The interest rates affecting house pricing is because lower interest rates increase demand. Solving the house price issue doesn’t mean keeping interest rates high, it can be influenced on the other side, supply. Which is what you’ve mentioned, the government could build state housing to increase supply of warm dry houses, and this could be a driver of lower prices if done right.
I also feel the need to point out that house prices falling is good for almost all owner occupiers, even though it’s unintuative. And since you have to pay off the same million dollar mortgage regardless of if house prices go up or down, we definitely come into the territory of that trolley problem meme with the trolley flattening a bunch of people and then saying it’s unfair to those people if we stop the trolley now before it squashes the next group - even though whether it stops or not has no impact on the ones already squashed.
There absolutely is, however, $5k is pretty minimal so I’m not sure it’s measurable in this case.
In general, with a bit of a lag, when people can borrow more because of low interest rates, house prices shoot up. When people can borrow less, house sales plummet (people don’t tend to sell when they can’t get what they paid for it, so sales fall instead as people stay put - though prices will fall a bit as some people will still need to sell but buyers won’t have much to choose from so they don’t fall back to where they were).
Stuff had a good article on this a while back (perhaps 2 or 3 years) where they compared I think average mortgage payments based on average interest rates for average houses each year going back 20 or 30 years, and I think it was adjusted for average wages as well. But do you think I can find it? Of course not.
Low interest rates mean people can borrow more. If people have access to more money but supply is limited, then prices go up. This is the supply and demand equation, but I think it’s good to test things we think we know. One issue we will find is that the US tend to sign mortgage loans with the interest rate fixed for 30 years, so interest rates changing don’t impact existing owners except when they move. Here in NZ people tend to only get a fixed rate for a year or two, and no major bank offers one past 5 years. Here’s one study “The Effect of Interest Rates and Mortgage Lending on House Prices”.
The abstract states:
We find a surprisingly important role for short-term interest rates as a driver of house prices, especially outside the United States.
The “especially outside the US” part is why I mention the difference in US mortgages vs ours.
And in the actual paper, this is part of the conclusion:
Most empirical studies assume that short-term interest rates do not influence house price growth other than through the domestic cost of borrowing, ie by their influence on long-term interest rates. The findings in this paper suggest that this view might be mistaken: changes in short-term interest rates seem to have a strong and persistent impact on house price growth
Here’s another that takes it a step further and says that purchasing power is the real driver, rather than interest rates in and of themselves.
Real income and the real interest rate have been widely considered as two important determinants of house prices. We find that the purchasing power for housing, which is based on the net present value of future income flows, is a more powerful concept. It is intuitive and realistic in nature for first time buyers who need substantial mortgage-financing. Based on aggregated yearly time series data for Belgium from 1973 to 2009, we find that nominal house prices are cointegrated with the purchasing power for housing.
I mean, that’s pretty much what that first study says. The international markets they studied had big impacts on house prices from interest rate changes. There was less of an effect in the US, but still a lot more than they expected.
My profile has a link to my Matrix account - though I guess it doesn’t help knowing that if Lemmy is down and you can’t get to my profile page. In the past though, the Lemmy.nz Matrix chat has been a good place to mention it. It’s not as active as it used to be but I still get notifications of messages sent in there and others can comment on if it’s working for them.
We have actually had some further downtimes of less than an hour each since this post, I’m still trying to narrow down the cause but I have a theory about what might be causing it.
In the official announcement, they have very carefully and deliberately avoided the term “open source”.
“Open source” has a very specific meaning, and probably the key part for this is if there are any restrictions on what you do with any derivative software you create.
Can you use the Winamp source code to create a new media player and sell it? If there is say a restriction on if you can use it in a company or on if you can sell it, then it’s not “open source” even though you can publish noncommercial software based on it.
In that case probably the strongest argument is that if it were legal, many people would get off charges of real CSAM because the prosecuter can’t prove that it wasn’t AI generated.
That’s not quite what I was getting at over the course of the comment thread.
It one scenario, AI material is legal. Those with real CSAM use the defense that it’s actually AI and you can’t prove otherwise. In this scenario, no innocent men are going to prison, and most guilty men aren’t either.
The second scenario we make AI material illegal. Now the ones with real CSAM go to prison, and many people with AI material do too because it’s illegal and they broke the law.
A bill designed to give consumers more control over their data will be introduced into Parliament tomorrow, the minister of commerce and consumer affairs says....
Just tracking HTTP status of lemmy.nz. Host is in an Auckland datacenter, but I don’t control it, it’s hosted by the guys at fediservices.nz. Monitoring is minimal, other than the up/down I’ve gotta dive into logs.
Yeah, I have a tracker (Uptime Kuma) that’s testing every minute. There has been failures or time outs every day for the last week or so, but it was much better before that. I’m not sure what’s changed that’s caused the issue.
There have been 6 separate outages today, and it needs two checks in a row to fail to count it as an outage. Though most have only been a few minutes.
If anyone has suggestions on how to troubleshoot, I’m listening!
Nice idea! Any thoughts on presentation? A post with info, links, and screen shots would probably be easiest, but maybe we can do better?
I’ll try to think of some major things that have happened in the last year.
Looking back through old posts I’m feeling sad about all the cool people who have slowly dropped off over the year. But also all the ones who are still here so that’s cool!
Hi all, sorry for being a bit slow on creating this new thread.
I have a few updates but I’ll post them in separate comments so they have separate comment chains.
Census
I’m working on a census survey like lemmy.ca did here. I didn’t have access to the original survey questions but I’m trying to align with their survey so we can compare against it. Though not everything is relevant so some things will be a bit different. I’m planning on doing this some time around the instance birthday at the start of June, and repeating it each year as Lemmy.ca does.
I’ve been fighting with lemmy a bit recently, it’s going down randomly and I’m not sure why. I have started disabling things to see if I can isolate it. The main one you might notice missing is the automod that handles spam, so if you see spam please report it and I’ll handle it manually.
It’s probably not news anymore. No one is reading articles about it, so they don’t publish the stories.
In Wellington there’s this flu study that also tracks COVID, but they have only just started tracking the 2024 flu season. Still, there’s a substantial number of COVID cases. In the past the most recent week has always been inaccurate as they are still waiting for the results of some testing to come through, so ignore that as it’s probably not actually a drop (based on the other axis we should see it higher than the first week’s results).
In terms of MOH reporting, absolutely. Triple is probably still underestimating. You’re right about hospitalisations and deaths, data is much better when we don’t rely on people self-reporting. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to find the right data (though I didn’t try particularly hard).
The graph I posted about is from a flu study, the numbers should be very reliable, just affected by the small sample size (from my rough calculations based on the graph, about 1,300 participants). From the graph it looks like about 20/80 confirmed cases, so 20/1300. With a very rough 400,000 people in the Wellington region, that’s 6,000 people with COVID in Wellington alone.
Revealed: Govt set to scrap grants to help first-home buyers onto property ladder | Newshub (www.youtube.com)
Pull up the ladder after you.
Down time last night 17/5/24-18/5/24
Hi everyone,...
Winamp is going open source, and it feels like the early 2000s again (www.xda-developers.com)
Not cool (sh.itjust.works)
branding makes Strange Bedfellows (discuss.tchncs.de)
“CSAM generated by AI is still CSAM,” DOJ says after rare arrest (arstechnica.com)
New tech bill will allow consumers to share data (www.rnz.co.nz)
A bill designed to give consumers more control over their data will be introduced into Parliament tomorrow, the minister of commerce and consumer affairs says....
Aotearoa Weekly Kōrero 23/5/2024
Last weeks thread here...