live in 4 more. Lots of things play into that but a major part of the calculus is whether or not I can afford to live the life I want here.

[0] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-u-s-housing-affordab...

And with a few years of 10% inflation on the value of money etc... that 600 at x=30 was a bad deal

Compared to what?

> It's fine to want that but let's not pretend "rent should be illegal" is a serious or reasonable policy proposal.

So its fine for you that there are people owning 20+ properties speculating on profit for basic human needs? Its literally Nestlé "this is MY water" behavior.

Most people here are pro capitalism. It has flaws but you’re also being blind to its benefits.

If 20 people need homes to live in and can’t afford to build them, suddenly landlords/investors have a place because they built housing inventory where others couldn’t. They won’t do that for free though and why should they.

I remember your username from prior threads, you’re a troll man. Take this crap to Reddit.

Let them profit off commercial real estate, or a million other things that capitalism provides.

The nestle statements about profiting off people’s need for drinking water were universally viewed as disgusting. We shouldn’t always profit off the basic needs of other humans.

This list gets long pretty quick once you start it though. I'm sure you could say the same for healthcare & education. In doing so, according to a cursory google search, you just removed profit from ~40% of GDP. That's going to be felt.

Propose pivoting our entire economy all you want, but do it in a way that doesn't cripple it and provides more than a one sided benefit masquerading as having no downside implications.

> I'm sure you could say the same for healthcare & education

Yes. In fact, every developed country already does.

> you just removed profit from ~40% of GDP

Is the point of society to maximize profit all the time at the expense of other things, or to provide a good life for people and ensure their basic needs are met?

> provides more than a one sided benefit masquerading as having no downside implications

Of course there are downsides. Rich people will be less rich. Lower class people won’t be so easy to exploit. People will be happier and more content, so there will be less crime and less people in prison.

The fact you prioritize profits over people is both illuminating and horrific. What a terrible place you must live in.

Like it or not it is the reality of the United States. It would be a huge shock to the system but I don’t disagree with you entirely that it wouldn’t help close the wealth gap. I just don’t trust our politicians here to implement a change like this without making it worse.

I’m arguing for not just making one single law that X must be profit free as an entire industry without considering anything else. The government here would not provide housing. It would not invest in hospitals. It would not build universities. It would just ban them from being profitable and we’d all suffer because of the lack of supply that results. I think the difference here is I’m thinking if the practical implications of how it would be executed and you’re imagining some hypothetical scenario when it’s executed well. The fact other nations do it isn’t reassuring to me, precisely because we have proven time and time again that we will flat out refuse to look outward for ideas that are effective. We have to put our own stamp on it and mess it up, or just do nothing.

Sounds like you’ve already given up before you even tried.

It's a bit telling of your own biases that government/public housing seems to have escaped mention as "having a place" in this scenario.

There's nothing mutually exclusive, I'm addressing the thing that's being discussed not the entire universe of possible solutions

Say they don't. If they can't afford to buy their own house, now those people no longer have a place to live. How is that better?

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