Mint was useful to me for a while until it started forcibly recategorizing stuff with no way to fix it. Tech support was aggressively worthless to the point that I fully shut down every Intuit account I had (they have their tentacles in some surprising businesses). Fuck Intuit and their data hoarding and their anti-taxpayer lobbying and their cold-blooded murder of what was once the only half-decent money tracking app.
This is a good example of what was once a really good company that made really good products but was ruined by the business bros. Everything they touch turns into garbage.
They pay for it to be built. Unless you think the workers should work for free and not receive any benefit from their labor. Does hexbear know you feel this way? 🤣
As someone who has been homeless, I would MUCH rather live my entire life in a “cinderblock gulag” then spend even a second homeless. So, yes, if we ever were to get such buildings provided to us from the government, I would greatly enjoy them.
Can I rent from someone who isn’t a capitalist who’s charging me way more than the cost of upkeep for the property to make a profit? Also even if we have a housing market wouldn’t the option to live in public housing be good for less well off people to help drive down rents on the private housing market?
If you want to argue that the government should develop low cost housing, that’s an interesting discussion. In general, “supply” regardless of how it’s created, is the answer to high housing prices. I do fear that you’ll be dissatisfied with the quality of that government housing.
No it’s not. That’s why you have houses and apartments for hypothetical millionaires going empty because no one can actually afford them. As long as homes and real estate have speculative value there is no guarantee that “supply” will positively affect prices or affect them enough to provide housing for everyone.
The simple fact that there are more empty homes and apartments than there are homeless people disproves your premise.
It’s true. That’s why our homelessness incidence are less than 10% of yours. Maybe that’s why you’re trying to drive yours down by conscripting your homeless and forcing them into “former glory” wars?
I assume, accurately, that all you hexbears are Russian trolls, Hindu Nationalists, or various flavors of pudgey man children collectively known as college communists who want to seize the means of production from their parents that didn’t give them enough hugs. Which flavor are you? I bet it’s the last one 😂
now compare the amount of homeless people in both, also you linked the same article twice
btw now you have edited your article remind me, is russia a socilaist country or a neo-liberal one, like the USA?
you have linked me info of Russian from 2010-present, in what way am I remotely suggesting a capitalist, neo-liberal country is what im adovcating for?
I’ve read and re-read this thread… Do you think Russia is currently communist? Like… Putin is a communist, the United Russia Party is communist etc etc. Is this actually your belief?
I think it’s pretty hilarious that you assume everybody opposed to capitalism is Russian, and use that as a counter-example for why “communism” is failing today.
Did history stop for you in 1991 or something? The neoliberals won; Russia has been a hyper-capitalist abomination living in the corpse of the USSR for over three decades now. Why would we care that Russia sucks? Everybody knows it sucks now.
“socialism is when you’re in russia. the more russia you are in, the more socialism is what’s wrong america #1 football hotdog toby keith.” - the diabetic gym teacher who taught this guy’s social studies class.
The only thing that is state affiliated more than in Capitalism is the mean of production (businesses) being owned by the state. Everything else is still owned by individuals.
Landlords pay up front (directly or via a loan, which the renters presumably cannot get) and assume the risk of vacancies and repairs. If landlords ceased to exist, how do you propose new housing stock be created? Should the government be your landlord?
You’re describing a developer. Most landlords aren’t developers.
And yes, the government should take on the role of developing residential properties and ensuring everyone has access to them. Housing is not a commodity, it’s a basic human need.
Food is also a basic human need, and markets seem to work well-enough for that. The core difference is that, while we have an extreme abundance of food to the point of waste, cities have been underbuilding housing for decades and there are far more people wanting to move to them than available housing units, so only the richest people get the housing. This puts a lot of positive pressure on housing prices
That’s because it is easy to compete to sell food. Housing doesn’t work that way.
Agreed, but there's a lot that could be done to make it much much easier. For nearly a century, housing policy has been explicitly designed to make housing a productive asset for investment, which is a goal that's fundamentally opposed to housing being affordable.
not to mention, many big developers aren’t paying cash to construct housing. they get a loan or establish a line of credit with or brokered via investors/banks/funds. the first rule of doing anything under capitalism is to use somebody else’s money to do it, and all those loans drawing on lines of credit ultimately leads back to the central bank anyway.
it’s a massive shell game to obscure the fact that workers do all the work to create the products and services and then have to pay their shitty wages right back to access the very things they create, just so maybe 2-3 million megarich assholes can roll around in piles of money and make an income for doing literally nothing.
landlords are among the most nakedly parasitic sectors of society, and even then we still get bootlicking bozos pretending they “provide” housing or are somehow responsible for the community infrastructure that makes living in the place where the house exists desirable.
And they have little to no risk in the first place because the market has such high demand that they can pretty much instantly fill vacancies, and they barely do repairs if at all. And at least where I live, renters are required to have/pay for renters insurance which further drives down the landlord’s risk. And on top of all that, they have security deposits to lower their risk even further. They don’t take on any meaningful risk.
If landlords ceased to exist, how do you propose new housing stock be created? Should the government be your landlord?
Government investment into housing development (which then turn into market rate housing/co-ops), zoning fixes, and a LVT is the solution. The builders get paid, home ownership becomes affordable, the risks are dealt with, and renters aren’t being priced gouged. It would also do wonders to help fix the homelessness crisis.
And none of it needs the government to own your home.
Investment into housing development, zoning fixes, market rate housing, co-ops, and a LVT is the solution.
You can’t be serious? Let’s review.
Investment into housing development
By who…? Come on, be honest, who do you think is going to do this 🤣
zoning fixes
That allow who to build more housing?
market rate housing
Is literally what the West has right now.
Co-Ops
We have these now.
and a LVT
This is a fine step. Most states have property taxes now that include the land that a rental sits on.
If you can’t pay for your own housing, your choices are either for the government to pay for it, or for the private sector to pay for it. In either event the entity that owns your house, that isn’t you, is your landlord. If you can’t pay for your own housing, and you don’t want the private sector or the government to provide it for you, then you’re homeless.
It was implied, but I later edited my comment, the government should do so. We have a massive housing crisis on our hands and there needs to be a solution. The government is so bloated that there is easily already the money somewhere to divert to something actually worthwhile.
That allow who to build more housing?
Private developers, individual citizens, the government itself, etc. Anybody and everybody with a willingness to build a house should be able to do so without dealing with the ridiculous zoning laws we have now.
Is literally what the West has right now.
We have these now.
We have market-rate housing and co-ops at such a low rate. We need a massive increase in quantity. The private sector won’t do this because there is no profit motive, so it largely has to be the government who is building these. But once their built it shouldn’t be the government who owns it, it should be the co-ops, market-rate housing orgs, or literally individual citizens who own the housing,
Most states have property taxes now that include the land that a rental sits on.
I don’t want property taxes. Those need to be removed along with all other types of taxation. The only valid type of taxation should be land value tax, and a carbon emission tax. A property tax punishes a land owner for developing their land and using it more efficiently. A land value tax on the other hand incentivizes more effective use. It’s a massive topic and a massive difference. If you want to learn more I would recommend looking into georgism.
In either event the entity that owns your house, that isn’t you, is your landlord.
If you want to argue that it is a valid use of the state to produce low cost housing then this is an interesting conversation. But much of the rest of your response is nonsense. For instance -
I don’t want property taxes. Those need to be removed along with all other types of taxation. The only valid type of taxation should be land value tax, and a carbon emission tax.
You’re going to fund all the social programs of a modern government via, essentially, no taxes? Come on. If you want the government to provide a robust social safety net, including housing, you’ll be looking at Nordics level taxation.
You’re going to fund all the social programs of a modern government via, essentially, no taxes?
No, it would be funded through land value and carbon taxes. Those two tax types should be the only valid form of taxation. We should still have enough tax to pay for it (after we ditch the bloat our government has. Example).
If you want the government to provide a robust social safety net, including housing, you’ll be looking at Nordics level taxation.
People always complain about such a system but they actually have healthcare, so seems like a moot point to me.
You can be wrong if you want to be.
First off, there’s no need to be a dick about it. Second, that definition says person, whereas you said entity.
“In either event the entity that owns your house, that isn’t you, is your landlord.”
“a person who rents land, a building, or an apartment to a tenant.”
Ah God, I was wondering (cheering for) when you’d make the turn to “politically only possible with a socialist government” or something along those lines, but now I see you’re one of the famed georgists. First I’ve seen in the wild!
I see you’re one of the famed georgists. First I’ve seen in the wild!
If you have a criticism of georgism I’d love to hear it, because so far I’ve heard basically none. And I don’t think I would go quite so far as to call myself a georgist. It’s only something I learned about relatively recently, but the more I learn about it the better it sounds than the current dog shit we are dealing with that we somehow call a tax system. Is georgism perfect? Almost certainly not, but it’s a massive step in the right direction.
you’d make the turn to “politically only possible with a socialist government”
You are correct in that the solution to the housing crisis is only possible with a socialist government. Socialism and georgism are not mutually exclusive.
Land is in common ownership + tax based on land distribution. What does this do? Georgism is only relevant to capitalism and is only a minor improvement to efficiency and distribution that will also just become calculated into costs within the C of the C+V equation from marx. It would only have a minor impact based on the size of your house+yard, nothing more. It’s in no way progressing us towards socialism. It could be useful for a NEP/current China situation of broadly capitalist relations controlled by a socialist state, I guess, and I’m open to that tax dominating, though it doesn’t really consider (or tries to theoretically consider but won’t ever be able to) imperialism/unequal exchange and extraction in other lands where the raw product is immediately exported to a country that will refine it.
In some versions of socialism, not all. And technically in a georgist system, depending on implementation, all land is considered the governments land, it’s owned by the common people. From there individuals pay society for exclusivity to a plot.
It would only have a minor impact based on the size of your house+yard, nothing more. It’s in no way progressing us towards socialism.
I’m not an economist, so my understanding is limited, but my understanding is that a LVT results in the landlords themselves paying the tax instead of tennants. The end result is a giant hit to the wallets of landlords across the country. That’s a very good thing, and does indeed get us closer to socialism. Less landlords, less landlord power, the better.
Additionally, even if it only slightly effects land use efficiency (which I disagree that it would be slight) any increase in efficiency will increase the proportion of land that is for sale and therefore reduce prices.
And keep in mind, this is only part of the solution, not the sole solution. Zoning still needs to be fixed and there needs to be massive government investments into co-op housing developments.
Read some theory, it kinda sounds like you’re basing this entirely off of YouTube videos you’ve seen (including your understanding of socialism)
Landlords increase rent to make up for it, what does georgism do? Landlords don’t exist as such in socialism, but how they do exist still isn’t really impacted by this shift.
Georgism is a misunderstanding of the causes of issues at the “tax affecting productivity” level. That’s not the cause of our problems.
The lack of massive investment of housing and zoning are, again, results of a problem not the problem itself. These issues don’t exist with good planning, and that’s why georgism is just irrelevant except as a bandage for some of the ills of capitalism temporarily
Read some theory, it kinda sounds like you’re basing this entirely off of YouTube videos you’ve seen (including your understanding of socialism)
If you want to convince me, mocking me isn’t the way to go about it. I’m as much of a leftist/anti-capitalist as it gets in my area, and I almost certainly agree with you on more things than the average american. If you can’t even hold a civil conversation with me, how could you ever hope to convince anybody else?
But yes, most of this is based on a rather light understanding as I have already mentioned. I live in the U.S., a capitalist country that very intentionally does not allow workers to have free time. I have a disabled girlfriend that I take care of. The amount of time I have to myself that is truly free time is extremely limited. I’d rather spend that time playing video games and watching youtube than reading economics books. It’s shocking, I know. And during the rare times that I am able to find the time/energy to read, I’d rather read science fiction, which rarely if ever goes into economic theory.
Landlords increase rent to make up for it, what does georgism do? Landlords don’t exist as such in socialism, but how they do exist still isn’t really impacted by this shift.
Again, they can’t exactly just increase rent to pass off the tax.
The lack of massive investment of housing and zoning are, again, results of a problem not the problem itself. These issues don’t exist with good planning
How is investment in housing and zoning fixes not a form of better planning?
georgism is just irrelevant except as a bandage for some of the ills of capitalism temporarily
I disagree that it is just a bandage. But even if it was, I’d rather have a bandage than a fucking open wound like we have now.
If the government doesn’t collect wealth in the form of a land tax, how do you suggest we do it?
Not to pester too much, but georgism, philosophically, seems entirely based in an attempt to find some liberal justification for a broad solution to many problems. It attempts to find some legal method within the assumptions of the capitalist system (ownership as it exists in capitalism being key) to mitigate the problems that the original assumption creates. Capitalism will just react and reform to its benefit around those new mitigations systems like it always does. But the georgists ideas remain limited to the set of possibilities that capitalists have limited debate to.
Half of the apartments I lived in were built by their owners or by their parents. And not as in literally built as all the idiots here try to twist my words.
you’re replying to someone who said landlords are unnecessary middlemen in the construction of housing. your mocking analogy is “people buying things with credit cards”. do you not see how funny a self-own that is?
the landlords are the credit cards in your analogy. people bought things before credit cards existed. people built housing before landlords existed. landlords are as necessary to the building of housing as credit cards are to the buying of toilet paper.
tho I wouldn’t be surprised if you thought Buttcoin was necessary for cleaning your shitty ass.
tho I wouldn’t be surprised if you thought Buttcoin was necessary for cleaning your shitty ass.
Nah, bitcoin did exactly what I thought it would do, just much faster than expected. It’s funny how many people who think they hate capitalism love the petrodollar system.
Never mind how ridiculous your question is to begin with (what do landlords, the useless money syphoning middlepeople, have to do with building???), but the reality is that there are already enough empty properties to house all of the homeless people in most countries you check (US, UK, Canada for starters), not only once, but several times over.
It isn't lack of housing that causes homelessness, it's capitalism and the selfish greed it encourages.
That statistic regarding available housing ignores a lot of things. Where do the resources come from to keep this available housing in livable conditions? What is considered the minimum livable condition for these spaces? Who is responsible for keeping these spaces livable? What guarantee is there that any of this available housing is within reasonable travel distance of other necessities (not even speaking of employment, there’s urban food deserts to consider)?
At some point there is a required expenditure of resources, even if enough physical homes exist.
The construction workers got paid within a short time of the house being built. The developer got most of the money, and the bank continues to collect on the property for decades. The value of most of the US's housing stock was paid for years ago, and now we are all just paying for financial shell games to enrich the already rich.
I’m not even sure why I’d respond to someone as intellectually dishonest as you. But if you want to live in a shelter, your shelter has to be paid for. If you can’t pay for the full construction costs yourself then you have to get a loan and the bank gets paid. If you can’t get a loan, then you have to pay someone that can get a loan and that person gets paid. This isn’t a hard concept.
If you’d like to argue that the state should provide a minimum shelter for every individual, then that’s a interesting conversation that we can have. But a simple “landlords shouldn’t exist” is an unbelievably ignorant position held only by children and morons. Because even if a “the state provides shelter” scenario it’s the state that is your landlord.
But if you want to live in a shelter, your shelter has to be paid for.
no, because housing is a human right, and the fact that you want to live in a society where someone has commodified your right to survive to this degree, is as pathetic as it is terrifying.
If you don’t think that housing has to be paid for, via any number of reasonable means, then you’re explicitly arguing that you deserve the labor of others. That’s called stealing. And slavery.
If you want to have a reasonable conversation, tell us how you think the workers that produce the materials and build the housing should be paid. The only pathetic thing is when people refuse to answer this question.
Regardless of housing being a human right, the space used has to exist, materials have to be used to make or upkeep the structure, and it has to be prevented from decaying to the point it can no longer be habitable.
Building and upkeeping these spaces requires expenditure of resources (building materials, time, work effort). Where is that supposed to come from? Whatever source for these resources exists has to get them from somewhere, and if you don’t expect to have to help upkeep their ability to provide these resources over time, someone else would have to.
There’s no way to magic these resources out of thin air. Even without the grim specter of Capitalism, the wood and nails have to come from somewhere, and someone has to put it together. Someone has to keep it from falling apart.
Any further discussion boils down to: Do you accept the responsibility of contributing your fair share, or do you expect someone else to subsidize your fair share in some way to make up for what you can’t or won’t contribute?
I’m not making any judgement one way or the other, just saying that there is no social/political system in which you can make something out of nothing. Some people are going to over simplify that, but it’s a valid question. Where are these things supposed to come from when someone can’t provide it for themselves? Who should be made responsible?
I don’t have the answers, but calling the expectation that others provide it for you “stealing or slavery” isn’t an absolutely absurd leap.
And who's paying the construction company or contractor?
Like, if you want to advocate for the abolition of private property ownership, that's fine, and it's a model that has actually worked halfway decently in some countries (though the lifetime leases aren't necessarily that functionally different than ownership). But just own up to what you're actually proposing and state that you think the government should own all property.
The vast majority of the US's housing stock has been paid off. Every time a residential property changes hands, the bank gets to re-collect all of their fees for...what, exactly? Making money available? They only do that because they're underwritten by the federal government, subsidized by taxes.
So why don't we just give direct loans to people, and subsidize those who need it directly instead of funneling the money through dozens of greedy hands taking percentages off the top?
The renters, ultimately. Landlords are just middle men who need to be cut out of the equation through a land tax system and massive investments in housing development, zoning fixes, and market rate housing/co-ops.
The only “job” landlords have is owning, which isn’t a job and adds nothing. They are a burden and inefficiency of the economy, and a burden on people.
There is value in someone figuring out all the finance mess so that when someone wants a place to live it exists. I.know how to build a house (I was in construction in my younger days). I don't want to spent 200 days of my life building a house, I just want a place to live.
There is value in someone figuring out all the finance mess so that when someone wants a place to live it exists.
That’s the job of a manager, which isn’t what a landlord generally does. And even on the rare times when a landlord actually does do some financial management, it takes up a minority of the time.
I don’t want to spent 200 days of my life building a house, I just want a place to live.
I would like to do so at some point, and I don’t blame you for not wanting to do so. But housing needs to be affordable and it isn’t.
I actually agree with a lot of those proposals, but property ownership still comes with a level of long-term required investment that many people simply do not want and cannot afford. You could vaporize every landlord in New York City today, and the housing would still be incredibly valuable and far more expensive than most people could afford. I live here myself, and while I do hope to own some day, that's simply not financially feasible for me right now. People like me need to rent, and thus we need to rent from somebody. I only moved here a year ago, and I'm quite happy to have not had to combine all the hassle of moving with the added pressure of purchasing an asset that will tie up my net worth for a good few decades.
I can see some merit to systems like China or Singapore where land is leased directly from the government rather than private landlords (and arguably, given the existence of land and property taxes, it's a nominal distinction really), but still, you've got the existence of an intermediate owner that performs maintenance and searches for tenants, with the bonus and curse that that intermediate has no profit motive to actually perform that work.
but property ownership still comes with a level of long-term required investment that many people simply do not want and cannot afford.
That’s largely due to the lack of supply of housing. And that’s why I think the government should be absolutely spamming housing units. Even if we kept landlords, they’d have no leverage to keep rents sky high.
People like me need to rent, and thus we need to rent from somebody.
And I think that your choice for that somebody should be better than some rich fuck who owns half the city’s housing (mildly exaggerating).
you’ve got the existence of an intermediate owner that performs maintenance and searches for tenants, with the bonus and curse that that intermediate has no profit motive to actually perform that work.
The person who does that work doesn’t need to be the owner though.
You know, so long as we can agree that lack of supply is the core issue, the rest of all that is really just details haha. I'm not hugely confident of public housing's track record in the US (though there's obviously a lot that went into that), but whether it's new public housing or just loosening zoning and allowing the market to actually meet demand, I don't really care so long as there are units.
You know, so long as we can agree that lack of supply is the core issue
It’s one of the core issues. I think there is a lot more baked into this, but if this is one of the things we can agree on then so be it.
I’m not hugely confident of public housing
While I do think public housing is a part of the solution, and has a lot of mistakes to learn from, I think co-ops should be the main workhorse/end goal for government built housing.
public housing or just loosening zoning and allowing the market to actually meet demand, I don’t really care so long as there are units.
I say, all of the above. Any possible way to increase the supply is a good thing.
Landlords do not build houses, they just rent them out. Housing, shelter call it whatever you like is human right and essential need, so it should not be a part of speculations for profits. Now you can see overpriced real estate because of investors who buy it and never live there. All this “helpers” who rent out their apartments bring more harm than benefit for society (they at least contribute to a price growth in real estate). Buildings could be constructed by government owned organizations in order to provide society with housing, no need in speculators to solve problems.
Food is also an essential need, but it absolutely has a massive profit-driven market around it that generally works. I'd argue that there are specific flaws in the housing market that can and should be addressed, not that the very concept of having a housing market is inherently flawed.
for sure, there are many essential needs beyond housing and food. I cannot agree that it works well with food either, starving still exist even in “developed” countries. It looks you are trying to a patch something that really flawed. Unfortunately it is not a way. We should move away from profit oriented society and away from human exploitation.
You’d just swap profit for influence instead. Look at the USSR, they had issues feeding their population, yet the people in power largely got whatever they wanted.
So the profit motive certainly has some benefits. It also has downsides, such as unequal Income distribution. But then, existing examples of communism/socialism also have similar problems.
So I think the discussion about economic system misses the mark. We can regulate capitalism to provide many of the benefits we want, so the discussion should be on what we actually want and what changes we need to make to get there. For housing, we could solve the problems we see in a number of ways, each with downsides, such as:
subsidize renting
increase property taxes to reduce vacancy
add a vacancy tax - probably harder to enforce
build more public housing - I haven’t been impressed with section 8 housing, so I’m not bullish on this one
rent controls - seems to backfire more than help because it removes the profit motive to improve rentals
And so on. Switching the economic model comes with huge costs and I’m not convinced it’s actually better than fixing what we have.
You’d just swap profit for influence instead. Look at the USSR, they had issues feeding their population, yet the people in power largely got whatever they wanted. See the famous trip Boris Yeltsin took to a Texas grocery store. At least in those days, capitalism handily beat communism in providing a variety of foods to the average person.
I cannot accept your argument since variety of brands for similar product in the store doesn’t mean society can feed itself. It is wrong angle to see on the object. Since there is various of factors which could easily destroy such logic from quality of food to affordability (simple a lot of product in store, but people cannot buy it). Much better metric is satisfying the need, in our case in food. So in our case we should look at calories consumption and nutritional value. Look at cia document where conclusion is “American and Soviet citizens eat about the same amount of food each day but the Soviet diet may be more nutritious”.
The conclusion is that Americans ate too much, meaning there’s more food available than necessary, whereas Soviet citizens ate a better amount, but it consisted largely of less expensive foods like potatoes. Americans ate a lot more fish and meat (21% vs 8%), which is likely a marker for prosperity differences between average citizens. The difference was pretty small (~250 calories according to that document), so I’m not exactly sure what your point is.
So from what I can tell, the US had much more consistent food availability throughout even the worst of crises, whereas the Soviet system seemed to struggle. Granted, starvation wasn’t really a thing after 1947, so the USSR seems to have at least met minimum expectations for food production. This is a decent Reddit thread on it, and the result is essentially that farmers don’t like collectivization much at all, and sometimes that resulted in huge problems like food shortages, and the USSR often resorted to imports when production wasn’t enough:
A system of state and collective farms, known as sovkhozes and kolkhozes, respectively, placed the rural population in a system intended to be unprecedentedly productive and fair but which turned out to be chronically inefficient and lacking in fairness… However, Marxist–Leninist ideology did not allow for any substantial amount of market mechanism to coexist alongside central planning, so the private plot fraction of Soviet agriculture, which was its most productive, remained confined to a limited role. Throughout its later decades the Soviet Union never stopped using substantial portions of the precious metals mined each year in Siberia to pay for grain imports, which has been taken by various authors as an economic indicator showing that the country’s agriculture was never as successful as it ought to have been.
So basically, the USSR was dependent on food production in the west because its own production was often lacking. So not only did the US have more than enough food production for its own population, but it also had enough to help out the USSR (e.g. this massive grain deal).
so the discussion should be on what we actually want and what changes we need to make to get there
Come now, that's far less entertaining than tribalistic shitfling on the Internet, and isn't that the real objective here?
Joking aside, a big solution that should absolutely be on that list is abolition of single-family zoning and a general reduction in the amount of red tape involved in building more housing. There are, and I am not kidding, multiple examples of middle-density housing being blocked because some local NIMBYs tried to have a laundromat protected as a historical landmark. In California, endless demands for environmental reviews can be weaponized such that the legal fees and wasted time make the financials for new housing fall through. And that's even assuming you can find land that isn't exclusively zoned for single-family homes. San Francisco has one of the worst housing markets in the country, and despite that, on 38% of its land, it is illegal to build housing that isn't single family homes. At the end of the day, if you have a million people looking for housing and only a third as many units available, you can either build more, or you can accept that only the richest third of them will get housing. One of those options is much more enticing if you're claiming to care about the poor.
I disagree, we should just make it less attractive. This can happen in a few ways:
improve mass transit, and encourage higher density along transit arteries
make vehicular traffic less convenient by routing it around city centers instead of through - i.e. encourages mass transit use
increase property tax and reduce sales tax - basically encourage using less space and using more services (i.e. rely on the local shop, not your own food storage room)
And so on. The benefits here are varied, such as:
less traffic in city centers
more green space, since the space isn’t occupied by as many SFH
less road maintenance because you need fewer roads
healthier people since using a bicycle or walking would be more convenient than driving
But as you noted, the above gets blocked by NIMBYs. But it is possible, as we can see in the Netherlands, which has largely reduced its vehicular traffic and improved the residential density. It wasn’t always that way, but they made a big push for it and people now don’t want to go back.
I totally agree that those are all good things, but I still see no real reason why the government has any business telling a homeowner who wants to split the building into a duplex that it's illegal, because reasons.
The political cost of actually abolishing SF zoning is definitely high though, and proposals to make SF homes less attractive are definitely more politically palatable.
Yup, it’s really dumb. SF should have virtually no SFH-exclusive zoning since they’re very much space constrained, they should have a lot more mixed zoning (i.e. shops at ground level, housing above).
Food also enjoys massive amounts of competition amongst what type of food to eat. Housing doesn’t.
At least here in the states unprepared food isn’t taxed either.
Should more be done to get food to the needy? Absolutely. Should we allow unfettered accumulation of private property (every domicile beyond your residence) at the behest of personal property (your residence)? I don’t think so.
Let people own more than one home; after everyone has one.
Otherwise it’s just cruelty as a feature of society, not a flaw. And I in good conscience can’t get behind that
Food also enjoys massive amounts of competition amongst what type of food to eat. Housing doesn’t.
You're actually on to something here. There is far far far more food produced than we could ever consume; so much that a massive amount is literally thrown away. Whereas with housing, we've been grossly underbuilding for decades now. If, in a year, you have 25,000 people who want to move to your city, but you've only added 2000 units of housing, then the inevitable result is that the richest 2000 people get the housing, and the owners of that housing can charge extremely high prices. Given this, why the hell is it literally illegal in most of the land in our cities to build anything other than a detached single family home that might house four or five people, as opposed to a duplex or small apartment building that could house two or three times as many?
I'm not saying that we shouldn't tweak around with the allocation incentives, but there's simply no where to policy your way around the fact that our urban areas have far too little housing for the amount of people who want to live there.
Buildings could be constructed by government owned organizations
Ok, so you want the government to be the landlord as you have more trust in a government monopoly than in a market. Fair. Just not something I agree with.
While he's doing that, perhaps you could challenge your belief in the efficacy of big government. Countries which prevent markets from operating efficiently tend to do really poorly over time. The more authoritarian, the worse they perform.
I think the solution lies somewhere between government and markets.
hehe considering market propaganda in education, on every media it is hard for me to not challenge my “belief” on a daily basis.
unfortunately in your comment you repeating neoliberal propaganda, please check guardian article on “free market zone libertarian experiment” tldr it led to low wage sweatshops and workers repression (and spoiler even this libertarian experiment relied on governmental support)
I argued that the solution is both, not one or the other. You provided me an example of an extreme in the other direction. I also think libertarianism and anarchy does not work. Please re-read my comment.
I think the solution lies somewhere between government and markets.
Countries which prevent markets from operating efficiently tend to do really poorly over time. The more authoritarian, the worse they perform.
In general it means less government control over the markets. And less means libertarian concept (see article again). If you mean something in between , there is need in very detailed scale to find difference between current regulated markets, non regulated markets (libertarian nonsense) and balance that you want.
I get the point about anarchy (power vacuum arguments apply across implementations), but libertarianism is such a huge category that I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Libertarianism isn’t an economic system, there are socialist and capitalist extremes. It’s also not a government structure, it houses both anarchists and bigger government ideas.
It’s a philosophy that values the principles of individual liberty and non-aggression first and foremost, and everything else is discussed on those terms (I.e. how can we solve the problem with more liberty). There are different views about property rights, validity of certain types of taxes, etc, so you usually can’t generalize unless you believe we need authoritarianism or something.
If you could be more specific, we could probably have a constructive conversation.
Ok, so you want the government to be the landlord as you have more trust in a government monopoly than in a market. Fair. Just not something I agree with.
ok, so you want a society where people, yourself included (though I have a feeling you like to pretend otherwise), can end up homeless and destitute because.. They don't have enough of this imaginary thing some people made up so they could centralise their power and commodify the existence of the rest of us for profit, so they deserve to be left for dead, and that is something you agree with..
If we, the workers, are the ones running that government monopoly and not an oligopoly of landlords and other speculators then yes, that would be more fair. It’s also a vastly more efficient way to guarantee that everyone is housed, as history shows
Is this government controlled by the bourgeois or the proletariat class? If I can’t afford to buy a home (and even then, unless I’m rich enough to buy with cash I’m going to be beholden to the bank I get the loan from) I’m going to have to rent from the bourgeois class no matter what under capitalism, I just get a choice in which member of the bourgeois I get to rent from, they’re gonna be taking my money regardless. If the working class is in control of the state I actually get a say in who’s running the housing authority in my city, I can vote and advocate for housing policies I like, potentially I can make housing totally free, or at least cheap as dirt, cuz it’s not being run as part of the profit motive anymore, which is good for me as a renter. Or I can promote policies where the state build housing for people to own, Cuba for example has one of the highest home ownership rates in the world because the government funds the construction of very cheap housing that people basically “rent to own”.
Ok, so you want the government to be the landlord as you have more trust in a government monopoly than in a market.
Yup. Basically. Although it is worth noting that the type of government we currently have, beholden to capital, is not trustworthy. Their priorities first and foremost are to serving corporate interests, which is probably why you trust them so little. Any power or public capital they are entrusted with gets pumped into private companies whose sole purpose is to make as much profit as possible for as little expenditure.
Any government brave enough to outlaw private landlords is going to have much more socially oriented priorities and will be much more inclined to serve the public good rather than the almighty market.
This is a very sudden jump from "housing shouldn't be so expensive", which essentially everyone agrees with, to "we should abolish private property", which you'll find is a significantly less popular proposal.
Communism brought Russia from a feudal industrial backwater to putting the first people in space in the span like 20-30 years, and they crushed the Nazi war machine in the process.
Poland was invaded by both the Soviet Union and Germany.
The USSR entered Poland after it was clear the Polish army was collapsing. The alternative was to let the Nazis occupy the whole thing. Britain and France went to war with Germany to preserve Polish independence. If they thought the USSR was just as bad as the Nazis, why didn’t they also declare war on the Soviets in 1939?
A pact that was a necessity when all the Allies rebuffed the USSR, but also a pact that documents show the USSR never even intended to honour from day one.
It’s pretty clear the Soviets expected Germany to violate the pact, they wouldn’t have bothered building a massive fucking defensive line between them and Germany if they hadn’t.
More like the Soviet Union liberated Polish-occupied Belarus and Ukraine after Poland stole Belarusian and Ukrainian land during the early 1920s. Or are you one of those Polish ultranationalists seething that Lviv is a Ukrainian city instead of a Polish one?
Communist governance is responsible for dramatically increasing living standards of people across the world. A clever trick that capitalists like to do is pretend that all the work done by the CPC in the last few decades has actually been done by capitalism!
Almost all the top countries on that list are socialist or were socialist until the 90s. It’s almost as if socialism actually results in homes being treated as basic needs for people instead of commodities for landlords to make money off of.
But they're free to do that right now and it doesn't happen. Not on the scale we require. Asking people to donate their time to build houses just isn't a scalable solution in modern society.
I unfortunately wasn’t able to refinance, but I’m still significantly below 4%. I don’t think I could afford to buy my own house today with current rates and house values because my mortgage would more than double.
No. Costs rise all the time. Ideally, so does your income, giving you mostly the same purchasing power as before - just because 10 is a larger number than the 8 you paid a year or two ago, doesn't mean you realistically expended more value (e.g. time spent working, or foregoing other things).
Rejiggering this would involve a lot of work. It would not give you any more or less value, it would be cosmetic. It would also be based on a very subjective "this shouldn't cost as much as $X" where both X and the rough value of the $ are... just something you happen to be used to. A trivial example is how this looks to anyone with a different currency, or to an American in a different time.
Now, of course, a large amount of people in the entire Western world have gotten shafted for 50 years plus, and the purchasing power has gotten even worse in the past 5, but that's basically a separate issue.
(Also, coins are pretty expensive compared to paper money, IIRC)
Yeah, incomes have risen a hell of a lot slower than inflation causing the average person to be poorer overall. Redominating the currency would not fix that problem. That is a systemic issue where inflation is higher than wage increases, so people demand higher wages, which then causes inflation to increase, and it’s a spiral.
Because numbers are becoming so large its almost pointless to think about. The national debt for example is 33 trillion dollars. That is an unimaginable sum. What even is 33 trillion dollars?
That is an unimaginable sum. What even is 33 trillion dollars?
How is 11 trillion any better?
If you want to actually bring that to a number people can grasp than small amounts would become impractically small. Like you would need to deal with 0.000001 and 0.0000001 dollars and stuff.
Is this a problem, though? There’s currencies like the Yen which have high numbers, the users just adjust their mindset of how much is “a lot”. Reducing the numbers wouldn’t change the problems of things getting more expensive. This feels like treating a very cosmetic symptom of a much larger problem.
The wealthy would still possess an obscene and unfathomable amount of wealth and the impoverished would still be struggling to get by, just the numbers would be smaller. Does that help anything?
Don’t get me wrong, I’d much rather be paying $266 in rent, though if I’m making one third of what I do now, I’m still in the same spot, just… with smaller numbers.
Right, as I said, it is definitely more psychological than actually helpful, but it would definitely feel a lot better to see smaller numbers. Hell, the national debt is even hard to write. 33,000,000,000,000
But the national debt is irrelevant to me. It has zero impact on my day to day life. It’s just some imaginary number pundits can shout about to push their utterly disconnected agendas.
Even if I could wrap my head around it, that wouldn’t improve the credit rating of the nation, even if I could manage to care one iota about that.
I’m sorry, I’m just struggling to understand why it’s useful to have a national debt that’s a small enough number for me to visualize some quantification of it.
Sorry, I don’t think I follow as to why that’s bad. If I pay, say, $1,000 in rent and earn $3,000 a month, it’s the same thing as if I paid $10,000 in rent and made $30,000 a month.
While I can see how those numbers could be reduced into smaller numbers easily, I’m not sure I understand why that is beneficial. My material conditions don’t change.
Your rent could be 200,000* units per month. So it’s basically a factor of 100, but for cents instead of dollars.
Yet shopping was still a whole lot easier because if the price said 1000₩, you paid 1000₩, no questions asked. Unlike in the US, where your $1.00 coffee gets $0.10 added for tax, $0.25 added for the tip, so even though the menu says $1.00, the actual cost to the customer is $1.35.
The problem isn’t that the numbers are big. The problem is that you’re trying to think about national numbers from the perspective of an individual.
500 miles might not be far for a pilot, but it would be for a jogger. We don’t need to shorten the units to make it easier for the jogger to understand 500 miles. (0.5 kilomiles! Lol)
*EDIT: Fixed the scale. I’ve been working with Japanese Yen which is a factor of 10, but KRW is a factor of 100 like I said…but mathed wrong. Lol
Right, but I figure that making, say, the national debt, at least somewhat more understandable to the average individual, would, at least hopefully, make the average individual hold the government accountable for absolutely uncontrollable spending. as is people just don’t care because the numbers are so unfathomable that they are like fuck it
You do realize if you cut all dollar values to be 1/3 of the original value, the national debt becomes:
33 trillion * 1/3 = 11 trillion
This number is still unimaginably large, no?
I really wouldn’t worry about the debt. All nations have debt, and I bet the USAs debit-to-gdp ratio isn’t that bad (been a while since I paid attention to those numbers though).
Debt to gdp ratio is probably pretty average in comparison to other nations (admittedly this is a figure I have not looked up in a while). The yardstick we should use to measure how bad our debts are should be other economies. Government debt is nothing like the debt of private citizens.
I haven’t looked up what other countries debt to GDP ratios are, but if they are similar, at say, 150% then won’t we just end up in a scenario where the entire world crashes and burns and the average citizens all over the world are put out onto the streets? To my knowledge, the crazy circus can’t go on forever.
No, that only happens if countries stop being able to make good on their loans. To my knowledge most USA debt is owned by USA citizens and corporations in the form of bonds. Nations aren’t just loaning each ofher money they don’t have.
But the United States is getting to a point where they will not be able to make good on their loans unless they print more money, which will then cause inflation and make the dollars they repay the loan with worth less to the person/company/country who made the loan. We already pay more on our debt than we spend on the military and considering the US cannot stay out of other people’s business, that’s saying something.
But the United States is getting to a point where they will not be able to make good on their loans unless they print more money,
I’m sorry but to convince me you’d have to find a VERY good source for that claim. Government bonds are the safest bet in the game for a reason. The situation you’re describing would be a global collapse of most economies.
Anyway, you seem very interested in this topic, I hope you find the answers you’re looking for, but I think that wraps this conversation up for me.
I think this is a different issue than big numbers.
I have zero mechanisms available to me to reign in national spending anyway. If the debt were $10 dollars, that’d still be the case. But even if I did, the national debt doesn’t affect me in the slightest, why should I care if it’s $10 or $10T?
Fair. Eventually the us will enter a debt spiral and the average person will be living on the street eating 1 meal a day and shooting politicians for fucking everything up. However, just revaluing the currency does not solve that problem. That is a bigger, more systemic issue.
What is the size of the “median” home in each area? Single family, or townhome, or condo?
Given that this appears to be a median average, this graphic does not account for the extremely wide variance depending on the cases above. A two bedroom condo and a five bedroom single family home could easily have a $2000/mo variance in the mortgage cost.
The other item that would perhaps be useful would be to call out what the down payment requirement is for each of these areas; ie, you can only achieve a $3000/mo mortgage if you’ve also put down $140,000, which is unachievable for over 90% of the country.
From the Bay Area, $1.5M will get you a two bed one bath or three bed 1.5 bath home built in 1925 or so. You can buy in a lower end neighborhood for a little less or a higher end one for a bit more, but the standard is going to be a craftsman home from 1906 with a driveway if you’re lucky.
I think the graphic also used a 20% down payment and a slightly over 6% mortgage in the calculation.
I just want to retire and move someplace cheap, like NYC or London.
That’s insane to me. I live in Tulsa, OK and bought a nice 2400sq ft home with 4 bedrooms, 2 living rooms, dining room, 2 full baths and garage and in a cul-de-sac for 120k. But the downside is I’m living in Oklahoma…so… Yeah.
I feel that. I got a cute little almost 4 bed, 1.5 bath farm house in a smallish town in Wisconsin for 120k a couple of years ago. When I first moved here I was a shut in and the trade-off of not really having stuff to do out of the house was fine, but now I’m wanting to go enjoy the nightlife, have a good meal that isn’t a bar burger (I can get some damn good bar burgers, but still) and also drive less so we’re looking at moving to a bigger city in the nearish future.
On the upside thanks to the hyperinflation we’ve been able to get a chunk of equity that’ll help us a lot when we do move
Well the good thing about Tulsa is it’s still a fairly large city and there’s tons of shit to do here. Tons of great restaurants and great nightlife. And as far as Oklahoma goes, it’s extremely liberal here in the city. Which is crazy because historically not so much lol. This is home of the biggest race riot ever in the country. It’s not the best place in the world but it’s extremely cheap to live here and has everything I had when I lived in Dallas. Minus all the traffic lol.
Even in downtown San Jose you’re talking about seven figures for an ancient craftsman with outdated electric and plumbing. Willow Glen, Los Gatos, Cupertino, you’re pushing $2M.
If you’re willing to commute from way up in the east bay, you can do a bit better, you’re right, but if you’re commuting to a South Bay company you’re paying for it in travel time and stress.
And tbh, I was stationed for a bit near Dublin. I can’t swear to what the prices are like now, but man, now that I’m out of that line of work I’d choose to live in East SJ or the peninsula instead.
But those are super reasonable prices, I will happily admit, and if you work in SF the commute might be worth it. We just need much more mass transit.
There is no way that this graphic isn’t including the entire metro area. The city I currently live in is on the list and so is the city that I am planning to relocate to. Prices shown do not accurately reflect the prices of houses/condos that I would consider “in the city”.
Put a hard stop to the purchasing of homes by corporations/businesses and people with no intention of living in them.
You should need proof of intention to live in the home within a reasonable amount of time after the purchase in order to make the sale. The flipping of homes for profit by those with cash and more money is a detriment to the market and the american dream for the rest of the population trying to get a foothold.
How about expropriation of these homes instead of just a half assed “can we put a pause on capitalism guys?” You realize what the problem is. No more half measures, Walter
You’re essentially talking about decommodification of housing, which is the only correct answer. It is necessarily impossible for a house to be both affordable and a good investment, and the current status quo means that housing will be used as an investment. Whatever mechanism used to fix the housing affordability problem will require that housing no longer be subject to commodity market forces.
The value of a house should be in reduction of costs, not increase in real value.
When you rent, you pay for maintenance of your residence, some amount of furnishings, and the risk tht property owner takes in renting to you (i.e. the likelihood that you’ll destroy the property, fail to pay, etc).
When you own, you take that risk on yourself. You can choose to delay, DIY, or preempt repairs. You can choose what level of furnishings you have, and you are responsible for any loans or taxes due on the property. You don’t need to worry about unplanned vacancies.
Housing should keep pace with demand so property values stay roughly consistent with normal inflation. Unfortunately, cities tend to grow, making existing property more valuable.
When you rent, you also pay for the flexibility of being able to pick up and move in a short while if you get a new opportunity somewhere else, or just want to move for whatever reason.
Some people rent because they don’t want to worry about repairs, or mowing lawns, or any of that stuff.
They’d rather spend $3,500 taking a nice vacation than on a new furnace.
When you rent, you still pay for that $3500 furnace, you just pay for it in monthly installments through your rent instead of all at once.
You can accomplish the same thing with home ownership by using sinking funds. Basically, if you expect that furnace to last 20 years and cost $3500, you’d set aside ~$15/month, assuming your furnace is new. If you expect repairs in that time, set aside enough to cover that cost as well. If you do that for enough of your major repairs (roof, major appliances, driveway, etc), you should always have enough in the fund to meet any house related emergency, assuming your estimates are accurate enough on average. I do this in my budget by using online estimates for expected lifetime and cost to replace, and I do my best to make things last longer than that estimate. I do the same for cars and other large expenses so I’m always prepared.
That’s what landlords do, and homeowners can do it too. Budget for repairs just like you’d budget for a vacation.
Your first point is more important though. Selling a house is expensive and time consuming, so it absolutely makes more sense to rent if you expect to need to move with short notice. You’ll pay a premium for that convenience, and you’ll also not have to worry about repairs. For some people, renting is less expensive on net vs owning even if they don’t need to move quickly, e.g. if they know they’ll overspend on renovations and repairs. There’s absolutely an argument to both, I’m just pointing out that the value in a house isn’t in the appreciation imo, it’s in potential cost savings by taking ownership of repairs, vacancy, etc.
The problem is not that the furnace is $15/mo, it’s that it requires having $3500 all at one time. Newer furnaces have circuit boards on them and seem to require more repairs and maintenance. Everything does really. Appliances, water heaters, etc. There’s lots of expenses to home ownership and expenses that happen suddenly instead of being able to plan neatly for them.
Right, and those can be anticipated and mitigated. Options:
home warranty - essentially forces you to save for larger expenses
be pessimistic about expected lifetimes - i.e. only assume your appliances will live while they’re under warranty (most can last more than double that with proper maintenance)
forego most or all other savings until you can pay for the highest ticket item in cash - it’s extremely unlikely that everything will fail at once
If something truly out of the blue comes up, you’re usually in appliance warranty or home owners insurance claim territory. The vast majority of the time, “unexpected” expenses could’ve been planned for, but the individual didn’t do their due diligence. A 20 year old furnace going out isn’t an emergency, that’s its expected lifetime (and with maintenance, a high quality furnace can last double that).
Owning a home is expensive, and so is renting. If you’re paying more owning a home on average vs renting for the same size of place (after, say, 6 years or so), you’re doing something seriously wrong.
Again, not everyone who owns a home saves up for those things. Case in point, one of my friends budgets for an annual furnace tuneup at the end of summer. Well, they discovered that the furnace is dead and won’t start up once it gets cold. So her plan is to work a second job for a month to be able to afford getting a new furnace since it’s close to winter.
If she was renting, the owner would simply replace the furnace and she wouldn’t have to worry about it.
Does she budget for other longer term expenses, like car replacement and repairs, retirement, or college for kids (assuming she has kids)? If not, this should be a wakeup call that she needs to get her finances in order, because working a second job shouldn’t be the solution to every periodic expense.
I don’t know where you live, but at least in my area, I had to finish a new homeowner packet to get my mortgage, which laid out common expenses. AFAIK, that’s a pretty common thing because banks don’t want you to default due to an unexpected repair cost.
But maybe renting is better for her if she is unable or unwilling to plan ahead. My point is that, in most cases, owning ends up being cheaper than renting for the same space.
I absolutely agree. I’m just saying that’s what homeownership requires, otherwise you’ll be stuck with an endless money pit financing every little repair.
It’s disgusting because airbnbs in my area can have 50% occupancy and do better than a long term, meaning for about 180 days of the year that housing is just artificially decreased supply.
I live in a touristy area and literally everything is getting turned into AirBnBs. It’s a huge problem because the people who actually live here have nowhere to live now
If you want to operate an airbnb in Berlin you need a hotel license (unless you actually live in the thing at the same time, or only do it for I think about a month a year, say when you’re on vacation). Long story short the city isn’t giving out any licenses in areas with high rent pressure, which is basically all of Berlin.
But those things are highly regional, there’s plenty of villages in the alps with an absurd amount of tourist accommodation compared to the number of regular inhabitants, but they also don’t have any industry but family farms and tourism. If you own something on Sylt and somewhere else you’re paying sky-high secondary residence taxes (rich fucks don’t rent they just buy holiday homes).
Municipalities are required to house everyone so the situation doesn’t even begin to be comparable to the US. Ballpark a shabby dorm room to yourself as the minimum, bath and kitchen might be shared, washing machine will almost invariably be. In Berlin there’s about 27k living in those shelters, about 2k are sleeping rough, and that’s as a metropolis smaller cities tend to have zero. None of that includes people crashing on somebody else’s couch, but it does include apartment burned down and you don’t want to pay for a hotel until you find something new kind of situations.
The official term is “emergency accommodations” and they’re supposed to be short-term, hence also the low standards, but we haven’t built enough social housing in ages and the stuff that got build constantly stops to be social housing as municipalities cheaped out and simply tacked “X% of units as social housing for 30 years” onto building permits, which leads to municipalities push come to shove having to rent hotel rooms and eat the difference.
The whole situation could be solved within a decade if we re-instituted the social housing programmes of the 50s, and you can’t do it as one-off investment as construction companies aren’t willing to increase their own capacity for a short-term boom.
Side note: Berlin had a referendum to expropriate all landlords who have more than 3k units, it passed, but wasn’t 100% binding and politics is dragging its feet implementing it, including the social democrats. With legalities out of the way though they’re now starting one that would be immediately applicable law.
The reasoning of the socdems isn’t even completely wrong, “we should build instead of expropriate” but MFers don’t seem to understand that people are out for blood. If the people want to expropriate something you can say your bit that you think that there’s better solutions but fucking do it. Especially in the east.
And, no, the landlords won’t get compensated at market rates. The whole thing is possible because for landlords housing units are means of production and Article 15, Berlin doesn’t even have to show it’s for the public good. Eminent domain type stuff is Article 14, 15 is way stronger and there because the constitution was deliberately written to be compatible with democratic socialism.
331.9 million (2021) US Population / ~142 million housing units in the United States (2021) = ~2.34 people average needed per dwelling to fully house everyone.
According to Statista: " The average American household consisted of 2.5 people in 2022. "
If people did not need vacation homes, and investment property… We appear to have enough housing for everyone already.
I’m working under the assumption hotels/motels are not included… there should be plenty of those to house people on vacation, and leaves plenty of room for the ultra wealthy to still have their vacation homes.
Rather than a hard stop, I think it would be a good idea to significantly increase taxes on real estate no one is actively living in, and use the proceeds to subsidize construction of new housing.
This seems to be the most reasonable. Disincentiivize multiple property ownership rather than outright ban it. The ones who can eat the cost will pay taxes and the rest will just bow out of the market.
But housing is a need and people will keep paying any price to not be homeless, this feels like it leads to massive corporations still owning all of them and paying large taxes they can eat short term and raise to massive prices of rent. Maybe they dump some stock but I’m just not sure it does much other than diversify smaller investors that used property for assets
this feels like it leads to massive corporations still owning all of them and paying large taxes
Then the taxes aren’t high enough. That’s an easy fix. It’s one of those times the state doesn’t want to optimise the rate for total tax earned but to make paying it for any length of time actually prohibitive. Make it so that they can’t possibly raise rents high enough to cover those taxes and they’ll understand quickly.
The other side of the equation is a bit harder, and that’s housing overstock: Companies will be sitting on housing they can’t rent out due to lack of demand for housing. One idea would be to allow them to lease homes out to municipalities for literally nothing but tax forgiveness and the municipalities can use that to house the left-over homeless, unemployed, etc. Call it a half write off. Oh those leases need sensible minimum durations, I’d say five years is a good start.
smaller investors that used property for assets
You can easily make smaller investors be hit significant less by it by scaling the tax to the number of vacant housing units. Own a second home you rent out and spend four months finding a renter you like? Fine, pay ten bucks. Do that to 1000 housing units? Pay 10000 bucks for each.
Yes, those kinds of rates are right-out financial violence. That’s the point: The state has to step in as the larger bully to keep the small ones in check to avert market failure.
Your argument falls flat once you remember that there is in fact plenty of homeless people and there will always be those who will choose not to pay irregardless of logic or desire of self preservation. And while yes, any privatization of housing isn’t really any good, but you don’t have to make it impossible for them to make money off of it. You just play their own logic against them and keep it just on the line where they will ultimately go for something else to profit off of other than housing as their returns and infinite growth will eventually lead them into microscopic margins so any variability becomes a threat to the bottom line.
I disagree, because that would disincentivize housing. I think the price of housing is mostly just a function of how much of it is on the market. Wealth inequality is also a problem but should be addressed in other ways.
As an aside, the tax should also apply to commercial real estate so there is an incentive to convert offices to apartments.
Rather than a hard stop, I think it would be a good idea to significantly increase taxes on real estate no one is actively living in, and use the proceeds to subsidize construction of new housing.
An alternative is to replace property tax with a land tax. That way instead of penalizing people for building more housing, they are penalized for holding onto land that could be used to house more people (or whatever other use is in mind).
ATL had a pretty good program at one point. If you made $60k, you could buy a $250k house with the requirement that you would be the primary resident for the first year.
What’s even better is that the comparables in the area were all $450k, so 3 years later, all of the homes got valued around $500-600k.
The problem isn’t necessarily flipping houses, if the ones doing the flipping really are improving the property and are able to refurbish old properties to be more appealing. If they put in the work, they deserve to make money off of that - but they only make their money if they sell.
The problem is corporations who buy up housing stock, with no immediate plans to resell. They view houses like a commodity, and if they constrain supply in certain areas they can artificially create profit. This profit, though, comes at the expense of everyone who is looking for a home at the time.
I think the solution is for localities to step in and crank up property taxes for residential units that are not either occupied or actively on the market. Once a company keeps a property off the market for a year, make it much more painful for them to hold it for another year.
Non-owner occupied properties already aren’t eligible for the capital gains exclusion. I guess we could make unoccupied houses subject to regular income tax instead of capital gains tax rates would further discourage empty houses. That, and higher property taxes would probably be enough.
All agreed except the localities bit. These smaller cities councilmen are too cheap to bribe. A $1,000 check will have them hanging on your every word. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Probably best bumped up to state level.
But yes, we should ban corporations at some well-defined point. I mean, what if I incorporate myself? Now I can’t buy another house?
To add, the corps buying up housing are also the ones that have the most potential to back housing builders, but since they’re buying up stock to artificially decrease supply, then they’re deincentivized to support builders. I really wish these big corps had some sort of for each unit you buy, you must build a unit within the next 2 years.
House flippers are incentivized not to make good, long term, sustainable, or efficient home improvements. Their only incentive is to make a house more sellable upon initial inspection, house flipping is a bad practice I would argue far more often than not.
The problem is housing as an investment like a stock. They should be commodities.
I spent the last year looking for a house to buy, and since it took me a year I got to see many of the shit-bucket houses I was looking at (since they were in my price range) get bought up and “flipped” - which usually amounted to just some paint slapped on everything and those fucking grey fake wood vinyl planks that everybody loves these days put down everywhere - and then resold for absurd prices. I respect people that do a good job of renovating houses, but most of these flippers aren’t doing that.
I’m in no position to buy a house, but I like to browse and dream, and my mindset at this point is basically–give me an honest old house that hasn’t been renovated since 1970…at least I can SEE the problem-spots (cracked this or that, stains, etc.) and make a plan on how to tackle them.
Like, my gut feeling when I see that horrible silver-blue color scheme anything flipped/“renovated” in the past few years is to run as fast as I can. You can’t plan, you don’t know what you’ll have to tackle, it’s all hidden under fresh paint or flooring. Is there mold? Who knows. Water damage? Who knows. Old pipes/electrical/etc. that need fixing? Who knows, the signs that might have given you a clue were hidden or pulled out. It’s all a big mystery.
Inherently, flipping houses is about increasing the price of the home. This directly relates to the article by making more houses further out of range of more people.
Houses with issues might not be able to be financed by a mortgage. So a company/individuals will fix the issues, then resell the house to someone who can now get an FHA loan for it.
FHA loans have strict requirements on the condition of the house in order to give funding.
If someone does work on the house, they should get paid for their efforts.
Higher taxes is just a cost of doing business which is passed on to other tenants, be it long or short term rentals, even if housing stock is temporarily held - though I don’t disagree that such a vacancy tax is a good.
GP was right - forbid corporations from owning any residential property if 4 or fewer units and greater than four unless the building is wholly owned.
On the tax side, add a purchasing tax of 15-25%, 90% of which is rebated at closing for non-corporations who have not received the rebate in the previous 24 months. That targets flippers and property-bros willing to go naked on liability.
We do need to have an exception for those who need to buy through a corporation in order to protect their privacy, especially with the rise of professions such as streaming.
Those professions aren’t going to be going anywhere anytime soon.
This would take all the single family and duplexes off the rental market and make a ton of people homeless. No thanks. There’s enough people homeless in this country due to drug and alcohol issues.
But the truth is the decline in buying is because there’s nothing to buy. A person eventually sells their house for any number of reasons. A corporation using rental as long term investments never will, and the biggest don’t care about interest rates because they’re making cash purchases anyways.
I’m not saying high mortgage rates aren’t a problem, I’m saying they only are for people buying housing to live in, and those people can’t afford to buy regardless of interest
Big rental corps will absolutely sell buildings when they think rents are too low. They’ll sell them in bulk to some other big rental corp, though, not piecemeal, one-by-one, to owner residents. Too much overhead and time in a couple hundred individual transactions when you can just do one deal.
It’s a few things, at least in my experience house hunting.
High prices
High interest rates
Limited availability due to people being locked into low-rate mortgages
Those three items, in combination, are a death sentence for anyone wanting to enter the market. Hell, my 800 sq ft condo is going for over 650k now, which is a great litmus test for how absurd prices are right now in my area.
Interest rates are a big part of it because people who have a mortgage who would consider moving otherwise won’t. I’d consider moving, but there’s no way I’d trade my sub 3% fixed for nearly 8%.
My house is about 600k. At today’s rates I’d pay nearly 1.4 million over the life of the loan. 4k per month. At my current rate I’m paying about half that. For the same house.
This is the reason no one is selling. Everyone who had a mortgage when the rates hit record lows is never going to sell. Why would they. I’d literally be better of keeping this house and renting it out if I wanted to move. Nobody with 2.9% loans is better off walking away from it, it’s free money. Inflation is shrinking the value of what I owe, this mortgage is better than cash, and I get a house.
Not to be rude, but are you saying you have no equity and you want to sell your house?
Because when you sell your house, what’s not paid off goes to the bank, and you keep everything you paid off which in this case would go to the new house offsetting your future mortgage.
People flipping houses and moving before building equity was only a thing for a brief window
From 1960 till 2022 the historical inflation rate has been 3.8% per year. If they have a loan for 2.9%, they are inflating away their debt, so the longer it takes to pay, the “cheaper” it gets while they are still getting all the appreciation.
I have significant equity mostly from appreciation. There’s no reason I couldn’t sell, except that it makes zero sense to give up my current mortgage or to get a new one at today’s rates.
This is the problem I have as well. My house is worth 3x what I paid for it, and my monthly payments are… let’s just say I can’t rent a 1br shithole for what I pay monthly for 1500 sqft 3bd 2bath… (which is also a shithole but it’s mine.)
Even if I sell for the 3x, everything else went up proportionally -and- interest is much higher than the 3.18% rate I got, so I’d be much further behind, and it would be a lateral move, to boot, not an upgrade. Trading the problems I’m aware of for problems I’m not aware of, and paying exorbitantly for the privilege.
Instead, I’m stuck here. Either convince my friend to move in with me, which she’s nearly sold on already, or buying a second property and renting this one out to cover the difference, which I’d rather not do. I hope she takes me up on moving in, not because I need help with the bills, I don’t and don’t really want a roommate, but because she does (she makes barely more than I do, but pays almost 5x as much every month for a quarter of the space in a major metro area rental - she could make half her current wage here and still come out well ahead, but she’d probably make almost the same amount).
It’s being willed to her if I die before her (single, no kids, no plan to change either of those), so anything she puts into improvement she benefits from now and later, even if she moves out. Win-win, and really the only way I’ve found to make this whole thing work decently.
Would be super fantastic if y’all could include geography in articles like this. Even narrow it down by continent if you’re really just trolling for clicks.
Personal finance, like legal advice, is region specific. Like Reddit, there are PF communities, like !personalfinancecanada, to get specialized advice. The main community is treated as US centric.
Personal finance is about personal finance. This community is not region specific. There are people from all parts of the world here. Kindly specify the general location in the post; that would be very helpful.
I like that politicians always claim the savings will be passed on to customers. Companies are benevolent and will definitely not pocket the extra 1% they’d save.
Exactly this. I’m pretty sure the CC companies themselves are behind this legislation. “We wanted to give you perks for using our card, but it’s illegal now. Oh BTW, completely unrelated, your interest rate and annual fees will remain the same. If you don’t like it, then just pay everything off before the annual fee hits again next month. Ta-ta!”
Like a lot of legislation, this reads like someone without much expertise in the field wrote it.
The number of parties taking a cut of processing fees is one major issue. A lot of point of sale providers are payment facilitators (payfacs) or independent sales organizations (ISOs), which means they’re selling the merchant on processing with a third party and taking a cut. For example if you buy Toast POS, you’re forced into processing with them, which is actually going through 5/3rd bank, but Toast keeps between 0.5 - 1.0% just because they have you locked in.
There are also all kinds of murky security fees. If your platform tokenizes card numbers (swaps the encrypted credit card number out for a single use token, which means if the traffic was MITMed and decrypted it still wouldn’t contain full card info), there’s a fee for that, typically 1 cent per transaction or so. On top of the ~5 cents per transaction network fees (which are separate from interchange fees). Card not present transactions (online / phone orders) have higher fees. Swipes have higher fees than emv/nfc. Has anyone ever looked into how strongly all those upcharges tie to the cost of increased fraud with those methods? Knowing credit card companies I wouldn’t be surprised if they slip in some extra profit here, it’s certainly not transparent or regulated. And for that matter - how much are processors saving on fraud now that emv puts liability for chargebacks onto the merchant? Processing rates have only increased over the years, but that was a pretty major shift in the favor of the banks.
Some point of sale providers have quietly been rolling out what they call “cash discounting”, which means that paying with cash is cheaper, with the consumer paying the card fees on top of that if they pay by card. And a lot of payfacs use this as an excuse to sell absurd processing rates, I’ve seen over 4% + 15 cents per transaction a few times (industry standard for small restaurants/retail is 2.6% + 10c per); since the merchant isn’t the one paying it, they’re less likely to argue about that.
Toast decided recently to start adding a surcharge to every order on the platform that goes directly into their pocket - that’s on top of monthly subscriptions from the merchant and their cut of processing fees. Why not legislate something as blatantly predatory as that?
In any case - fintech is far more convoluted than it needs to be, something as simple as busting the entire idea of payfacs, forcing all platforms to allow a choice of processors, would go a long way in encouraging competition. A bigger overhaul would be to start restricting who can handle that data and how many hops are allowed - hypothetically right now your card can go from merchant to point of sale to tokenization provider to gateway to processor to bank to card brand, and they all take a cut.
What are the unintended consequences of this proposal? It is amazing how many people replying to this topic have proposed something without considering what effect it will have. Sure there is a problem, but most solutions have serious negative downsides.
I don’t think people care about the downsides for landlords anymore. Real or imagined, perceived greed is what people blame for high rent costs. They’re ready to make greedy landlords suffer as they have and I can’t say I blame them one bit.
The fundamental misunderstanding in this view, IMO, is that greed is not something that landowners are uniquely equipped with. Rice is cheap as hell; are rice producers simply not greedy, and that's why rice is cheap? No, it's because an absolutely massive amount of rice is produced every day, and there's more than enough around to ensure anyone who wants rice can get it. Slightly more abstractly, there is more than enough supply to meet the demand. And like housing, cheap food is an absolute need. But unlike food, housing has been woefully underproduced for decades now in cities, and government policy has done a lot to cause that. It's illegal to build denser than single-family homes in most urban land, and the aim of policy has been more to protect people's investments rather than have housing be affordable - two goals that are fundamentally at odds with each other.
This isn't a coincidence, of course. A lot of federal housing policy goes back to the 50s and 60s, when you had suburbs that literally banned people of color from living in them. Housing policy was explicitly designed to advantage landowners and penalize renters, which is to say, wealthier white families pursuing The American Dream™ and urban Black families whose neighborhoods were systematically redlined and demolished to build highways for white suburbanites.
Sure, all that’s true, but it doesn’t invalidate what I’m saying. I think people are angry and ready to get out the pitchforks. There’s been decades of policy debate with no actual improvements to the situation. People think politicians and the wealthy are using discussions like the one you’re trying to have to delay meaningful change rather than find an agreeable solution for all parties. That’s not to say you’re wrong but you’re assuming people want to avoid punitive action and I don’t think that’s true.
Totally agree with you; this frustration is a direct and obvious result of decades of policy failures. I just worry that a lot of the ensuing anger is a bit misplaced.
I do think that there's been a sharp acceleration in recent years towards actual concrete steps, even though they're not super flashy and will take more time to see results. There's been real progress towards zoning reform, abolishing parking minimums, and other bits of red tape that have played a huge role in housing costs exploding.
It probably will end with some poor decisions being made but sometimes a bad decision is all you can get. Hopefully it will get more meaningful discussion going at least.
Speaking of which, I appreciate your point of view and your demeanor. Civil discourse seems pretty rare these days.
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