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The Rise of Renting in the U.S

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Re: The Rise of Renting in the U.S

#291

Post by Tsagadai »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #285
Tsagadai wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you been to China lately? Many Chinese cities are what happens when you allow supply to meet demand. Prices don't necessarily come down with increased supply because it also increases speculation (and contrary to economists believes we are not rational actors). Demand also follows supply, if you increase supply there is often an increase in demand because now people can move to $desirable_location.

But that speculation only affects the value of a property. It doesn't affect rent levels, which are determined by short term supply/demand. The increased supply may not make it easier to buy, but it sure makes it cheaper to rent a place.

Speculation affects rent because many buyers have debt. If an owner can raise rents that cover the interest and costs, they will; that is their baseline for how low they will go. Large amounts of speculation will increase rents even with increases supply because owners need to service their debts (up until the point where renters won't pay and owners default).

Re: The Rise of Renting in the U.S

#292

Post by hueving »

d4rkph1b3r wrote: post #163
hueving wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor, because poor people are the only ones to be entirely in debt. Also everyone with a good income that has huge student loans. I think you've become very disconnected from what the lower middle class is like if you think high interest will help them. The average savings account in the US is well under 10k.

Ok, I guess we're doing this. I'll explain the basics of money to start. Money is a representation of your buying power relative to everyone else. So if everyone's money doubled, no one got richer . It's only when the percentage of buying power changes that anyone is really more or less poor relative to before. Ok, back to the argument... >Poor, because poor people are the only ones to be entirely in debt. Wrong answ…

>Ok, I guess we're doing this. I'll explain the basics of money to start.

Don't behave like a child. It doesn't add anything to your argument. Also, you seem to be confused about the difference between interest rates and inflation. The value of money being cut in half is what's referred to as 'inflation' and it's not what is being discussed.

Re: The Rise of Renting in the U.S

#293

Post by dang »

d4rkph1b3r wrote: post #133

> In broad strokes, this makes them good for the poor and bad for the rich The stupidity in this comment hurts my soul. Let me ask you this, out of the poor and the rich, which one is more heavily leveraged into assets (using debt).

> The stupidity in this comment hurts my soul.

This kind of incivility isn't allowed on Hacker News. We ban accounts that do it repeatedly (as yours unfortunately has), so please stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11121104 and marked it off-topic.

Re: The Rise of Renting in the U.S

#294

Post by captronrico »

lowglow wrote: post #221
lawpoop wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you park your van, and how often do you shower? Also, do you worry about your van being broken in to while you're not there?

I park it wherever, but mostly try to stick to cities where it's legal to sleep in your van. While I have parked in San Francisco, Redwood City, and San Jose, right now I'm crashing in and around Palo Alto, CA. I shower every morning at my local 24 hour super sport gym. I'm a sucker for hygiene. I don't really worry about my van being broken into because I think I tend to stay in low crime neighborhoods. I'm also not…

Your lifestyle reveals an incredible amount of privileged; it's really hard to think about how this could work for non-white, non-male, non-highly educated white collar workers.

Re: The Rise of Renting in the U.S

#295

Post by throwaway28715 »

captronrico wrote: post #294
lowglow wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I park it wherever, but mostly try to stick to cities where it's legal to sleep in your van. While I have parked in San Francisco, Redwood City, and San Jose, right now I'm crashing in and around Palo Alto, CA. I shower every morning at my local 24 hour super sport gym. I'm a sucker for hygiene. I don't really worry about my van being broken into because I think I tend to stay in low crime neighborhoods. I'm also not…

Your lifestyle reveals an incredible amount of privileged; it's really hard to think about how this could work for non-white, non-male, non-highly educated white collar workers.

Why non-male? I'd think a highly educated white collar white female would be able to pull it off just as well if not better. (To be honest I have trouble imagining one would want to though...sexist of me I suppose.)

Re: The Rise of Renting in the U.S

#296

Post by epistasis »

maxsilver wrote: post #243
jseliger wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unaffordable housing, especially in cities, is a huge and regressive drag on the economy. Housing is unaffordable primarily due to parochial land-use restrictions, as Matt Yglesias explains in The Rent Is Too Damn High ( http://www.amazon.com/TheRent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp... ) and I explain here: http://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-futu... . If we want cheaper housing, all we have to do i…

> If we want cheaper housing, all we have to do is legalizing the building of it. I wish it was that simple. But experience disproves this theory. It's like saying "if you want cheaper cars, build more Lamborghini's". For instance, the article you link to complains about Seattle being unaffordable. Which is ironic because Seattle is building apartments like crazy . Something like 8,000 new apartments opened last year…

8,000 new apartments for Seattle is a drop in the pond, no wonder the rents are going up. It's building crazy little amount of housing! With a population of 650,000, even if Seattle were growing only at the rate of the US population of 0.7%, then they would need 4,500 new apartments. But they're growing much faster, like 2-3% per year, for quite some time. No wonder housing is getting pricy. They need to build 30,000 to 40,000 apartments per year for a while to relieve the shortage. Most of these new apartments will be more pricy, because they're new construction, but with time it will even out.

>Even in my tiny midwest town, they're building tons of new urban-ish apartments. And the rent in those units is always $1,000 over the average for the area. It's sending the entire towns rents up (even for ancient, crummy buildings).

I'm not sure the market works that way... These new apartments are more pricy presumably because they are more desirable; new construction usually is. In 30 years, they will be back with the rest of the rates. How do these new apartments increase the rent of the other apartments? Why can the land lords of the crummy apartments charge higher rents? Is it because there's not enough apartments or is it because they are behaving in anti-competitive ways?

There may be some macroeconomic ways to get back to more affordable housing without building, but they all involve devaluing current housing in some way.

Re: The Rise of Renting in the U.S

#297

Post by e0 »

throwaway28715 wrote: post #295
captronrico wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your lifestyle reveals an incredible amount of privileged; it's really hard to think about how this could work for non-white, non-male, non-highly educated white collar workers.

Why non-male? I'd think a highly educated white collar white female would be able to pull it off just as well if not better. (To be honest I have trouble imagining one would want to though...sexist of me I suppose.)

Fear of violent crime. I'm not saying it's reasonable (statistically speaking), just that it's there.

Re: The Rise of Renting in the U.S

#298

Post by triangleman »

dang wrote: post #293
d4rkph1b3r wrote: post #133

> In broad strokes, this makes them good for the poor and bad for the rich The stupidity in this comment hurts my soul. Let me ask you this, out of the poor and the rich, which one is more heavily leveraged into assets (using debt).

> The stupidity in this comment hurts my soul. This kind of incivility isn't allowed on Hacker News. We ban accounts that do it repeatedly (as yours unfortunately has), so please stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11121104 and marked it off-topic.

So wait, you banned the account? Or you deleted the comment and warned the account?

Re: The Rise of Renting in the U.S

#299

Post by [deleted] »

d4rkph1b3r wrote: post #133

> In broad strokes, this makes them good for the poor and bad for the rich The stupidity in this comment hurts my soul. Let me ask you this, out of the poor and the rich, which one is more heavily leveraged into assets (using debt).

[deleted]

Re: The Rise of Renting in the U.S

#300

Post by dang »

triangleman wrote: post #298
dang wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The stupidity in this comment hurts my soul. This kind of incivility isn't allowed on Hacker News. We ban accounts that do it repeatedly (as yours unfortunately has), so please stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11121104 and marked it off-topic.

So wait, you banned the account? Or you deleted the comment and warned the account?

I did neither; the warning is in lieu of banning.

Users flagged the comment, which causes it to be replaced by "[flagged]" unless you have 'showdead' set to 'yes' in your profile.

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