Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

nltimes.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 598 posts

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

#411

Post by im3w1l »

imtringued wrote: post #375
chrisseaton wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blaming outsiders - classic strategy, can’t go wrong!

We are blaming outsiders for giving us too much money. Where is all that money going if not into the hands of locals who are selling their property?

Consider a community of 10000 households. 5000 rent their housing, 4500 own their own place, and 500 own more than one place. Now outsiders enter the picture and buy property driving up the prices. The 5000 renting households are now in trouble. If rents go up they are squeezed that way. With rent control there are still issues: Their kids are unable to move out, and separations become tricky. For the 4500 it's a mixed bag. They have the same issues with splitting the household, but they also have advantages. They can do a reverse mortgage and live well. Or they call sell and live well elsewhere. For the 500 elite households it's a pure win, they can buy more yachts than before.

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

#412

Post by BurningFrog »

This is a common policy across the world. It is based on flawed reasoning, and won't work.

Simply put, housing isn't getting more expensive because investors are buying houses. The causation is the opposite: Investors are buying housing because its value is consistently going up, making it a good investment.

So why are prices going up?

Prices are formed by the forces of supply and demand. In the regions I know about, housing supply is severely limited by regulations/laws that makes building new housing hard.

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

#413

Post by imtringued »

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…

>LVT in the UK would likely just increase cost of ownership for leaseholders which would make flats in cities even more expensive

Increasing the cost of ownership makes it more expensive to speculate on real estate which would drive prices down. The most speculative assets have no maintenance costs.

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

#414

Post by rhacker »

murgindrag wrote: post #85
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,…

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…

To be 100% completely honest, home building needs to be one of our basic skills taught in school. That along with chopping down the building codes for small homes to be extremely simple. I'm not saying we support shanty homes everywhere, but the problem we have is that investors are buying up all the perfect homes and most homes are perfect homes. Maybe we should have less than perfect homes that aren't valued so high and sought out by investors that live in China.

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

#415

Post by imtringued »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #346
dogma1138 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://www.ducksters.com/history/middle_ages_feudal_system....

>Lords and Knights - The lords ran the local manors. They also were the king's knights and could be called into battle at any moment by their Baron. The lords owned everything on their land including the peasants, crops, and village.

It was not the king (the government) but the local lord (the property owner) that abused his subjects the most.

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

#416

Post by seanmcdirmid »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #359
ipaddr wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If prices were going down would things be better? You bought a 500,000 and in ten years it will be worth 100,000 would you still make that investment? Everyone wants prices to remain the same forever. That takes a neutral population growth or more supply

Certainly yes, it would be better - the value of a car goes down, do you still make an 'investment'? No, you buy a car if you need a car, we don't call buying a car 'investment', we don't encourage people to hoard cars they don't need, it contributes nothing to the economy. The optimal situation is for cars and houses to be as cheap as possible relative to earnings, that's what we call economic growth and improved qu…

Housing (the structures) depreciates in Japan now of days, and so they mostly don’t have this problem.

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

#417

Post by jenscow »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #350
jenscow wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OK, I worded that very badly. I'm not using it because they're scarce. I mean to say:

The reason someone could say I'm "abusing" it, is because they're scarce.

They shouldn't be scarce, and they're not intended for just poor people.

To be clear, I'm not here for financial reasons. In fact, I would not object to paying more, if it meant putting more in the pot for poorer households to benefit from.

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

#418

Post by seanmcdirmid »

emodendroket wrote: post #281
aikinai wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think those small business owners are packing away substantial profits they could use to pay staff significantly more?

If a business can only exist by having serfs it wildly underpays then maybe it deserves to lose out to the big chains.

Or they could turn to automation, eliminate their labor costs substantially. Eg that cafe can turn into a bunch of vending machines.

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

#419

Post by imtringued »

newswasboring wrote: post #148
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,…

Land ownership tax doesn't work because land is a basic need. You have to exist somewhere. The problem isn't ownership of land, it's excessive ownership of land. Ownership of land beyond need into greed. You can easily design land ownership tax like income tax where people who own more pay more. People who own enough for their family are not taxed at all and if you want more you pay a lot more. Of course there is the…

Well, when people talk about wealth taxes those are always above a certain threshold. I am perfectly fine with taxing excessive ownership of land. We don't need the theoretically perfect utopia. We need something that is good enough to give us another 80 years of peace.

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

#420

Post by rhacker »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #361
debarshri wrote: post #86

This move is well appreciated. Currently, I own a house in oudegracht, Utrecht. It is very terrible situation here. All the apartments in and around me are all the time rented out as airbnb. During peak of pandemic, it was pretty much a ghost town. The housing prices have skyrocketed due to covid, but all these all-cash investor are jumping and swooping in the apartments, holding it for a while and passing it to the…

> All the apartments in and around me are all the time rented out as airbnb. During peak of pandemic, it was pretty much a ghost town. What you mention around Airbnb shouldn't be addressed through a buy-to-let ban, but an airbnb or short-term rental ban, which already exists in various forms. If there's problems with enforcement, address that. The ghost-town you described happened regardless of airbnb but due to lite…

> Airbnb shouldn't be addressed through a buy-to-let ban, but an airbnb or short-term rental ban, which already exists in various forms

Airbnb is probably paying off various government officials around the world to make sure the laws are friendly to them.

Post reply on HN