In the end, isn't the answer relatively simple when phrased in terms of supply and demand? In by far the majority of these cities, the number of new units built pales in comparison to the number of new people moving to these cities, and as such you have a larger number of people competing for the same number of units, thus driving up prices. Cities like Montreal, Canada have a much larger housing stock due to middle density housing (multiplexes of 6-10 apts), and this is reflected in these cities having much lower average rent compared to other cities in North America.
No. Landlords became greedier. In contrast to the kind, generous landlords of just a few years ago, landlords are now greedy. Building more units won't help. Supply and demand is a capitalist myth.
Late game monopoly. Lots of wealth in the hands of a few, the rest meant to be content to go around the board paying them for the privilege of working for them.
Certainly a joke, but I don't see how it aligns with what I wrote. We're def in the late stages of a monopoly game, provided we don't magically find another board (aka leave Earth).
OK I'm not a landlord/capitalist apologist but it sure does make sense to me that rents rise in part because there are way more people that want to live in an area than available units.
For example Downtown LA and Koreatown are putting up large apartment buildings like crazy, because the zoning allows them to, and rents have not increased nearly as much as other popular LA areas that are mostly single-family zoned, such as Santa Monica.
This is why Minnesota and now recently California basically upzoned the entire state, because upzoning with local ordinances neighborhood by neighborhood is almost always defeated by NIMBYs, which are generally a combination of of local homeowners and local small-time landlords.
Don't forget that a huge portion of US landlords are "mom and pop" landlords, which have a massive portion of their net worth wrapped up a handful of rental units and don't have the capital to build net new units. These people are more economically opposed to new housing than a large developer who can stomach the capital outlay for a new building.
When they are allowed to developers can profitably build dense housing, which produces net new units into the market, which helps combat rising rent.
Just like how gas stations got really greedy earlier this summer - thankfully Biden told them to knock it off and now prices are falling.
Don’t let those economists tell you lies about how goods with inelastic demand will dramatically rise in price when supply can’t keep pace… they’re just covering for the greedy people.
I mean this depends on the context. In our current market that's how a lot of people operate but it isn't a requirement. See any kind of pro bono work, To be honest it feels like a really convenient excuse that people use when they're aware, on some level, that they should feel bad about their actions.
From a purely practical point of view, as a landlord your tenants can cause a lot of financial damage. If you force out a good tenant by raising rents then you're gambling that the next one isn't going to be a nightmare.
Let’s say you have a leasable asset, your choices are to maximize its net present value or to price the lease under the market in order to benefit someone else. The best thing you can do for someone else is to give them all of your assets and attempt to live in a manner that does not compete for resources with others (live in some kind of zero energy homeostasis until reaching an old age for example).
Obviously, these represent two extremes of selfishness and selflessness. So, what is a rule of thumb for an asset owner to not be considered greedy? Price 10% below market for example or allow 3 missed payments per year?
Greed is an easy label to assign until until you have to get concrete about it.
Like many things in society it's not entirely objective. It depends on the situations of the parties involved.
Take two hypothetical tenants. One is a young software developer earning $15k/mo, the other a retired widow on a fixed pension of $3k/mo. The social reaction to either party's rent being raised from $1k/mo to $2.5k/mo is going to be very different.
> your choices are to maximize its net present value or to price the lease under the market in order to benefit someone else
This leaves out the fact that in the majority of cases the lessor is benefiting either way. It's purely the extent to which they benefit that changes.
> Greed is an easy label to assign until until you have to get concrete about it.
All sorts of labels are difficult to assign objectively. What matters is personal opinion and societal consensus. Both of those are fluid and have changed throughout history.
huge problem in Vancouver, a single bedroom/studio 500sqft in Vancouver is asking ~$3000 CAD / month or $2300 USD / month. 10 years ago I lived in a 600sq ft for half that rent including utilities and internet.
Wages has not changed here since the 80s and tech also underpays people for the same role. Meanwhile condo sales sees no sign of slowing down, everywhere real estate is on the decline, here it seems to continue.
I wonder if this is sustainable, there is a large number of multi bedroom condo units asking well above $5000 CAD / month
Canada has one of (if not the) lowest housing stocks per population in the developed world. BC and Ontario are on the lower end of all the provinces in this regard as well, which is a major problem when you count how much our population is growing and the fact that the majority of that growth ends up in the VAN/TOR greater metros.
Canada's biggest problem is that we didn't lock out immigration policies to our infrastructure and housing policies. Bringing up that fact though often spirals into someone trying to claim that being concerned about the policies makes you a racist or anti-immigration which is nonsense.
yet the people flipping homes and own multiple properties are local canadians, so are immigrants to be blamed for wanting to buy a home? why is there no focus on corporations purchasing multiple units in bulk to flip it? I feel like this blame the immigration policy is an old trope that I been hearing since the 80s.
and this just highlights the issue in Canada: we can't even agree as to what the underlying issues are, instead we scapegoat minority groups because it has worked since the 80s.
see you're doing exactly what I described.. you saw someone mention the word immigration and went off like a dog on a steak without reading.
I'm not "blaming immigrants" - I'm blaming immigration policies that have Canada leading most of the developed world in net immigration while also being in last place for it's housing stock.
That situation causes a supply and demand loop that makes it profitable for corporations to flip units (the corps doing this is a SYMPTOM not the CAUSE of the problem).
I have no issue with immigration and I'm not scapegoating minority groups (seriously read next time please), what I'm saying is the policy that allows one needs to be directly influenced by the policy of the other or you get knock on effects like we are seeing now.
You are correct that we can't agree on the underlying issue, but not because anyone is scapegoating but because so many people want to concern troll and try to avoid having a discussion for fear of being labeled as insensitive.
<monkeywork> we didn't lock out immigration policies to our infrastructure and housing policies
*lock out -> lock our(?)
<upupandup> but you are literally blaming immigration for the housing situation
No, monkeywork is saying that housing policy and immigration need to be tied together. If we have slow housing growth, immigration must be restricted. If we want high immigration, we must allow fast housing growth.
This is certainly a factor, but there are additional factors, too, that mean demand has been increased.
In the UK mortgage application controls were increased after 2008. This meant it became particularly difficult for first-time buyers to get a mortgage, locking them into rental properties for longer, and further increasing demand.
In London and most cities in the UK we have an extraordinary amount of foreign investment in property. Entire blocks owned by foreign faceless corporations (many of which are probably offshore shell companies for wealthy entities in the UK) who are happy to let their properties remain empty in order to maintain the average price(s) and sit on the capital gains with little to no maintenance requirement because they just don't have any tenants.
For decades now, "buying to let" has been promoted as the easypath for those fortunate enough to invest for their future. Ultra low interest rates, coupled with ever increasing property prices, and charging rent that covers your mortgage repayments, and maintenance, _and_ some extra passive income on top, means it's certainly an attractive option for those who can afford it, and by God has it been taken. News articles of landlords with _hundreds_ of properties in their portfolio is not uncommon. Entire towns owned by a single landlord in some cases.
And our political parties treat "house price" like a hot potatoe through fear of being the ones to pop the bubble, cause lots of defaults, and ultimately lose the homeowner vote. In fact most MPs are landlords themselves.
If you ever played Monopoly; you know that available housing is limited by physics, conglomerates and local laws, therefore supply is capped. Global housing demand cannot adjust because people need a place to stay. Supply and demand (elasticity) works great for certain goods, housing is just not one of them.
It's part of the 'great squeeze' affecting the 20-50% of Americans who do not have college degrees or highly paid, sought after skills (although some college educated people are indeed feeling the squeeze too). Expensive areas have higher rent but lower wages and fewer job opportunities. This is why so many people still recommend college, despite debt and loans, because it still offers the best shot of at least some semblance of a middle class lifestyle and home ownership, which is the only ticket out of the cash-to-rent wealth incineration trap.
IRS should hire as many people as they need, as there is usually greater return than what it costs to pay them.
Everyone SHOULD pay their fair share. If the laws suck then the lower and middle class should focus on the rich and put pressure on the puppets in the office. However, it seems many love voting against their own interest.
Edit: If you have a problem paying taxes and are in the middle class. I suggest you think about starting a life somewhere without taxes, you will quickly realize that your middle class life is actually made possible by the infrastructure in place.
Unfortunately not true, and your article outlines why. Going after the rich requires not only highly trained and specialized agents, but state attorneys to enforce judgement, and those aren't being hired or trained up.
They may be going after more people in the 2-25% income group, but the 1% is just as immunized as ever, hiring 80k non specialist agents won't change that.
I have college degrees and sought after skills that are highly paid for, I just don't get highly paid for those skills or degrees. They're still valuable in the abstract, but I get by on entirely unrelated work and pay that most HN users might feel is abject poverty. And that's OK to me, for the most part. I have a roof overhead and food on the table and am intellectually challenged every day, if not in the ways I thought I would be.
Yet I'm still part of this squeeze, the segment of America that cannot buy a home because I cannot outbid others because I cannot afford to save up enough to put down more down-payment, despite the many grants/programs meant to help people like me. Sellers just won't sell, since they get better offers.
In the meantime, I rent. If you gave me one year of not having to pay rent (hello eviction moratorium, wish I had met you), I would be able to be barely competitive in a LCOL area for a home that would need me to bribe an inspector to qualify for those grants/programs.
Around here it's not a supply and demand issue, either; there are plenty vacant places, both low and high end. It's just that owners (corporate and individual alike) don't feel any need to take on any risk. Same with renting. Risky tenants without hefty deposit and/or collateral aren't worth it, not one bit. The rest of us suffer for those who can't behave, as usual.
It'll work itself out, though, or it won't, and I'll age out of it all and it'll be a problem for my kids to handle. That's how it goes.
> Free market. People forget free market is not allways cheaper.
It's not a free market. Look at how hard it is to get land and approvals to build new housing.
If we had a truly free market in housing, we wouldn't have these problems. High prices would incentivize more construction which would bring down prices.
It's not a free market, though. It's not even a well-regulated market. It's a total mess of a market. This is a land zoning map of Toronto [1], one of the more pathological examples for a North American city. Toronto is a large and dense city with a housing shortage. And yet everything in red? It's only legal to construct a detached single family-home on that land.
In something at least vaguely resembling a free market, detached homeowners such as me would have to compete with other land use that generates much more utility, and thus income from rents, on the same land area, with something like a high-rise. But I am insulated from that, by laws that effectively entrench the upper middle class's preferred land-use pattern of detached suburban housing. Zoning bylaws that prohibit constructing anything else effectively subsidize the suburban lifestyle.
If people spent half the effort on holding their provincial and muni reps accountable for this rather than belly-aching online about all the other items I listed above (which are really symptoms not causes) maybe something will change.
Im hopefully for a rental class backlash. Hopefully enough people will vote for YIMBY policies and actually start building enough housing. I hope the backlash is strong enough that all the landlords squatting land and voting against housing get left holding the bag.
Housing should not be an investment. If it is we can never have affordable housing. Developing, renting out, and managing properties can be profitable without requiring the mere act of owning a house to be an investment that grows. A house should be a capital expenditure. It's shameful that for many, leaving the apartment or house empty can still make significant returns.
Land in places with jobs is scarce. We don't tolerate people hoarding other scarcities, land should be no different.
How about.. increasing the property tax rate exponentially with the number of properties held. Few people are arguing that a mom-pop rental business needs to be shut down. These conglomerates with > 10,000 properties are the serious problem, even the data from the article points this out clearly.
I really like your idea but I don't know how you'd reconcile it with organizations simply forming a shell over many smaller companies with a few properties each.
I don't want it to be harder for someone to buy their first house (I also want to buy my first house haha). I want it to be harder for some thing to buy it's 10,001st house.
Not sure this is feasible. A) People can hide how many houses they "own" rather easily. B) People with 10,000 houses have 10,000 times the economic incentive to run for office and/or press elected officials to make things easier on them.
The best approach is to press for over-development of housing. It doesn't matter if someone owns 1 house, or 1000 houses, so long as there is more than enough homes for everyone.
Idea: have a property tax line item that's based on the ratio of population / housing units. The higher that ratio, the higher the tax. The tax revenue is used to cover the costs of constructing more housing units, which lowers the tax.
Homestead exemptions can keep property taxes low on one house per person, allowing property taxes on investment properties to skyrocket without any effect on first-time buyers, or really any homeowners. In theory.
How do you handle the risk of defaults? If you never charged interest wouldn't anyone who offered loans just go out of business?
I do think credit scores are a scam (as are overdraft fees) and that rates should be reasonable, but no interest would make nobody lend money.
I like having a car loan - I was able to buy a car with current safety features. Without it I'd have to buy some unsafe (or unreliable) clunker in cash.
By prohibiting interest bearing loans, loans become relegated to purely an act of charity, and as you point out, there will no longer be businesses that are built only or mostly to lend money and profit off of usury. And that's a good thing.
There's no reason why the car manufacturers won't be able to offer 0% interest on moderate term loans (a few years long). They already do today when they want to sell cars. This will drive prices down actually.
You can also have longer term leases without interest, effectively paying for depreciation and the company can profit from leasing the car.
Where I live, they lop off a large value for tax purposes if you live in your property:
"shifts the tax burden within the residential class from owners of moderately valued residential properties to the owners of vacation homes, higher valued homes and residential properties not occupied by the owner, including apartments and vacant lands."
I want to agree, but at the end of the day the corps doing this are taking crappy properties and renovating them. They want to fix it up and resell it or charge higher rents than the current owners. That's how they make their profits.
Usually they have a maintenance staff that takes care of the property as well or add additional services.
Mom and pop landlords don't do any of that usually, and just hand someone a key w/ a call to the occasional contractor to fix something instead of an actual company. Most need a warm body to pay off their mortgage so they can sell it in the future and pocket the cash.
We need to fix the supply side, if the corp takes the properties that are broken down and fixes them that's a good thing. The problem comes when people who are around there now cannot afford the new rents they either become homeless or leave.
How far they have to leave depends on the supply of housing in the surrounding area, which b/c of the shortage is pretty low. With a huge supply of housing, it's possible to move next door or down the street and not much changes.
If we build more rents will go down, regardless of who the owners are. Prices to buy homes too for normal people.
Getting people to build more is the problem, high construction costs, zoning/permiting, local opposition etc.
> but at the end of the day the corps doing this are taking crappy properties and renovating them. They want to fix it up and resell it or charge higher rents than the current owners.
Could it be the reason that those properties are too expensive for a regular Joe to fix up because of investors in the first place.
Hawaii does that and it wrecks the housing market, because it creates two tiers of housing: leased land and owned land housing. All you will end up with is all the expensive property is going to be on "purchased land" and all the cheap properties will be on leased land.
Hawaii has a good reason for doing this because land is scarce and there is no place to go. Basically anywhere else this would be idotic IMO.
All land should be leased from the government. That's what a land value tax is and there are many, many reasons it works much better than our current land system.
In effect it already is: we lack allodial title in the United States anyhow, and all land is subject to taking by eminent domain and taxation by local governments.
High property taxes based on land value. This makes the land itself a liability that is offset only by the owners to extract value from the property by improving and using it.
This property is still an investment via improving the property to enhance income potential, but less of a speculative bet on the overall state of the market.
What does that do for an existing single family house that someone inherited / moved into as their parents moved out? It wasn't bought as an investment - its a place to live.
A high property tax based on land value would suggest that all the places people need to live would need to be generating income, have a high income for the family, or they'd need to move into a place where that land value is distributed across a wider base of households.
If someone inherits a single family house and don't view the property as providing enough value as a residence or rental to cover the land taxes, then they should sell the property or redevelop it at a higher density that better matches the value of the the land.
Of course land should be producing economic value. If it doesn't or thr value produced doesn't match the land's value, then something is wrong.
Are the developers of apartment buildings financial vampires too? The people who literally are adding supply to the market (and therefore lowering prices, because supply and demand)?
I think if it's an investment, that's fine. The problem is when housing is allowed to become a speculative investment, and the investment activity on housing begins to seriously threaten the actual housing activity. So for example you could do one or more of the following:
- Adjust mortgage rates on homes owned but not lived in (eg: triple them)
- Completely ban owning more than one home
- Implement a sliding tax on rental income (the more units you collect on, the higher the tax you pay)
- Bring back (or implement) rent controls and have them geared to cost of living
Basically anything that makes it less feasible to profit off of people who just want a safe place to live.
" The unprecedented number of refugees arriving in Ireland has put pressure on the country's housing crisis, despite generous offers to host Ukrainian families. "
I'm not sure how that results in cutting demand for building housing. The article is basically saying there's a crisis with few reasons offered.
How / why / what would be cutting demand for building housing? Demand is the last thing I'd be worried about. People need a place to live, and they need the housing to live in, so there's always going to be demand for building it.
> The problem is when housing is allowed to become a speculative investment
I don’t think the distinction you’re drawing makes sense; there are plenty of ways to speculate in an otherwise healthy housing market (e.g. move to a gentrifying neighborhood in the hopes of moving again in a few years when your property is worth more).
It seems like the common theme for the ills you identify is housing being un- or under-utilized while the owner is expecting or reaping the rewards of capital appreciation. More straightforward policy responses to that could include imposing a surtax on unoccupied property or taxing imputed rent regardless of occupancy.
> move to a gentrifying neighborhood in the hopes of moving again in a few years when your property is worth more
I didn't leave it just as speculation being the problem. You ignored the second part where I said "and the investment activity on housing begins to seriously threaten the actual housing activity". The speculative investment features intensify the use of homes for purposes other than housing. In your example, the purchaser is using it for both speculation and housing. Not so bad. But someone who owns a home, then leverages the equity to buy another that they don't intend to live in but rent out, then does that again 2 or 3 times, now we have a problem where this person is just massively leveraging and speculating, supported by the government and the banks, "the system" if you will. And then higher rents are in the best interest of these more affluent people. Rather, "the system" could disincentivize this kind of activity.
> ills you identify is housing being un- or under-utilized...imposing a surtax on unoccupied property
Not really something I was talking about, no...but that problem would be addressed by the first two suggestions I offered. Of course if for some reason it was still a problem, or you didn't want to be as heavy handed, you could go ahead and impose a surtax like you said.
> Lots of people buy a starter house with the intention of selling for more when they, for example, start having kids and need a bigger house.
This is the problem though. Capital gains for the seller represents inflation on an equivalent lifestyle for the next buyer.
First time buyer programs, lower mortgage rates, etc, are all just smokescreens to try and grow the pyramid one more level before it becomes evidently unsustainable. Exponential growth is too powerful: if housing is a good investment for long enough, it becomes unaffordable, period.
Either deregulate to allow for developers to build more, or have the govt step in and build more. (Maybe even both)
Nothing should stop housing from being an investment in the same way that any good effected by supply and demand is, but there's a difference with the price of housing going up at at slightly over the rate of inflation and what we've seen the last couple years across the entire market. (Or even the decade before that in the bay area.) 10-20% a year rises in the COL is insane, and encourages rent seeking by current housing owners to the detriment of everyone else.
Public policy should favor the former, and punish the later.
There is no problem with property being an investment.
Prices are constrained by people's incomes and over the 20th century incomes have grown faster than inflation (people have got richer). This leaves space for positive returns without necessarily hurting affordability.
Now, in many places construction has slowed a lot and capital is cheap, which is really what has caused prices to skyrocket.
Eventually, incomes will still constrain the market, though, especially in lettings.
Housing should also not be finite… and yet it is. You can only stuff so many people into a city. At some point, people must accept that they will have to live somewhere else, potentially less desirable but very affordable. The only way to fairly distribute the limited supply of housing is to the highest bidders.
The places where there are housing shortages don’t even have “sell to the highest bidder” they have miles of red tape that make the land have absurd prices because 20 story condominiums should be being built there instead of a two bedroom bungalow with granite countertops and a pool.
It seems that the construction of most new housing is blocked by people who have a clear interest in maintaining the status quo for mainly monetary reasons, as well as not wanting new people to come in. Here it seems that current residents have every right and reason to maintain the form and substance of their current housing situation until they, their children, their grandchildren, and who knows how many generations after them, decide it is time for a change.
The "people must accept" can also be used to keep supply limited ("you want to be a lawyer, but we, current lawyers, don't want you"), wages low ("you don't want to make two dollars an hour? Get another job") or anything else that is currently regulated or unregulated, depending on what the people in power currently want or don't want.
There is no Bible, nothing is written in stone. It's an ongoing struggle—-and I'm not speaking from a Marxist perspective, please, just a human one--between people who have power now and other people who would like to have a say and currently don't have one, and who, after they get some power, will probably block other would-be newcomers to the party.
There is no perfect "market-dynamics".
Where I currently live, there is no reason to have entire neighborhoods scarcely populated, or areas that could receive hundreds if not thousands of new units not developed. They are not because there are people who fight tooth and nails to keep housing limited for the reasons I explained above, and the city is either kept hostage or is in cahoots with those who do not want new housing.
I mean sure, but we’re nowhere near capacity in most places.
Say I could ignore zoning laws and had a billion dollars to blow, I could just buy up a bunch of the $1.2 million 1200 square foot single family homes in San Francisco, bulldoze them and roll out a bunch of 10 story apartment buildings and I’d make an astonishing amount of money.
> The only way to fairly distribute the limited supply of housing is to the highest bidders.
How is it fair to distribute the supply of housing of a city, a place that people have roots in, generations sometimes who actually have a history there, just to the luckiest and greediest? Instead of, let's say, the people who have actually built that city which those rich folks seems so desirable to move in? I really don't understand how you can use fair to call a system like that.
How fair is it for generations of people to indefinitely hold onto desirable pieces of property they inherited for cheap until the day they die simply because they were born there? Not very.
And someone buying a property could easily be the beginning of new generations of people who will have long history there. Do they not deserve a chance too?
Only if you have money. No, it's not fair that someone with more money can take over land, it's the market and the way the world is but it's not fair. The only way this would be fair is if everyone started from the exact same spot in regards to resources: money, education, intelligence, etc. which isn't realistic at all.
The part that I don't get is with the pandemic you heard about folks moving out of the major cities. With that said you would think that prices in the cities would go down because there is more supply; however, looking at the numbers it seems quite the opposite.
I heard of many folks my age (mid 20s) moving to "lifestyle cities", places like Miami, NYC, LA, etc. These people aren't coming there for work, rather they are just there for the lifestyle. I can't really feel bad for this group of people because they did it to themselves. No one is putting a gun to your head and telling you that you have to live in NYC, LA or Miami with some of the highest cost of living in the country.
Don't move to a HCOL city and then bitch about the HCOL.
i don't think there's a high proportion of transplants complaining. rather, it's those that were already there and already struggling who have now found themselves in deep or deeper water.
NYC is an economic hub and there are many jobs that can only be done in or around NYC. Same goes for LA. Plus, both of these cities need regular people to run the services that a city relies on.
Not to mention that generations of people have lived in NYC.
Housing prices is determined by a lot of factors. The most recent being the pandemic and institutional investors. But we are still reeling from the 2008/9 housing crash. Everyone that went bankrupt couldnt buy a house for 7 years after their insolvency. That caused rents to rise, but also slow home sales. Once those people could buy houses again did, but even those people took time save properly so the buying period was (2008 + 7 years) give or take 7 additional years. Which is where we are at now. Everyone that cannot buy a house right now has the ability to change their lifestyle drastically and save. Move and save. etc.... There is plenty of housing (and jobs) if people were willing to change their lives for what they want instead of forcing the land to bend to their will.
i'm there with you as far as LA is concerned, but too bad most people here are focused on all the manufactured media distractions instead. for instance, abortion issues[0] affect literally no one here in LA (because CA law), and yet, so much talk centers around it here instead of the housing crisis and other stark disparities.
[0]: i'm pro-abortion via the absolute right to bodily autonomy, but no, i don't support the current media rhetoric or focus.
Abortion laws affect everyone in this country. Every unwanted child grows up to be a citizen here that you and I and everyone else will have to interact with. The econ literature has shown that about 40% of the reduction in violent crime since the 90's has been due to the proliferation of abortion.
first, if you truly believe that, i have a bridge to sell you in arizona. economists make unwarranted claims buttressed by biased models all the time.
second, that's ultimately a racist argument disguised behind safetyism, neither of which have a leg to stand on. every unwanted child still wants to grow up, be they poor or brown or whatever. let's welcome them rather than paint them over with disgust and wanton disposability.
besides, the point was not to debate abortion, but that it's an (wedge) issue used to distract and divide, rather than focusing the populace on the most pressing problems we face. covid, mass shootings, or climate change (as opposed to pollution) are suitable alternative distractions to consider in place of abortion.
Agreed about the other disparities. But I don't think you'll find one starker than abortion.
The right to bodily autonomy is not absolute. If it were, you could (morally) deliberately drop someone you where holding off the side of a cliff. After all, they don't have a right to your arm. (But they do in this circumstance).
that's arguing semantics (about "absolute"), not addressing the overwhelming experience of the right to bodily autonomy. we live in a complicated sociopolitical world and one contrived thought experiment doesn't a refutation make.
by right, people get to choose what to do with their own bodies when harm to others is small not simply zero (e.g., smoking).
The harm in this case is death (which definitely impinges on the bodily autonomy of the child). The cost to the mother is gestation (9 months of intimate support). There is no other who could provide this support. The child did not place themselves in this position of dependence, but were placed there (by the mother and father, but most of the time this is not _intended_ either, though it could be).
there's a gradient between 'nothing' and 'human', and things toward the 'nothing' end can't invoke bodily autonomy, especially against actual humans with real, functional bodies.
The child has a real, functioning body. From the moment of conception there's a separate self-organizing organism performing processes that will improve their body. The mother also has one. Both of them are human bodies.
it's pretty clear in the real world what is and isn't a separate human. i can't hang out and play paddycakes with a bunch of barely differentiated cells in a womb. it's like calling our gut bacteria a separate being because they have their own functioning processes. some even argue that gut bacteria have some sort of community sentience, but even that doesn't make them a separate being with any claims at all on the human's body.
You must not mean "separate human" in the sense that biology does (because a distinct individual of the species homo sapiens exists from the moment of conception). What does "human" in this discussion imply if not "distinct individual of a particular species"?
it's 'separate human' whether you're speaking in terms of biology, sociology, politics, or anything else. biology happens to be the most brutal of these, considering human only those who reach viability, which for humans is long after birth unlike most animals. again, a group of cells doesn't an individual make.
I must be misunderstanding something. Are you saying that a one-week post-birth child is still not a separate human from your perspective because they are not "viable" yet?
you were making an ontological claim, which simply doesn't hold true in any practical or reasonable sense, in any and all domains.
then, i put forth a separate observation (perhaps too tersely and obliquely) that biology is the most brutal (ultra-objective, yet ultra-complex) and so the least reasonable domain to be employed in pursuing your line of reasoning (which is wholly subjective and cultural).
biology isn't subject to human reasoning, emotion, or culture, which is where ontological arguments like yours squarely reside.
Yes, I assumed that since we can talk about categories and kinds we must be able to talk about a shared truth based in objective reality. Either "human" is a category we can talk about which is based in objective reality (and our understanding of that objective reality in biology, physics, and metaphysics) or we're not going to make any progress because we're discussing "taste" using the language of "truth".
To put it another way, either there's something objective which can be said about dropping children off of bridges in the moral realm related to bodily autonomy and our understanding of the duties and rights around bodily autonomy or else there isn't an objective moral realm. I presume, from your previous comments that you hold that there is an objective moral realm. Did I mistake your meaning?
yes, objective. bodies (i.e., independent beings) are required to invoke bodily autonomy, which brings with it the direct corrollary that non-bodies cannot invoke bodily autonomy. that's rational and objective, as in, it's beyond culture, beyond 'taste', towards 'truth'.
you countered with a subjective opinion hanging off an ultimately irrelevant legal triviality (that's also cultural, not objective).
The child in-utero is most certainly an independent being (or else the mother is not unless she's living in a universe she created herself ex nihilo). Is there some way to define "independent" that isn't driven entirely by subjective desires for one outcome or the other? Or must we leave bodily autonomy as being too subjective a principle?
a clump of fetal cells is the textbook definition of dependent and inseparable. you're otherwise projecting what they might become if everything goes well, not objectively perceiving what they are in the present. if we projected every human that way, we're all dead, and therefore worthless.
neither our subjective nor objective experience of those cells today is equivalent to that of any human being around us. you just can't get to the conclusion you want with only biology and objectivity, because your key premise is neither an objective nor a biological axiom.
A zygote is most certainly independent of the mother in the sense that the child and the mother are distinct members of the species. The child is not a part of the mother, but an independent (distinct) entity. The mother and child are distinguishable by biologists, by information theorists, by Thomistic philosophers, and by nutritionists in the south of France.
The child is most certainly dependent on the mother in the sense that this distinct, independent member of the species Homo sapiens cannot survive without constant support from the environment (another living person) that the child finds themselves dependent on. They are, as you point out, inseparable. But even birth won't solve this problem. From a societal perspective, even adulthood won't solve this problem for 99.999% of the human race.
In some places rental prices are increased even more because properties that would be rented otherwise are now just AirBNBs.
Just look at this map of registered short-term rentals in Scottsdale, AZ: https://eservices.scottsdaleaz.gov/maps/registered-rentals. I know it's a vacation destination, especially in the winter, but I'm sure something like this is going on everywhere rents are skyrocketing. And guess what, the short-term rental lobby got the state legislature in Arizona to pass a law that cities and counties couldn't restrict short-term rentals to a greater degree than the state does.
I still think the best solution (that'll never, ever happen) is something like an exponential property tax increase for additional properties you own over 2 or so. After you own a few properties that's a cost that can't simply be passed on, so it locks out giant investors and local monopolies.
There's nothing wrong with airbnbs. The problem is that airbnbs increase the demand for housing while local governments make it impossible to build new housing. Let supply follow demand.
This is like saying "uber increased dmeand for cars and that made cars expensive". No, the car companies just built more cars. We need to build more homes.
I mean sure. But land is limited. If you really want to build more homes you're going to have to bulldoze entire neighborhoods of single-family homes in places like Phoenix. Which is fine with me, I prefer a denser place, but I'm guessing that'd be a non-starter. And many places have sprawled so far that unless we densify it's not really all that helpful to keep carving out desert or farmland depending on where you live.
So I think there is a problem with AirBNBs. Even discounting quality of life issues that they can create for people actually living near them, they take a valuable resource for locals and turn them into pure investment plays that stay empty long stretches of time. Death to Nimbys generally, but I think you could get them on the same page as housing advocates if you went after short-term rentals.
Housing being an investment is the inevitable consequence of a free market around real estate. Land is scarce. Land near job centers is scarcer. There are far more people that want to live in nice neighborhoods near high-paying jobs than could possibly live there. How do you allocate that real estate?
Who gets to buy the next housing unit built in Manhattan? (This is equivalent to the question: you are selling your housing unit in Manhattan; who are you allowed to sell it to?)
If "investors" are not allowed to buy housing in Manhattan, who will develop the high-rises that house people who can't afford to buy their own apartment? Or do you institute price controls, so that instead of paying with money, you pay with generation-long wait times?
At this point I'm at the brink of advocating for violence.
I can't understand how people is so relaxed talking about this issue, seen large swaths of people in the west becoming poor and homeless.
It's not like we don't know what to do. It seems our elites don't really think it's a pressing issue. As long as they keep extracting wealth, they're fine.
Since the poor has no effective tool to overturn this situation, I think it's time for people to take justice in their own hands. It's the best way to send a message.
Maybe realizing their investments and their safety are in high risk will make them move their asses so we can have social peace.
We can't have millions of people becoming homeless and be like it's nothing.
> We don't tolerate people hoarding other scarcities
Can you give me an example of something we don't tolerate being hoarded? I genuinely can't think of anything. People seem to be allowed to accumulate whatever they can afford to, if they choose to. If it's on the market, that is.
Notable because the ultimate solution for PPE was 'build more'.
Outside of a few token busts on random idiots, and a few temporary limitations on Amazon purchases, anti-hoarding measures weren't the effective solution.
It seems, simply put, that more people are choosing to live alone in this market. If that holds true, then it could explain the large surge in demand in recent years. Perhaps it's not that the market lacks enough housing for people, it's that the market lacks enough housing for the number of people who wish to live alone.
For reference, 16.7% of adults aged 18-25 and 55.1% of adults ages 25-34 are living with a spouse or other partner as of 2018, down from 39.3% and 81.7% respectively in 1970. By my math that alone is responsible for an increase in demand of close to 10 million housing units. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/11/cohabitation-...
Of course, young adults living with roommates or parents have absorbed some of that difference, but I'm sure many of those people would live alone if housing prices were still at 1970 levels.
This is a perhaps rare case where some folks with bad financial behaviors ruin it for everyone. Someone making minimum wage buying Supreme, IPhones, etc...who cares. Doesn't affect anyone else, really.
But here you have people being irresponsible with what they're willing to spend on rent. And in doing so, force everyone else to also be irresponsible, else be left homeless. It feels like a giant jenga tower just waiting to collapse...
> But here you have people being irresponsible with what they're willing to spend on rent.
Irresponsible how? Rent goes up the most in places with good paying jobs. As rent goes up, generally the people without the good paying jobs have to move out. This process of low income residents competing with high income residents on housing and subsequently being displaced is called gentrification. It’s an example of a negative externality in a supply-constrained housing market where all players are acting rationally.
But there are a ton of areas not gentrifying, just turning the screws. One can see rent prices rise even in areas with a declining population, for example. And as long as enough people are willing to just pay more, everyone has to pay more. I'm not really proposing unionized renters, I don't know what the solution really is. The free market sounds nice on paper, until things crash ever so often.
It's not just rent, it happened with house prices, too. You had/have a sizeable amount of people out there willing to spend the absolute max the bank would approve them for, to compete. I was watching the RealEstate/REBubble subs over the last two years, and the number of people living outside their realistic means seemed insane to me.
This in turn made more competition, driving prices higher. A reasonable person who say, wouldn't try to buy a 500k house on a 100k salary was left with no choice(area dependent, of course).
Property prices basically doubled over the last 2 years, but rental prices have yet to catch up.
Unless you assume housing prices are going to crash, and I don't think there's any serious expectation that's going to happen, it seems pretty safe to assume rental costs will take a nearly identical trajectory
5. Investors Bought a Quarter of US Homes Sold Last Year (pewtrusts.org)
18 points by ParksNet 13 minutes ago | flag | hide | discuss
6. Why Is Rent Skyrocketing? (thehustle.co)
15 points by paulpauper 28 minutes ago | flag | hide | 29 comments
This is going to hit low income retirees very, very hard.
Here in Canada I'm hearing plenty about this already. In Victoria, BC, a lot of retirees are living here and dealing with price increases for home insurance, services like water/electricity/garbage/recycling, property taxes, food, etc. and it sounds like many are being pushed to the brink of homelessness. I suppose there is no shortage of wealthy retirees here, but those just scraping by aren't uncommon either.
Eviction moratoriums and increased renting risk being passed down to the renter.
So many tenants were taking advantage and abusing the system, but a few bad apples creates an outsized perception, which results in skyrocketing rents.
This created a massive new risk that is now getting priced in. prices are probably going to jump for a decade because of it, and maybe permanently if politicians decide to do another eviction moratorium for some reason.
Due to rising interest rates, a lot of people who would've gotten a mortgage are now looking to rent. Not a single mention of this in the article.
Also the article mentions "rent control", something that terrifies landlords. So they hike the rent to protect of a possible future rent control. Landlords paid for the property and took a huge risk with a possible real estate bubble and rising rates (in case of variable adjusted mortgage).
People like this make me think it's on purpose to make half the population hate the other half. And then double down. Divide and conquer.
2. People with access to #1 take it and buy properties (either as rentals or AirBnB).
3. From #2, use properties for collateral on other loans, rinse and repeat (even scarier, banks will rehypothecate that collateral).
4. Charge what you want because there's no competition as everyone needs a place to live.
The implosion of this will be when a combination of new debt not being available to service old debt collides with properties being left unoccupied due to exorbitant costs.
I'm currently renting while I build my house and the development I'm living at was fully rented last year (near a college), but this year I've been counting and there are ~3-5 empty town houses for rent here and the school year just started. My rent went up ~$150/month, too, arbitrarily with no improvements/added services.
I view it as a short-term cash grab that will find a lot of Grant Cardone types scrambling when it (predictably) blows up in their faces. My bet is that if you can live modestly and squirrel away cash, things are going to get super cheap for a short period and then the dollar will hyperinflate when none of the debt can be serviced (assuming this drop off triggers a massive QE run). Then: CBDCs and a new serf class will be born.
This is where the QE comes in (assuming it does). That will give a false hope for a very short time (my bet is weeks/months at most) and then hyperinflation will take over as people beg for QE to continue like a crackhead finding a rock under the sofa.
"But there's a reason. There's a reason. There's a reason for this, there's a reason education sucks, and it's the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It's never gonna get any better. Don't look for it. Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don't want: They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. That's right. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don't want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they're coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people -- white collar, blue collar, it doesn't matter what color shirt you have on -- good honest hard-working people continue -- these are people of modest means -- continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don't give a fuck about them. They don't give a fuck about you. They don't give a fuck about you. They don't care about you at all -- at all -- at all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That's what the owners count on; the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes everyday. Because the owners of this country know the truth: it's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it."
Also, here's an article to explain modern-day economics:
157 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadFor example Downtown LA and Koreatown are putting up large apartment buildings like crazy, because the zoning allows them to, and rents have not increased nearly as much as other popular LA areas that are mostly single-family zoned, such as Santa Monica.
This is why Minnesota and now recently California basically upzoned the entire state, because upzoning with local ordinances neighborhood by neighborhood is almost always defeated by NIMBYs, which are generally a combination of of local homeowners and local small-time landlords.
Don't forget that a huge portion of US landlords are "mom and pop" landlords, which have a massive portion of their net worth wrapped up a handful of rental units and don't have the capital to build net new units. These people are more economically opposed to new housing than a large developer who can stomach the capital outlay for a new building.
When they are allowed to developers can profitably build dense housing, which produces net new units into the market, which helps combat rising rent.
Don’t let those economists tell you lies about how goods with inelastic demand will dramatically rise in price when supply can’t keep pace… they’re just covering for the greedy people.
From a purely practical point of view, as a landlord your tenants can cause a lot of financial damage. If you force out a good tenant by raising rents then you're gambling that the next one isn't going to be a nightmare.
Obviously, these represent two extremes of selfishness and selflessness. So, what is a rule of thumb for an asset owner to not be considered greedy? Price 10% below market for example or allow 3 missed payments per year?
Greed is an easy label to assign until until you have to get concrete about it.
Take two hypothetical tenants. One is a young software developer earning $15k/mo, the other a retired widow on a fixed pension of $3k/mo. The social reaction to either party's rent being raised from $1k/mo to $2.5k/mo is going to be very different.
> your choices are to maximize its net present value or to price the lease under the market in order to benefit someone else
This leaves out the fact that in the majority of cases the lessor is benefiting either way. It's purely the extent to which they benefit that changes.
> Greed is an easy label to assign until until you have to get concrete about it.
All sorts of labels are difficult to assign objectively. What matters is personal opinion and societal consensus. Both of those are fluid and have changed throughout history.
Wages has not changed here since the 80s and tech also underpays people for the same role. Meanwhile condo sales sees no sign of slowing down, everywhere real estate is on the decline, here it seems to continue.
I wonder if this is sustainable, there is a large number of multi bedroom condo units asking well above $5000 CAD / month
https://www.scotiabank.com/ca/en/about/economics/economics-p...
Canada's biggest problem is that we didn't lock out immigration policies to our infrastructure and housing policies. Bringing up that fact though often spirals into someone trying to claim that being concerned about the policies makes you a racist or anti-immigration which is nonsense.
and this just highlights the issue in Canada: we can't even agree as to what the underlying issues are, instead we scapegoat minority groups because it has worked since the 80s.
I'm not "blaming immigrants" - I'm blaming immigration policies that have Canada leading most of the developed world in net immigration while also being in last place for it's housing stock.
That situation causes a supply and demand loop that makes it profitable for corporations to flip units (the corps doing this is a SYMPTOM not the CAUSE of the problem).
I have no issue with immigration and I'm not scapegoating minority groups (seriously read next time please), what I'm saying is the policy that allows one needs to be directly influenced by the policy of the other or you get knock on effects like we are seeing now.
You are correct that we can't agree on the underlying issue, but not because anyone is scapegoating but because so many people want to concern troll and try to avoid having a discussion for fear of being labeled as insensitive.
*lock out -> lock our(?)
<upupandup> but you are literally blaming immigration for the housing situation
No, monkeywork is saying that housing policy and immigration need to be tied together. If we have slow housing growth, immigration must be restricted. If we want high immigration, we must allow fast housing growth.
So while it's one factor, it's far from the only factor.
In the UK mortgage application controls were increased after 2008. This meant it became particularly difficult for first-time buyers to get a mortgage, locking them into rental properties for longer, and further increasing demand.
In London and most cities in the UK we have an extraordinary amount of foreign investment in property. Entire blocks owned by foreign faceless corporations (many of which are probably offshore shell companies for wealthy entities in the UK) who are happy to let their properties remain empty in order to maintain the average price(s) and sit on the capital gains with little to no maintenance requirement because they just don't have any tenants.
For decades now, "buying to let" has been promoted as the easypath for those fortunate enough to invest for their future. Ultra low interest rates, coupled with ever increasing property prices, and charging rent that covers your mortgage repayments, and maintenance, _and_ some extra passive income on top, means it's certainly an attractive option for those who can afford it, and by God has it been taken. News articles of landlords with _hundreds_ of properties in their portfolio is not uncommon. Entire towns owned by a single landlord in some cases.
And our political parties treat "house price" like a hot potatoe through fear of being the ones to pop the bubble, cause lots of defaults, and ultimately lose the homeowner vote. In fact most MPs are landlords themselves.
Everyone SHOULD pay their fair share. If the laws suck then the lower and middle class should focus on the rich and put pressure on the puppets in the office. However, it seems many love voting against their own interest.
Edit: If you have a problem paying taxes and are in the middle class. I suggest you think about starting a life somewhere without taxes, you will quickly realize that your middle class life is actually made possible by the infrastructure in place.
They may be going after more people in the 2-25% income group, but the 1% is just as immunized as ever, hiring 80k non specialist agents won't change that.
Yet I'm still part of this squeeze, the segment of America that cannot buy a home because I cannot outbid others because I cannot afford to save up enough to put down more down-payment, despite the many grants/programs meant to help people like me. Sellers just won't sell, since they get better offers.
In the meantime, I rent. If you gave me one year of not having to pay rent (hello eviction moratorium, wish I had met you), I would be able to be barely competitive in a LCOL area for a home that would need me to bribe an inspector to qualify for those grants/programs.
Around here it's not a supply and demand issue, either; there are plenty vacant places, both low and high end. It's just that owners (corporate and individual alike) don't feel any need to take on any risk. Same with renting. Risky tenants without hefty deposit and/or collateral aren't worth it, not one bit. The rest of us suffer for those who can't behave, as usual.
It'll work itself out, though, or it won't, and I'll age out of it all and it'll be a problem for my kids to handle. That's how it goes.
It's not a free market. Look at how hard it is to get land and approvals to build new housing.
If we had a truly free market in housing, we wouldn't have these problems. High prices would incentivize more construction which would bring down prices.
In something at least vaguely resembling a free market, detached homeowners such as me would have to compete with other land use that generates much more utility, and thus income from rents, on the same land area, with something like a high-rise. But I am insulated from that, by laws that effectively entrench the upper middle class's preferred land-use pattern of detached suburban housing. Zoning bylaws that prohibit constructing anything else effectively subsidize the suburban lifestyle.
[1] http://www.datalabto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/toronto-0...
* Foreign ownership * Greedy landlords * People who own more than one house * AirBNB * etc etc
When the solution is much like you just said, it's a policy decision that is limiting the housing supply (well that plus record population growth in the GTA). https://www.scotiabank.com/ca/en/about/economics/economics-p...
If people spent half the effort on holding their provincial and muni reps accountable for this rather than belly-aching online about all the other items I listed above (which are really symptoms not causes) maybe something will change.
The article could probably have just been this repeated 1400 times.
Housing should not be an investment. If it is we can never have affordable housing. Developing, renting out, and managing properties can be profitable without requiring the mere act of owning a house to be an investment that grows. A house should be a capital expenditure. It's shameful that for many, leaving the apartment or house empty can still make significant returns.
Land in places with jobs is scarce. We don't tolerate people hoarding other scarcities, land should be no different.
Lots of people buy a starter house with the intention of selling for more when they, for example, start having kids and need a bigger house.
The best approach is to press for over-development of housing. It doesn't matter if someone owns 1 house, or 1000 houses, so long as there is more than enough homes for everyone.
Idea: have a property tax line item that's based on the ratio of population / housing units. The higher that ratio, the higher the tax. The tax revenue is used to cover the costs of constructing more housing units, which lowers the tax.
Want to really address the problem (and many other problem with today's economic system)? Prohibit interest bearing loans.
I do think credit scores are a scam (as are overdraft fees) and that rates should be reasonable, but no interest would make nobody lend money.
I like having a car loan - I was able to buy a car with current safety features. Without it I'd have to buy some unsafe (or unreliable) clunker in cash.
There's no reason why the car manufacturers won't be able to offer 0% interest on moderate term loans (a few years long). They already do today when they want to sell cars. This will drive prices down actually.
You can also have longer term leases without interest, effectively paying for depreciation and the company can profit from leasing the car.
"shifts the tax burden within the residential class from owners of moderately valued residential properties to the owners of vacation homes, higher valued homes and residential properties not occupied by the owner, including apartments and vacant lands."
https://www.mass.gov/doc/living-with-the-residential-exempti...
It hasn't seemed to help, but maybe it has a little.....
Usually they have a maintenance staff that takes care of the property as well or add additional services.
Mom and pop landlords don't do any of that usually, and just hand someone a key w/ a call to the occasional contractor to fix something instead of an actual company. Most need a warm body to pay off their mortgage so they can sell it in the future and pocket the cash.
We need to fix the supply side, if the corp takes the properties that are broken down and fixes them that's a good thing. The problem comes when people who are around there now cannot afford the new rents they either become homeless or leave.
How far they have to leave depends on the supply of housing in the surrounding area, which b/c of the shortage is pretty low. With a huge supply of housing, it's possible to move next door or down the street and not much changes.
If we build more rents will go down, regardless of who the owners are. Prices to buy homes too for normal people.
Getting people to build more is the problem, high construction costs, zoning/permiting, local opposition etc.
Could it be the reason that those properties are too expensive for a regular Joe to fix up because of investors in the first place.
Cities could roll out such a policy directly when making unused land available or other activities.
Hawaii has a good reason for doing this because land is scarce and there is no place to go. Basically anywhere else this would be idotic IMO.
If the family home you aspire to wasn't also climbing in price, you wouldn't need to sell your starter home at a profit.
This property is still an investment via improving the property to enhance income potential, but less of a speculative bet on the overall state of the market.
A high property tax based on land value would suggest that all the places people need to live would need to be generating income, have a high income for the family, or they'd need to move into a place where that land value is distributed across a wider base of households.
Of course land should be producing economic value. If it doesn't or thr value produced doesn't match the land's value, then something is wrong.
The latter are financial vampires, sucking money from lower classes, pushing housing prices higher, locking more people out of ownership.
I think if it's an investment, that's fine. The problem is when housing is allowed to become a speculative investment, and the investment activity on housing begins to seriously threaten the actual housing activity. So for example you could do one or more of the following:
- Adjust mortgage rates on homes owned but not lived in (eg: triple them)
- Completely ban owning more than one home
- Implement a sliding tax on rental income (the more units you collect on, the higher the tax you pay)
- Bring back (or implement) rent controls and have them geared to cost of living
Basically anything that makes it less feasible to profit off of people who just want a safe place to live.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11119259/Hundreds-q...
" The unprecedented number of refugees arriving in Ireland has put pressure on the country's housing crisis, despite generous offers to host Ukrainian families. " I'm not sure how that results in cutting demand for building housing. The article is basically saying there's a crisis with few reasons offered.
How / why / what would be cutting demand for building housing? Demand is the last thing I'd be worried about. People need a place to live, and they need the housing to live in, so there's always going to be demand for building it.
I don’t think the distinction you’re drawing makes sense; there are plenty of ways to speculate in an otherwise healthy housing market (e.g. move to a gentrifying neighborhood in the hopes of moving again in a few years when your property is worth more).
It seems like the common theme for the ills you identify is housing being un- or under-utilized while the owner is expecting or reaping the rewards of capital appreciation. More straightforward policy responses to that could include imposing a surtax on unoccupied property or taxing imputed rent regardless of occupancy.
I didn't leave it just as speculation being the problem. You ignored the second part where I said "and the investment activity on housing begins to seriously threaten the actual housing activity". The speculative investment features intensify the use of homes for purposes other than housing. In your example, the purchaser is using it for both speculation and housing. Not so bad. But someone who owns a home, then leverages the equity to buy another that they don't intend to live in but rent out, then does that again 2 or 3 times, now we have a problem where this person is just massively leveraging and speculating, supported by the government and the banks, "the system" if you will. And then higher rents are in the best interest of these more affluent people. Rather, "the system" could disincentivize this kind of activity.
> ills you identify is housing being un- or under-utilized...imposing a surtax on unoccupied property
Not really something I was talking about, no...but that problem would be addressed by the first two suggestions I offered. Of course if for some reason it was still a problem, or you didn't want to be as heavy handed, you could go ahead and impose a surtax like you said.
Build social housing and maintain it at a level that far exceed market price.
This is the problem though. Capital gains for the seller represents inflation on an equivalent lifestyle for the next buyer.
First time buyer programs, lower mortgage rates, etc, are all just smokescreens to try and grow the pyramid one more level before it becomes evidently unsustainable. Exponential growth is too powerful: if housing is a good investment for long enough, it becomes unaffordable, period.
Nothing should stop housing from being an investment in the same way that any good effected by supply and demand is, but there's a difference with the price of housing going up at at slightly over the rate of inflation and what we've seen the last couple years across the entire market. (Or even the decade before that in the bay area.) 10-20% a year rises in the COL is insane, and encourages rent seeking by current housing owners to the detriment of everyone else.
Public policy should favor the former, and punish the later.
Prices are constrained by people's incomes and over the 20th century incomes have grown faster than inflation (people have got richer). This leaves space for positive returns without necessarily hurting affordability.
Now, in many places construction has slowed a lot and capital is cheap, which is really what has caused prices to skyrocket.
Eventually, incomes will still constrain the market, though, especially in lettings.
It seems that the construction of most new housing is blocked by people who have a clear interest in maintaining the status quo for mainly monetary reasons, as well as not wanting new people to come in. Here it seems that current residents have every right and reason to maintain the form and substance of their current housing situation until they, their children, their grandchildren, and who knows how many generations after them, decide it is time for a change.
The "people must accept" can also be used to keep supply limited ("you want to be a lawyer, but we, current lawyers, don't want you"), wages low ("you don't want to make two dollars an hour? Get another job") or anything else that is currently regulated or unregulated, depending on what the people in power currently want or don't want.
There is no Bible, nothing is written in stone. It's an ongoing struggle—-and I'm not speaking from a Marxist perspective, please, just a human one--between people who have power now and other people who would like to have a say and currently don't have one, and who, after they get some power, will probably block other would-be newcomers to the party.
There is no perfect "market-dynamics".
Where I currently live, there is no reason to have entire neighborhoods scarcely populated, or areas that could receive hundreds if not thousands of new units not developed. They are not because there are people who fight tooth and nails to keep housing limited for the reasons I explained above, and the city is either kept hostage or is in cahoots with those who do not want new housing.
Say I could ignore zoning laws and had a billion dollars to blow, I could just buy up a bunch of the $1.2 million 1200 square foot single family homes in San Francisco, bulldoze them and roll out a bunch of 10 story apartment buildings and I’d make an astonishing amount of money.
How is it fair to distribute the supply of housing of a city, a place that people have roots in, generations sometimes who actually have a history there, just to the luckiest and greediest? Instead of, let's say, the people who have actually built that city which those rich folks seems so desirable to move in? I really don't understand how you can use fair to call a system like that.
And someone buying a property could easily be the beginning of new generations of people who will have long history there. Do they not deserve a chance too?
Paying for things is a fair exchange.
Only if you have money. No, it's not fair that someone with more money can take over land, it's the market and the way the world is but it's not fair. The only way this would be fair is if everyone started from the exact same spot in regards to resources: money, education, intelligence, etc. which isn't realistic at all.
This is 100% incorrect.
The part that I don't get is with the pandemic you heard about folks moving out of the major cities. With that said you would think that prices in the cities would go down because there is more supply; however, looking at the numbers it seems quite the opposite.
I heard of many folks my age (mid 20s) moving to "lifestyle cities", places like Miami, NYC, LA, etc. These people aren't coming there for work, rather they are just there for the lifestyle. I can't really feel bad for this group of people because they did it to themselves. No one is putting a gun to your head and telling you that you have to live in NYC, LA or Miami with some of the highest cost of living in the country.
Don't move to a HCOL city and then bitch about the HCOL.
Also these cities could be much lower COL with better housing policies - that’s the point. It really does not have to be either or.
Not to mention that generations of people have lived in NYC.
[0]: i'm pro-abortion via the absolute right to bodily autonomy, but no, i don't support the current media rhetoric or focus.
second, that's ultimately a racist argument disguised behind safetyism, neither of which have a leg to stand on. every unwanted child still wants to grow up, be they poor or brown or whatever. let's welcome them rather than paint them over with disgust and wanton disposability.
besides, the point was not to debate abortion, but that it's an (wedge) issue used to distract and divide, rather than focusing the populace on the most pressing problems we face. covid, mass shootings, or climate change (as opposed to pollution) are suitable alternative distractions to consider in place of abortion.
The right to bodily autonomy is not absolute. If it were, you could (morally) deliberately drop someone you where holding off the side of a cliff. After all, they don't have a right to your arm. (But they do in this circumstance).
by right, people get to choose what to do with their own bodies when harm to others is small not simply zero (e.g., smoking).
then, i put forth a separate observation (perhaps too tersely and obliquely) that biology is the most brutal (ultra-objective, yet ultra-complex) and so the least reasonable domain to be employed in pursuing your line of reasoning (which is wholly subjective and cultural).
biology isn't subject to human reasoning, emotion, or culture, which is where ontological arguments like yours squarely reside.
To put it another way, either there's something objective which can be said about dropping children off of bridges in the moral realm related to bodily autonomy and our understanding of the duties and rights around bodily autonomy or else there isn't an objective moral realm. I presume, from your previous comments that you hold that there is an objective moral realm. Did I mistake your meaning?
you countered with a subjective opinion hanging off an ultimately irrelevant legal triviality (that's also cultural, not objective).
neither our subjective nor objective experience of those cells today is equivalent to that of any human being around us. you just can't get to the conclusion you want with only biology and objectivity, because your key premise is neither an objective nor a biological axiom.
The child is most certainly dependent on the mother in the sense that this distinct, independent member of the species Homo sapiens cannot survive without constant support from the environment (another living person) that the child finds themselves dependent on. They are, as you point out, inseparable. But even birth won't solve this problem. From a societal perspective, even adulthood won't solve this problem for 99.999% of the human race.
Just look at this map of registered short-term rentals in Scottsdale, AZ: https://eservices.scottsdaleaz.gov/maps/registered-rentals. I know it's a vacation destination, especially in the winter, but I'm sure something like this is going on everywhere rents are skyrocketing. And guess what, the short-term rental lobby got the state legislature in Arizona to pass a law that cities and counties couldn't restrict short-term rentals to a greater degree than the state does.
I still think the best solution (that'll never, ever happen) is something like an exponential property tax increase for additional properties you own over 2 or so. After you own a few properties that's a cost that can't simply be passed on, so it locks out giant investors and local monopolies.
This is like saying "uber increased dmeand for cars and that made cars expensive". No, the car companies just built more cars. We need to build more homes.
So I think there is a problem with AirBNBs. Even discounting quality of life issues that they can create for people actually living near them, they take a valuable resource for locals and turn them into pure investment plays that stay empty long stretches of time. Death to Nimbys generally, but I think you could get them on the same page as housing advocates if you went after short-term rentals.
Who gets to buy the next housing unit built in Manhattan? (This is equivalent to the question: you are selling your housing unit in Manhattan; who are you allowed to sell it to?)
If "investors" are not allowed to buy housing in Manhattan, who will develop the high-rises that house people who can't afford to buy their own apartment? Or do you institute price controls, so that instead of paying with money, you pay with generation-long wait times?
I can't understand how people is so relaxed talking about this issue, seen large swaths of people in the west becoming poor and homeless.
It's not like we don't know what to do. It seems our elites don't really think it's a pressing issue. As long as they keep extracting wealth, they're fine.
Since the poor has no effective tool to overturn this situation, I think it's time for people to take justice in their own hands. It's the best way to send a message.
Maybe realizing their investments and their safety are in high risk will make them move their asses so we can have social peace.
We can't have millions of people becoming homeless and be like it's nothing.
Can you give me an example of something we don't tolerate being hoarded? I genuinely can't think of anything. People seem to be allowed to accumulate whatever they can afford to, if they choose to. If it's on the market, that is.
Outside of a few token busts on random idiots, and a few temporary limitations on Amazon purchases, anti-hoarding measures weren't the effective solution.
Of course, young adults living with roommates or parents have absorbed some of that difference, but I'm sure many of those people would live alone if housing prices were still at 1970 levels.
I recommend this article, The housing theory of everything, as an introduction on why housing is not just another problem: https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-e...
But here you have people being irresponsible with what they're willing to spend on rent. And in doing so, force everyone else to also be irresponsible, else be left homeless. It feels like a giant jenga tower just waiting to collapse...
Irresponsible how? Rent goes up the most in places with good paying jobs. As rent goes up, generally the people without the good paying jobs have to move out. This process of low income residents competing with high income residents on housing and subsequently being displaced is called gentrification. It’s an example of a negative externality in a supply-constrained housing market where all players are acting rationally.
But there are a ton of areas not gentrifying, just turning the screws. One can see rent prices rise even in areas with a declining population, for example. And as long as enough people are willing to just pay more, everyone has to pay more. I'm not really proposing unionized renters, I don't know what the solution really is. The free market sounds nice on paper, until things crash ever so often.
It's not just rent, it happened with house prices, too. You had/have a sizeable amount of people out there willing to spend the absolute max the bank would approve them for, to compete. I was watching the RealEstate/REBubble subs over the last two years, and the number of people living outside their realistic means seemed insane to me.
This in turn made more competition, driving prices higher. A reasonable person who say, wouldn't try to buy a 500k house on a 100k salary was left with no choice(area dependent, of course).
Property prices basically doubled over the last 2 years, but rental prices have yet to catch up.
Unless you assume housing prices are going to crash, and I don't think there's any serious expectation that's going to happen, it seems pretty safe to assume rental costs will take a nearly identical trajectory
How much money people have on hand in aggregate and how much of it they ready to pay for rent matters!
People on the supply side always adjust their prices to maximize profits (price * quantity). Prices are climbing because some tenants agree to pay.
Eviction moratoriums and increased renting risk being passed down to the renter.
So many tenants were taking advantage and abusing the system, but a few bad apples creates an outsized perception, which results in skyrocketing rents.
actually, just yesterday I learned about a website for exploring eviction data: https://evictionlab.org/
Which is why it's being challenged in Supreme Court.
Probably lasted a few months too long also.
Also the article mentions "rent control", something that terrifies landlords. So they hike the rent to protect of a possible future rent control. Landlords paid for the property and took a huge risk with a possible real estate bubble and rising rates (in case of variable adjusted mortgage).
People like this make me think it's on purpose to make half the population hate the other half. And then double down. Divide and conquer.
2. People with access to #1 take it and buy properties (either as rentals or AirBnB).
3. From #2, use properties for collateral on other loans, rinse and repeat (even scarier, banks will rehypothecate that collateral).
4. Charge what you want because there's no competition as everyone needs a place to live.
The implosion of this will be when a combination of new debt not being available to service old debt collides with properties being left unoccupied due to exorbitant costs.
I'm currently renting while I build my house and the development I'm living at was fully rented last year (near a college), but this year I've been counting and there are ~3-5 empty town houses for rent here and the school year just started. My rent went up ~$150/month, too, arbitrarily with no improvements/added services.
I view it as a short-term cash grab that will find a lot of Grant Cardone types scrambling when it (predictably) blows up in their faces. My bet is that if you can live modestly and squirrel away cash, things are going to get super cheap for a short period and then the dollar will hyperinflate when none of the debt can be serviced (assuming this drop off triggers a massive QE run). Then: CBDCs and a new serf class will be born.
2. QT is also going to affect interest rates on MBS, which will reflect in mortgage interest rates.
Gotta love pie charts that don't add up to 100%. Zach you are fired.
- Why is rent skyrocketing? (thehustle.co)
- Investors bought a quarter of US homes last year (pewtrusts.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32568858
Seems like the second one is very much (part of) the answer to the first.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILQepXUhJ98
Here is a quote from that video:
"But there's a reason. There's a reason. There's a reason for this, there's a reason education sucks, and it's the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It's never gonna get any better. Don't look for it. Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don't want: They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. That's right. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don't want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they're coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people -- white collar, blue collar, it doesn't matter what color shirt you have on -- good honest hard-working people continue -- these are people of modest means -- continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don't give a fuck about them. They don't give a fuck about you. They don't give a fuck about you. They don't care about you at all -- at all -- at all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That's what the owners count on; the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes everyday. Because the owners of this country know the truth: it's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it."
Also, here's an article to explain modern-day economics:
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