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Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

nltimes.nl

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Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#341

Post by ClumsyPilot »

the_gipsy wrote: post #203
murgindrag wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sold on the Economist article. I do believe in home ownership. The idea that a person spends a lifetime in the same home and community is a good one. We're tribal creatures, and you want a tribe -- you want people to know their neighbors, have community BBQs, and live in real communities. You want enough of a vested interest in municipal politics that democratic structures work. You want kids growing up with…

> community BBQs, and live in real communities The sad reality is that people want their own BBQ and not really mix with their neighbours. That’s what poor people have to put up with, so to speak.

I massively disagree - the reason people want their own BBQ is that they dont know, and hence dont trust their neighbours. My parents knew ~100 people on the same street, these days average person know zero.

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#342

Post by Ensorceled »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #302
734129837261 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Designations. That's how. Some houses are built and intended to be rented out to people. These houses are constructed entirely by companies (or people) for that purpose alone. Other houses are meant to be for purchase, and purchase only. If you purchase a house like this and then rent it out, that should be considered breaking the intended designation. So if you as an individual want to own multiple houses to rent ou…

> These houses are constructed entirely by companies (or people) for that purpose alone. So private companies are allowed to engage in rent-seeking behavior but individuals aren't?

What individuals are you talking about that are not covered by '(or people)'?

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#343

Post by einpoklum »

Title is inaccurate. It should read:

> Dutch cities want to ban property investors from buying some kinds of apartments in some or all neighborhoods

I'm all for this. However, it is insufficient, because small-scale property investors may not be considered as such, but as buying an apartment for a family member or a friend etc. Or they will just "lend" money to someone to buy the apartment.

Generally, the situation in which individuals have full ownership of apartments or houses other than those they live in is problematic.

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#344

Post by user5994461 »

fxtentacle wrote: post #334
nkrisc wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's all the fault of Brexit driving away the foreign workers who had to do the jobs Forgive me since I’m American, but wasn’t getting rid of foreigners taking jobs one of the selling points of Brexit?

It was, but now that they're gone it's only become more obvious that locals simply don't want those jobs.

Of course nobody wants these jobs. A lot of positions were filled by tourists and travelers who stayed there for a little while and worked a bit to earn side money.

- Staff at a restaurant is £8 an hour, that is minimum wage.

- Expect two shifts far apart, around 11am-2pm and 7pm-11pm.

- Work on Saturday and Sunday and some of the week. You will never know more than a few days ahead when you are expected to work.

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#345

Post by IkmoIkmo »

arp242 wrote: post #291
rusteh1 wrote: post #165

I don't understand how this would work. How do people rent? Obviously many people can't or do not wish to own their house for any number of reasons. Who will own houses that are rented? I used to live in Amsterdam as an expat, and rented from a landlord who owned several homes in Amsterdam. Would she not be able to own and rent these homes under this scheme? The social housing system seemed to be abused when I was th…

This is called scheefwonen – which roughly translates to "crooked living" – and has been a point of attention for several decades at least, more or less as long as I can remember. It's a bit of a difficult problem, because you don't really want to kick people out of their house just because they have a better-paying job, and especially in the current climate these people don't really have anywhere to go; €7k people w…

I agree that evictions is an extreme measure and to be used as a last resort. I think it should be part of the policy instruments to be used, under the right circumstances. e.g. if you make 1.5x the wage that would give you a right to a social home, averaged over 3 years, then you get a 2 year period to move out.

That means you won't move out until 5 years after you've started earning more, and if your earnings were temporarily high, you get to stay. But if you're consistently earning a ton, you have to leave.

That's not so crazy considering that there's people who're low-income on a 10y waiting list for the home you'd be occupying, there has to be a mechanism that makes you have to leave. Yes it's hard to find something great at 3-4k, but it's even harder for someone at 2k who's 'spot' you're occupying. That could be limited to 5 years.

Everyone has a hard time finding a place, but why are some rich getting subsidised indefinitely at the expense of some poor?

But apart from evictions, I've never understood why we can't simply have dynamic rental rates adjusted to the market rate. I know people who live in Zuid for 500 a month in a home that's 1500 market rate, and their household income is 3x the average. Why can they not be made to pay 1500 to the social housing association? When they move out, the home reverts back to the subsidised rate for a low-income family.

I understand this can't be done on old contracts with no contractual clauses that make this possible, contracts are contracts after all. But we've had this situation for many years, and new contracts still allow the possibility of consequence-free scheefwonen. That's pretty absurd to me.

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#346

Post by ClumsyPilot »

dogma1138 wrote: post #138
nmca wrote: post #42

In the long term, the ethically right answer seems pretty clearly to me to be a land value tax [0]. But due to encouragement of home ownership [1], that's not going to democratically tenable in a lot of countries for 20+ years. Unfortunate situation. [0] In 1879, a man asked "How come all this new economic development and industrialized technology hasn't eliminated poverty and oppression?" That man was Henry George,…

LTV won’t work in the UK land ownership is way too concentrated and leaseholds give land owners an easy tool to transfer the cost to the leaseholders. London and other metropolitan areas still have a lot of low income housing in very high value areas, there are current/former council houses in Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea for example that sit on land worth billions. LVT in the UK would likely just increase…

"leaseholds give land owners an easy tool to transfer the cost to the leaseholders"

This relationship has always reminding me of medieval surfdom, i think it's deeply unfair and rigged and needs to be abolished.

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#347

Post by kingludite »

em500 wrote: post #204
rusteh1 wrote: post #165

I don't understand how this would work. How do people rent? Obviously many people can't or do not wish to own their house for any number of reasons. Who will own houses that are rented? I used to live in Amsterdam as an expat, and rented from a landlord who owned several homes in Amsterdam. Would she not be able to own and rent these homes under this scheme? The social housing system seemed to be abused when I was th…

> I could never understand why this wasn't means tested continually. They've started some degree of means testing a few years ago: the maximum allowed rent increase on social/rent-controlled houses can now depend on income. This was controversial legislation for privacy reasons (it involves giving landlords information about tenant incomes every year).

Oh, I missed that one. It seems to me that income tax based on rent would be more privacy preserving.

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#348

Post by einpoklum »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #320
dmje wrote: post #25

Amen to this. Two case studies from the UK I've been thinking about recently: 1) Visiting London and spending time in South Kensington - walking back to hotel at night, only about 30% of houses had any lights on. Suggestion is the others are effectively uninhabited, and a search on RightMove shows properties sell for £20-£30m for a 4/5 bed. This isn't normal Londoners, it's outside investment. 2) Cornwall, where I li…

Not sure why the amen is applicable to Dutch cities. I'll take the local perspective from Amsterdam as an example, but it applies more broadly to the other cities as well here. Regarding point 1: There's no real issues with long-term vacancies (the municipality already has laws in-place which fine owners of vacant homes), typically sits between 1 and 2%. That should obviously go down to 0 as much as possible, but it'…

> If buy-to-let is banned, rental supply drops

This seems to contradict your earlier claim that:

> the municipality already has laws in-place which fine owners of vacant homes

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#349

Post by pydry »

R0b0t1 wrote: post #304
taffer wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To avoid paying the LVT tenants are incentivized to own LVT is paid by the owner of the land. That is the whole point of a LVT, that you cannot avoid it.

On paper, yes, but it'll just get passed on to the renter.

Renters would pay the same rents they do now.

For some landlords that would cover their tax bill. Others not so much.

It would precipitate a collapse in property values, but not a rise in rents.

Re: Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

#350

Post by IkmoIkmo »

jenscow wrote: post #226
rusteh1 wrote: post #165

I don't understand how this would work. How do people rent? Obviously many people can't or do not wish to own their house for any number of reasons. Who will own houses that are rented? I used to live in Amsterdam as an expat, and rented from a landlord who owned several homes in Amsterdam. Would she not be able to own and rent these homes under this scheme? The social housing system seemed to be abused when I was th…

I live in social housing (in the UK), and could easily afford to buy or rent non-social... and I was already in that situation when my current tenancy started. You could say I abuse it, and I agree in principal. However, I'm only abusing it because social housing is scarce. The solution is to build more, and I do my bit by voting for a government that would probably do that. If they ever decided to make it means test…

Making use of any scarce resource intended for the poor, while you're rich, because it's so scarce, is beyond backwards... I have trouble being generous and playing devil's advocate because I simply can't see the argument you're making.
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