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

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

#871

Post by p_l »

bennysomething wrote: post #787
p_l wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan not so much scrapped various regulations as their regulations are just different - and nationwide. One of the effects of how their zoning classes work is that you don't have "residential-only" zones with no shops or other amenities - instead you have zones defined along the lines of maximum nuisance and with overlapping uses. You have a total of 12 zones, which start from "exclusively low rise residential" that…

I live in Edinburgh in Scotland. Best feature is tenement flats with shops or bars below. Old town is especially mixed use and it's brilliant because of it.

One of the more personally infuriating aspects of Brexit for me is that I can't just drop in to Aberdeen or elsewhere in Scotland and move there for longer. :(

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

#872

Post by Ccecil »

This explains a lot actually.

Spring-Fall 2020 my town (Coeur d'Alene, ID) had a bunch of real estate investors going door to door offering to buy houses. My parents had to shoo them away a couple times...same people. Through this year we have this incredible shortage of houses (not to mention a surge of newcoming residents).

The part I find interesting though is that the average house price in my area went up 25-50%...which pretty much lines up with what it seems these companies were paying.

It isn't the only issue here though...a significant number of people who move here are purchasing a second home as well in order to have a "vacation rental" which is further driving the housing crisis.

Average rate of pay in my area is $20/hr but in order to purchase the average house you are required to make 3x that amount to be eligible. (Minimum wage here is $7.25/hr)

Landlords see the rising prices and say "I'm losing money by not raising rents" and now a 1bd apartment is going for $1k/month (so you need to make $25-30k/year to be eligible). The "solution" they have is to build more apartments to house people...but those apartments are controlled heavily by large corporate interests who own multiple buildings and are controlling the prices.

I have talked personally with more than one of the investment realtors who came through (candidly) and one of them specifically said she "buys houses but does not sell them..." and she used that as justification to the argument that realtors raise the cost of houses by "flipping them".

It is a mess. Coeur d'Alene,ID was listed as the hottest real estate market in the US. Ketchum and Boise are having similar issues.

Why Idaho you might ask? Well...we have non disclosure laws which make it so you are not required to disclose the last selling price. We also have a 2017 law preventing any type of limitation on vacation rentals. The list goes on and on.

Not sure where everyone is going to live...or who is going to do the work...but the locals are being phased out. Homelessness/Rough living are becoming more common and Ketchum was even discussing tent cities. [1]

I have nothing but hope for the world. Someday people may realize that profiting from housing is profiting from another person's pain and poverty. It sucks that a 40% increase on property values are not enough for the investors...they need to raise rents too.

[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-superrich-bought-up-ketchu... (google brings a few more results that may be more recent)

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

#873

Post by adler0901 »

kelp wrote: post #864
masklinn wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Obviously some of that is to be expected of an island nation versus a continent-spanning one. It has little to do with "island nation", most nations use mixed zoning, it's certainly the standard in europe (and recent developments are gravitating towards more mixed zoning e.g. Amsterdam's eastern docklands). It could have to do with being an old nation, but even then that's not actually true, the US existed for a wh…

In the US, we invented zoning, mostly to exclude black people from white neighborhoods. And now we use it to prop up property values and continue to keep poor people out of wealthy neighborhoods. Now I'm speculating, but I wonder if Japan, being mostly Japanese people, didn't have such a large group to exclude from certain neighborhoods? So they didn't entrench the institution of local control and exclusionary zoning…

google burakumin

The public schools I taught at in Japan kept (private) lists of which kids came from burakumin families.

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

#874

Post by quantumwannabe »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #516
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?

Then your thoughts are incorrect. Portland, Ore. is facing a huge housing crisis because single-home zoning prevented increasing density. Without the ability to create more housing on existing land, there is a shortage. It's that simple. They recently passed a law allowing more dense developments, and that will create more supply. There are currently 10 apartment projects in flight in the city, so there is no cabal c…

Portland has an Urban Growth Boundary [1] that makes it very difficult (de-facto illegal) to build new housing on undeveloped land. That is a major cause of the housing shortage, but it was passed by people like you who wanted it to artificially densify the city. Current homeowners who want to maximize their house's value would be in favor of keeping the urban growth boundary (it restricts the supply of houses) and encouraging high density projects (if apartments can be built on a lot, it makes it more valuable), which coincidentally is the status quo in Portland and other cities on the west coast. You may personally hate sprawl for various reasons, but there is a reason why the sprawling cities of the South and Midwest are cheaper than the densifying cities of the PNW, despite many of them having larger populations. Building apartments and tearing down houses lowers the price of apartments and raises the price of houses; it's simple supply and demand. Repealing both zoning regulations and the urban growth boundary would result in a free market, but don't be surprised if people make lifestyle choices you don't approve of and the suburbs sprawl outwards in such an environment.

[1] https://www.oregonmetro.gov/sites/default/files/2020/02/24/U... Anything outside the yellow line can't be developed without a massive legal fight.

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

#875

Post by nathanaldensr »

jbay808 wrote: post #834
joe_the_user wrote: post #826

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Outlying suburbs should see an increase in the sorts of things that make them "places". Cafes, bakeries, bars, restaurants, offices, markets, schools, plazas, bookstores, and so on. Then they can further densify without automatically driving more commute traffic into the city.

You're assuming that those local businesses can just spin up and wait what, months? years? for the density to reach levels that will sustain said local businesses. Most people don't have the money to throw down the drain like that merely wishing for the urbanist utopia to arrive. In the real world, money matters, timescales matter, customers matter, etc.

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

#876

Post by fomine3 »

RHSeeger wrote: post #831
joe_the_user wrote: post #754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A neighbor was complaining just the other day about a developer want to build two houses on a sliver of land in our small historic town. I've got no reason to support this. There's space to build an apartment building near me but no one want to do that (a building, in fact, burned down a while back and hasn't been rebuilt). Neighbors want no development. Developers want to build more of the ubber expensive houses the…

Of course, those regulations to support dense housing need to be supported by other things; like money for streets, sewer, water, etc. If the town's streets are already crowded with traffic and it's sewer system can barely keep up, then building dense housing it going to destroy the town. And for a town that is already "in place", adding a bigger sewer system is hard. Widening streets is even more difficult because y…

Japan sometimes don't care much about such issues caused by building large apartment, like extremely crowded station/train and lack of nursery school. I don't know it's good thing, but these are often complained.

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

#877

Post by C-x_C-f »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #820

Sadly, archive.is is blocked in some countries For a smaller, simpler, Javascript-free, ad-free page curl https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/if-you-sell-a-house-these-days-the-buyer-might-be-a-pension-fund-11617544801 \ |grep -Eo "( )|( )|( )" \ |tr -cd '[ -~]' > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm

Looks like you need to set the user agent for this to work (I went with "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (K HTML, like Gecko) Chrome/61.0.3163.100 Safari/537.36" and it worked)

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

#878

Post by squiggleblaz »

rwcarlsen wrote: post #867
slashdot2008 wrote: post #830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Unfortunately, the health district won't issue a permit because of the existence of the "will serve" letter from the city. So this is turning into quite the ordeal to get sorted out. I'm really hoping to keep things out of the courts, but that is a very real possibility. And I live in a relatively low-regulation state. I don't know how anybody ever builds anything in CA or NY.

> And I live in a relatively low-regulation state. I don't know how anybody ever builds anything in CA or NY.

I'm not an American so I don't know anything about your system. But perhaps the existence of many state level regulations crowds out the city and state level regulations and therefore you get less uncooperativity and more straightforwardness?

Really I think the state ought to be setting complete menus that the local governments can pick from and apply in specific areas. If it's not possible to build a house in some location, it should be clear that it's not possible to build a house in that location. And if it is, it should be clear that it is.

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

#879

Post by nathanaldensr »

scotuswroteus wrote: post #296
joshlemer wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any ideas to propose then, as actionable advice for activists to improve their effectiveness?

Yes. Do better than this: "If there's a credible threat to build plenty of housing, they'll move on." What's needed is a mainstream, national name-n'-shame strategy that identifies specific officials and offices that are causing the block in housing. Make the target highly specific and concrete, and ensure the messaging is big tent -- don't make it anti-municipal government. Make it anti-zoning. It's a waste of polit…

Maybe it's because people disagree with you--people who like where they live and don't prefer radical changes and ideas. Maybe you should go talk to some of them and learn about what they want and why they prefer stable policies.

What you call "anti-housing" others call "pro-stability."

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

#880

Post by spoonjim »

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.

It’s a great idea, it means that my kids will go to school with other kids whose parents care a lot about their education. A large amount of money shouldn’t be needed for that, but I didn’t see another way to achieve that outcome.
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