Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by AtlasBarfed | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

AtlasBarfed

" The housing problem hasn't been solved"

This assumes it is a problem that is being addressed.

When housing values soar, there are people getting rich off of that.

The "solution" is devaluation of people's assets, and all politics is local, and all local politics is housing values.

As clearly is a supply and demand issue. Supplies clearly being artificially suppressed.

Of course, the housing market merely reflects every other segment in our our "market economy"... Everything is Monopoly cartel or regulatory capture

View on HN

Exactly. For most people, the housing problem is that their house isn't worth more.

My parents were whining a few months ago about the possibility of new apartments being built not far from their house. Why? More noise, more traffic, more people. Things that would impact the value of their nearly debt-free home.

Meanwhile most people my age (mid-30s) who don't have a home have more-or-less given up on the idea of getting one, and people their age (mid-60s) are having the possibility of property tax abatements thrown their way so that they can stay in a home until they absolutely can't anymore, or pass away.

The vast majority of American economic decisions are ultimately aimed at passing off more value into the hands of asset-holding retirees. Full stop.

> More noise, more traffic, more people. Things that would impact the value of their nearly debt-free home.

Maybe they just don't want the noise and traffic, and they don't really care about the impact on their house value.

Seems like you're jumping to a conclusion.

Yes, I'm jumping to conclusions about the people who I've known since my birth.

You're right. I forgot that it's impossible for parents and children to misunderstand eachother.

I should have realized it, too, because when my parents tell me something, I know what they really mean, and it's not usually what they actually said to me.

So of course your parents want their house price to go up so they can pay higher taxes while surrounded by more traffic and noise. Seems so obvious now that you say it.

> So of course your parents want their house price to go up so they can pay higher taxes while surrounded by more traffic and noise. Seems so obvious now that you say it.

Good thing that my county now offers people of their age a way to abate property tax increases so that they can "stay in the home they've known for so long" or whatever the line was.

Well, good for seniors. Absolutely awful for the people my age who want to buy a home, start a family, and participate in the economy in ways that those things enable. But we don't much care about those people.

Anyways, thanks for clarifying things to me internet stranger.

Yeeep. It feels like one of those “holding a wolf by the ears” situations. I don’t know how we get out of this mess.

One especially frustrating part of it is that it really benefits nobody. Your home goes up in value, cool. You owe more property taxes. And all the other homes around you also go up in value, so… you’re really no better off unless you downsize or move to a cheaper housing market.

Something akin to Georgism seems like the correct answer. But how you get there from here? Beats me!

One option is to get home prices to stop rising faster than wages by having wage growth speed up while real estate value growth slows down (not necessarily becoming negative). Then, no one is underwater on their mortgage, but buying a house becomes more accessible year over year. Of course, you'll need to eventually stop to address the normal problems with deflation, or address those in some other way.

What specific policies achieve this is also a separate question.

I don't see how home values could hold up with white collar work threatened over the coming years. Anyone's guess as to the timing but tech is aiming at this full force - what else has equivalent TAM? It's too big a prize to discount in the longterm.

All of the English speaking capitalistic countries are suffering from the same problem the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand.

Housing un affordability for the next generation coming up, starter homes in California are easily at least 500,000 the old two bedroom one car garage starter house I grew up in cost $550,000 today built in the 1925. There is no way anyone in the surrounding area for the most part make enough money to afford to buy it today.

The one thing that is going up all over the place across the country are those so-called luxury apartments which cost an arm and a leg even for a one bedroom studio, the one thing that is interesting or ironic. The only reason I can afford to buy anything is because relatively late in life bought as many shares of Apple computer as I could about 21 years ago.

Anyone coming up between 18 and 30 are in trouble unless their family is relatively well off and can help them.

Luxury apartments are BS. Lived in one. Slightly above builder grade materials, stainless steel appliances (that are still cheap), Pelotons in the gym and Starbucks in the main area are cool, but the walls are still thin and shit still breaks like anywhere else.

Luxury apartment is a term of marketing, all new builds use it. The main problem is the management tends to be lackadaisical. My current place is ~5yo, has great sound isolation, but responsiveness has varied over time and teams.

> All of the English speaking capitalistic countries are suffering from the same problem the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand.

A third world country like India has costlier real estate than any of those. A 2nd rate metro has apartments in high rise buildings for $500K - $1M. Unbelievably expensive. Then there are villa communities (equivalent of single family homes, suburbs), which are even more costlier. I keep asking people how do they afford these and how will this sustain, nobody has an answer about how these are afforded but everyone thinks the growth will continue. The usual problems of mosquitoes (dengue, malaria), water problems, power outages, lifts not working, worst air quality, etc, etc .... looks like the only thing copied from western world is super costly real estate.

The thing is homeowners benefit from denser zoning because the potential of their land is increased even if the average unit price comes down - also the amenity value of more jobs, amusements, school funding/tax base, etc in the city should show up in the price too.

Homeowners definitely do not believe that their home prices benefit from denser zoning. (I'm a housing activist, very close to killing off SFZ in my muni, knock wood).

Homeowners care less about their house prices than people realize - it's just a convenient excuse.

Most homeowners just don't want things to change.

I've spent kind of a lot of time talking directly to homeowners, and while I agree a general fear of change is one of the first principal components of this problem, housing price loss aversion is definitely a real thing.

Most people don't like loss ( | || || |_ ) but rarely is it really a case of potential loss (unless "density increase" is code for "build a maximum security prison next door") - it's just a case of slower appreciation.

I don't care much about price loss if it is happening everywhere, so if I ever want to move to another region selling my house here will pay for one there.

> fear of change is one of the first principal components of this problem

By describing it a "fear of change" you are assuming (I think) that the change is always good for everyone, people just "fear it" irrationally.

The reality is that most people choose where to buy a house based on some criteria of what they like and the lifestyle they want. Whatever it may be for them, but nearly everyone puts a huge amount of effort in considering what they want from a neighborhood and then try to find a matching location to buy a house.

If you come in and completely change the nature of the neighborhood, in a way that makes it incompatible with why they chose it, of course they'll hate it. You would too if it happens to you. Every human would, basic human nature.

It depends on what that factor is - cities change and the density, views, etc are not frozen for you at the time of your purchase. It's hard to understand why someone would think otherwise. There are plenty of planned communities, HOAs, etc that are much more likely to go unchanged that would seem to be a better fit for people like this.

> It's hard to understand why someone would think otherwise.

Think, or feel? Rationally, most people might realize that over the decades places will change.

Emotionally, if you put it a huge amount of effort and more money than you've ever spent (or ever will) on anything else and then someone comes in and changes everything about it that you originally loved, you will hate it. Basic undeniable human nature.

Here in San Francisco, you just have to look on Nextdoor for two minutes to see droves of people coming up with absurd complaints about any and every case of new housing construction, up to and including literally photoshopping bad faith concept images of buildings to try and make projects look worse.

Housing prices only come up when people try to engage in bad faith gymnastics about how actually they only paid 200K for their two million dollar house so they're totally just ordinary middle class people with middle class concerns.

It's not a convenience excuse, it's a strawman. It's easy to dismiss the strawman.

It's much harder to act like the good guy when you're talking about turning a quiet neighborhood into a much denser neighborhood where the kids can't walk to school anymore because there are too many cars.

I never understand why people are so eager to turn a neighborhood they don't live in into something else rather than move to any of the multitude of neighborhoods that are already like that.

Because it's not OK to take the areas of highest economic opportunity and lock them up for incumbent homeowners with exclusive zoning. I focus on the neighborhood I do in fact live in, for what it's worth.

The economic opportunities are not something in the soil, but rather effects of the laws governing the place and the people that chose to live and work there. It might not be possible to make the change you want without changing who wants to live and work there and reducing the economic opportunities.

I didn't say that. There are good arguments on both sides of the issue but the pro-density/change side rarely makes any kind of argument that I've ever heard from the other side. Instead, it's just painted like they're a bunch of greedy bastards.

Imagine if someone wanted to change all the streets in your neighborhood to only accomodate bicycles but you own a home in the center of the city and commute 20 miles to a town in another county for work.

I didn't call anybody a bastard.

yes, this is true - getting discussed a bit in YIMBY circles but definitely not common knowledge. benefits to current owners should be a topic of research and outreach.

Sure but homeowners can literally have their cake and eat it too. Homeowners who like where they live and don’t want to sell are best served by scarcity.

Unfortunately that means they can play both cards, they can benefit from scarcity while pretending to be anti-gentrification. And they can claim any pro-housing group is actually “pro scary capitalist developer”.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com