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Comment by chasd00 | Hacker News Reader

idk how this would work effectively. There's lots of affordable homes they're just located where no one wants to live. You'd have to focus on HCOL locations and make them not so high cost which seems something that should be done at the local level.

You can increase supply but investors would just snatch them up. Maybe the feds could put a cap on the value of a single-family home that an institution can own and then make ownership very tedious. For example, no institution can own a home valued at more than $500k and for each home owned a quarterly filing must be made in person at the county the home is located. I'm sure these organizations would rather own very high value homes than lots of low value ones out in BFE.

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>There's lots of affordable homes they're just located where no one wants to live

It's probably more accurate to say "they're just located where no one can get a job." You can give up you SWE job or whatever and move to a small town/rural area, but you're not going to convince anyone to give you a mortgage off your income from the subway at the local truck stop, or whatever labor gig you can get at the local industrial concern. Although if you're in medicine there is probably hope.

If only technology had progressed to an extent that we don't psychically need to be concentrated in 15-20 HCOL major metro areas to do most (if not all) office jobs.

> You can give up you SWE job or whatever and move to a small town/rural area, but you're not going to convince anyone to give you a mortgage off your income from the subway at the local truck stop, or whatever labor gig you can get at the local industrial concern

There's certainly SWE jobs in LCOL places but even if there weren't, one's savings from a HCOL area should go pretty far in a LCOL one. Also, thinking that you can't get a mortgage off working at Subway in a small town is just out of touch. You'd probably have to work a lot longer than a cushy SWE job, but it's still possible.

> You can give up you SWE job or whatever and move to a small town/rural area, but you're not going to convince anyone to give you a mortgage off your income from

It's strange to me that moving to LCOL wasn't a much bigger thing during the period when everyone was working remotely.

It seems to me that moving to lower cost-of-living cities did have a remote work boom, but it wasn’t evenly distributed. People from HCOL areas still wanted a high level of services (restaurant, airport, healthcare, recreation opportunities, etc) and probably a cool “vibe”. So the people fleeing SF and LA didn’t move to Dayton and Topeka and Duluth, but they did go to Boise and Bozeman and Asheville.

A lot of people did try moving to Texas, but with RTO it didn’t last.

Just tax non primary residences at a much higher rate. Housing crisis solved.

I think that it should be a ramping rate, the idea being that a 1x landlord should be able to outbid a 2x landlord and so on.

In theory this encourages a sort of spreading effect where at some point the Nth property is too expensive to buy to rent or speculate on, which naturally stops the exponential effect of making land lording your full time gig by continuously expanding the portfolio.

As someone who generally hates taxes I support this. Taxes at best should be used to discourage externalities and rent seeking.

However, California even tried to repeal prop13 for non primary residence and it failed! So i'm not sure how popular this idea is.

They already are.

Not enough. Things like 1031 exchanges should be removed from the tax code.

Only on a local level.

And businesses can already expense that tax, so it's 20% off, while individuals have been subject to the SALT cap

Clearly, not enough!

Capitalists hate him! Use this one weird trick to...

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