If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund • Hacker News Board

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#821

Post by paiute » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 10:02 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #552

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you're someone who thinks building stack-and-pack residences is the incorrect response for an investor-manufactured housing shortage?

I think if you are using derisive terms like "stack and pack" for apartments then you are probably precisely the investor that is manufacturing the housing crisis. Apartments create greater affordability, they allow for designing cities with lower carbon impact than single-unit homes, they allow better community, more connections, cradle-to-grave living, they allow people to survive without having to get in a car to…

try living in one. they are great maybe from age 24-29. they typically cost more than a mortgage in my area. you don't talk to people when you are that close. I find the greater the distance between neighbors the better the relationship.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#822

Post by bvinc » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 10:14 PM UTC

xdennis wrote: post #257

TheCowboy wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People using "The Great Reset" as a pejorative tend to have their views deeply rooted in right-leaning garbage conspiracy theories. Surely there's a better source for what Black Rock is doing than this person's Twitter thread. > Only the worlds largest asset manager and the leading proponent of The Great Reset. https://twitter.com/APhilosophae/status/1402437638423035906

What conspiracy? “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.” is something they said.

The conspiracy, which was not mentioned in this thread, but is all over youtube and twitter, is that the WEF is somehow going to reset everyone's wealth to zero and enact communism.

A video where futurists predict that you'll rent almost everything instead of buying it, isn't the same thing as evidence that the WEF is enacting communism.

Let's try to be clear about the nuance and details of what we're talking about.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#823

Post by Ericson2314 » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 10:14 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #39

Ericson2314 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that should be land held in the commons, not private home ownership. Private homeownership is just LARPing owning real capital to placate a new conservatized middle class, completely inefficient as rising prices cannot spur more land production and in fact preclude intensification use since the middle class homeowners don't have real capital to convert to apartments (even if zoning was relaxed), and histori…

> Private homeownership is just LARPing owning real capital to placate a new conservatized middle class If you don’t own real productive capital and depend on it broadly ad much as sale of labor, you aren’t even in the middle class to start with, your in the working class—just LARPing, to use your term, being part of the petit bourgeoisie . Of course, LARPing as a member of the petit bourgeoisie is the perennial past…

I personally define middle class as the people with most of their wealth in the form of their home. So yes traditionally those people would be considered part of the working class as you say. I don't disagree.

(My division is supposed to reflect how those people do behave, whereas the traditional Marxist one is supposed to be how they should behave based on the real relations behind the smoke and mirrors. That's fine, different categorizations for different purposes.)

For the second part, well, we'll need to abolish SFH zoning and related things, which is very unpopular because it would undermine landowner's speculation in the short term!

(It's especially annoying because taller buildings would lead to more valuable land area in the end, just cheaper floor area.)

So nevermind there are efficient market-based things to do, like everyone rents land from the state at auction which pays out universal dividend. Our land markets are popular precisely because they are a speculative mess!

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#824

Post by xapata » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 10:14 PM UTC

wallacoloo wrote: post #672

xapata wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its only the most expensive thing in most people's lives that has doubled in cost in about 10 years. Most people pay for housing by monthly payments, making the nominal value of the house irrelevant if the monthly payment stays the same. Further, you should consider the home owner's "basket of goods" to include the hypothetical rent they'd be paying for an equivalent house. Their mortgage payments and home ownershi…

> Most people pay for housing by monthly payments, making the nominal value of the house irrelevant if the monthly payment stays the same. Except homeowners get price exposure to the value of their home on the market. If you purchase and then go through a downturn which devalues your house, now you’re in the hole: you can’t use the sale price of the home to pay off the loan, so you’re stuck in that home until its val…

> Except homeowners get price exposure ... you’re stuck in that home until its value climbs again or you earn enough to pay off the loss.

> ... Higher values

Higher values at the time of purchase or at the time of sale? The latter doesn't jive with the idea of being "underwater" on the loan, since you'd have benefited from the price exposure.

Higher values at the time of purchase is relative to what the home was worth in the past, but our efficient market theory tells us that the price today can be considered neither high nor low (yes, Shiller might disagree).

I guess you're pointing out that interest rates are near zero, so that there's really only one way for them to go. I'm not so sure, because in some ways it's a Zeno's Paradox situation. I don't always care about the number of basis points the interest rate has changed, but the percent change of the interest rate. I get more benefit from the rate going from 4% to 3% than I did when it went from 5% to 4%. We can always get closer to 0%, because there's an infinite number of subdivisions we can make.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#825

Post by TuringNYC » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 10:15 PM UTC

zip1234 wrote: post #789

maxsilver wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everybody opposed the rezoning and fought to defeat it. Why? That's kind of an important point. For example, unless this is NYC or similar, 49 townhomes is going to need a minimum of at least 110 parking spots (just to hold the occupants alone, assuming no one ever has guests ever). A realistic parking minimum should be 2.5 spots per townhouse. A lot of builders outsource their pollution to the local neighborhood,…

Parking minimums should not exist, for about 1000 reasons. For further reading on the topic, check out 'the high cost of free parking'. They are a failed experiment from the mid-20th century. Many places are switching to parking maximums instead of minimums.

I think they exist because in reality, people start parking in driveways (blocking in people that may need to leave home for, say, work/school) or worse - they double-park or loiter in ever more congested circular drives around the neighborhood looking for parking.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#826

Post by joe_the_user » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 10:16 PM UTC

hilbertseries wrote: post #811

joe_the_user wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you could unravel all perverse effects of American localist planning and regulation, it would be great. But if the idea is just "let the developers build where they want and that solves everything", that idea is wrong. Developers don't want to build the dense, affordable house that's needed. Developers want to take advantage of the existing housing and housing expectation and build one bigger house or bigger devel…

What is this nonsense? Yimbys are support upzoning property, so denser housing can be built. They support removing parking minimums so denser housing can be built.

Most places (where I live, Nevada City, for example) upzoning and reducing parking limits would just create problems. It's the actual central areas where you want to allow much greater density. A denser outlying suburb isn't a win.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#827

Post by nunez » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 10:17 PM UTC

spamizbad wrote: post #153

adflux wrote: post #16

This is what happens when you keep printing money and keep mortgage rates incredibly low. All that money's gotta go somewhere. Hey, at least the CPI isn't going up right? Its only the most expensive thing in most people's lives that has doubled in cost in about 10 years. Same thing for stock prices, and slowly other commodity prices are catching up as well. Non-homeowners are being shafted by this fed/ecb policy. Eve…

The root cause here isn't really the Fed. We've been under-building housing since 1990, back when rates were 5-8%. If you track new housing starts against adult population, you'll see some pretty terrible things. Granted this is lower than rates were in the 1980s. But if the answer here is you need to keep rates at 10-15% to build sufficient housing I don't see how that's politically tenable.

Based on US Census data, it actually looks like we're building about the same as we had in the past, if not more: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/housing-starts

These are building starts (i.e. permits obtained, but construction not having broken ground yet), but the more complete US Census data at the .gov website shows that completions haven't been far behind starts within the last five years.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#828

Post by TuringNYC » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 10:19 PM UTC

zip1234 wrote: post #792

spoonjim wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After I spent my entire net worth plus a good chunk of my future net worth on this house you can be damn right I’m going to vote to protect its value.

Gambling your entire net worth on a single hyper-local investment is not a good idea.

Sadly in many parts of the US, that is how one gets access to the best public schools -- via home purchases. Many of the best public schools are in districts w/o a large number of rentals.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#829

Post by pempem » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 10:22 PM UTC

maxsilver wrote: post #536

KptMarchewa wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A realistic parking minimum should be 2.5 spots per townhouse. A realistic approach in the face of coming climate doom would be max 0.5, for the people that really need cars as primary transport due to disability etc.

In theory sure, but that's not realistic, it just induces sprawl. Great, you manage to artificially limit parking. So the new housing development moves another 10 miles outside of town, to get away from your artificial limit, and now their mowing down a cornfield out there instead for their build, so they can get the parking residents actually need. If cities want to be a solution to climate change, they have to let…

^ So accurate!

Los Angeles is suffering from this. Towers and towers of expensive apartments left empty at 4000+/mo meanwhile the homeless population grows and the population on the border of homelessness grows.

Traffic increases as people move out of the city center and need to commute in and then those people are taxed through congestion charges or tolls and provided with no, or tremendously expensive, parking.

The whole effort seems to conspire against exactly what made the city a city. Dense, mixed zoned, mixed class living

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#830

Post by slashdot2008 » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 10:23 PM UTC

rwcarlsen wrote: post #810

davidw wrote: post #125

Here's why investors buy up houses: they know your neighbors will do the dirty work of artificially constraining the housing supply, which makes it a good investment. Here's one who comes right out and explains this: > Meanwhile, local opposition to building is so commonplace and the approval process so cumbersome, time consuming, and expensive, even when a proposed project complies entirely with requirements, approv…

I've been trying to build a house for myself. Going through all the hoops is not only cumbersome and expensive - but nearly impossible. I've run into legal tiff's between the county and nearby city. The city wants me to pay $40,000 for a sewer hookup for a single family dwelling when the sewer line is literally right along the road in front of where we will build the house. This is because the city has a beef to pick…

There is lots of ag zoned land around me. nobody wants it rezoned to residential as that means more people and most people don't want more people around. People always buy the ag lots cause they are cheap and have low taxes if you have ag activity, and then want to build more housing on them than the zoning allows, because that is lucrative.

just use a septic field instead of the sewer hookup if the county won't play ball. then they can't increase your sewer rates every year.