931–940 of 1001 posts
this is actually good. once people no longer own homes they are going to stop voting for people who artificially prop up home prices by restricting supply through zoning and land use rules. Long term positive for our political system.
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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 e…
Do you have evidence of this? I would think increasing the supply of housing would have a downward effect on all housing. Sure, if you're really set on a SFH and there are fewer of them, you'll have to compete. But I think people who want a SFH want a SFH _neighborhood_, and there's an unanswered question to what extent different types of housing can substitute for one another.
The value of _land_ may increase with zoning because development rights are still in limited supply, and the profit opportunity for a developer has gone up. But I don't see many SFH owners clamoring to let their neighbors on both sides be replaced with 5-over-1.
At a philosophical level, I am opposed to the idea of funds being able to hold onto property like a pure monetary asset. Past the primary residence, individual landlords have some plausible deniability for having a 2nd/3rd home. Maybe they want to return to the house one day. Maybe it is a vacation home. A lot of folks on HN are libertarian and believe in the power of the free market. When supply can be kept artifici…
I built a house a couple of years ago for two times annual income. I was responsible. I work in tech, yes, but I didn't buy my house to flip it. I bought it because I have a wife and two kids and I want my kids to live in a nice neighborhood and, overall, have a good growing-up experience. I found that here. I'm not a NIMBY; I haven't attended a single city council or planning board meeting since moving here. I take good care of my property, working the soil with my own two hands, even. I love where I live and my neighbors do, too. We get along (imagine that).
Many years ago I lived in New York City, young and single, in a tiny apartment in a crappy, dirty apartment building. I wouldn't trade what I have now for that life no matter how good you say it will be. I've lived both sides--growing up in a small dairy town, moving to Manhattan, then moving on and seeking a better life in small town America.
There is no need to be so hateful and bitter. There are many, many people who are not in it for greed. You just don't hear them getting loud on Hacker News because they are too busy raising families and working jobs like most of us. Try and have some empathy.
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They know that the current government planning regulations mean that getting anything built is extremely difficult. They know that due to supply and demand that this makes property a wise investment. Blame planning regulations. I read recently that Japan and new Zealand scrapped various regulations and this led to stabilization / lower of property prices. Near me, someone is sticking up protest letters at bus stops c…
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've lived in Japan for 30 years, and I've never seen the topic so clearly explained.
Edit: BTW, in case you were wondering about the special zoning classification, "bathhouses with private rooms" are in a very different business than bathhouses without private rooms.
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%…
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And, at least in California, realtors will always push prices up. It’s pretty much never in their best interest to lower the price. Even the buyer’s agent gets paid a percentage of the sale price, so if they try to lower it they’d be essentially working against themselves. And this is without even accounting for all the schemes realtors create (like listing below market to get a lot of offers and create artificially…
Prices are set by supply and demand. Realtors don’t control that. Build 1-10 million 400 sq-ft studio apartments will solve the housing price problem. Existing inventory can cover families.
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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…
States with this amount of obstructive ossification, such as the Byzantine Empire or Austria-Hungary, don't generally stand the test of time. Just before Austria-Hungary's collapse following WWI, the collection of taxes in Dalmatia (now Croatia) cost twice as much as it raised [0]. We still use the word Byzantine today to describe systems that are "complicated, secret and difficult to change" [1]. I don't know what t…
Even if you only count from the time it didn’t share an Emporer with the West, rather than viewing it as a linear continuation of the Roman State, looking at the Eastern Roman Empire as somehow a state that did a substandard job of standing the test of time is, well, implicitly setting a really high bar, since even counted from the partition its, what, the second longest lasting state in history?
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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…
States with this amount of obstructive ossification, such as the Byzantine Empire or Austria-Hungary, don't generally stand the test of time. Just before Austria-Hungary's collapse following WWI, the collection of taxes in Dalmatia (now Croatia) cost twice as much as it raised [0]. We still use the word Byzantine today to describe systems that are "complicated, secret and difficult to change" [1]. I don't know what t…
To Western Europeans coming from the very loose state structure of feudalism, the fact that the Byzantine Empire was effectively a modern state (similar to ancient China) was practically incomprehensible to them. Hence the phrase! On the flip-side, the level of institutional capacity let the Romans and Byzantines ride out incompetent Emperors fairly well compared to feudal states that would quickly disintegrate with one bad roll of the "off-spring lottery".
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> Its only the most expensive thing in most people's lives For homeowners, it is the most expensive thing, but homeowners are winning on it because they get the value of the asset appreciating. For non-homeowners, the reason CPI isn’t going up is that rents aren’t rising with purchase prices, its the purchase:rent ratio going up. So it isn’t hurting them, either.
but homeowners can't actually access that value because they would need to immediately use the money to buy another house. They don't let you continue to live in the house after you have sold it.
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> 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 th…
> 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? It's less that it's any more straightforward in NY or CA, it's just that zoning and NIMBYism regulation is not the sole domain of either American political party. You can't es…