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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

#491

Post by 6510 »

zamfi wrote: post #371
MomoXenosaga wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Netherlands is just too rich that it is working against itself. We have created a society where every person wants their own house- 17 million people 10 million houses. And the Netherlands is a magnet for migrants- compared to most of the world the streets are paved with gold. And no matter how much the prices go up people can and will pay. Unless there's a mayor economic recession things will not get better.

> 17 million people 10 million houses Wait, you’re making it sound like this is an obvious case of not enough supply — which could potentially be solved by building more homes! — but in fact, it’s the total opposite: the average Dutch household has 2.14 people, so that’s 8 million households vs. 10 million houses! (I assume this is overwhelmingly folks who want to live together: partners, kids, etc., not just folks w…

there are 7.9 million homes in NL. The shortage is 279.000 vs 331.000 before corona (killing 18.035)

2.14 per home vs 3.54 in 1961.

I have no explanation why 17280000 / 7900000 = 2.187

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

#492

Post by seanmcdirmid »

joelbluminator wrote: post #456
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But he lied on his mortgage application about loans in other countries. So he could be up for some fraud criminal charges, and jail time.

I find that extremely unlikely

We had to reveal all of our houses and loans on our mortgage application. They had no way to verify, but the penalty in that case is always fraud. But there are definitely a lot of people out there who don’t think that is a serious problem, and the government has to come down hard on it:

https://www.magnifymoney.com/blog/mortgage/lying-mortgage-ap...

Is the UK more tolerant of lying than the USA? It doesn’t seem so via a Google search:

https://www.onlinemortgageadvisor.co.uk/mortgage-application...

Now, of course, they might not find out, but that just means it is a perfect crime, it is still a crime.

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

#493

Post by 6510 »

imtringued wrote: post #379
taffronaut wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the wealthy tend not to want to be taxed and they're not averse to fighting back. They've learned that they need to lobby even small local tax-raising authorities to obstruct these kinds of actions. In Wales, local authorities are allowed to raise a local tax premium of up to 100% on holiday homes [1], but few, if any, charge a premium of more than 50%, even in affected areas considered to be in crisis.…

The fundamental problem isn't that investors vote against land value taxes. The problem is that the small homeowner doesn't want to pay them either so he will vote for the benefit of the investors.

Use the money for a basic income.

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

#494

Post by heresie-dabord »

bushbaba wrote: post #317
heresie-dabord wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wages have been stagnant for decades while the cost of living has increased... and now housing has become a privilege . Yes, there are "rich foreigners" and some corporations are strategically acquiring the places and spaces where high rent can be extracted. But what has driven housing cost in the market of individual homes is simply that some citizens can afford to borrow at low rates, and other citizens are seizing…

The governments are to blame. If conventional mortgages were capped to 1 per person. And a minimum of 80% ltv was required. Then houses would be cheaper. Instead the government is letting people put low money down, low interest rates, and buy up many houses at once. That of course inflated housing costs.

> The governments are to blame.

Governments are reluctant to oppose profiteering. And with stagnant wages and rising COL, working people are being squeezed out of ownership.

The British band XTC had a prescient song -- "Where did the ordinary people go?" They couldn't afford to live in their hometowns anymore!

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

#495

Post by einpoklum »

fmajid wrote: post #406
einpoklum wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If "rental supply drops", that means the people who own apartments they don't live in won't let them out. If they don't let them out, they're subject to the anti-empty-apartment laws.

No, the owners who are grandfathered in rub their hand in glee, as over time only own-to-occupy buyers are allowed, thus the supply of rentals goes down and rentals become more expensive, thus making their rents higher and more lucrative. The answer is to reduce the centralization of jobs and other factors that cause everyone to want to live in Amsterdam, e.g. building out Lelystad or Buitenveldert. To a certain exte…

> thus the supply of rentals goes down

You're sort of "begging the question" here.

> The answer is to reduce the centralization of jobs and other factors that cause everyone to want to live in Amsterdam

Obviously I'm not against that happening but it's not either-or.

> but of course many things may have changed in two decades.

Oh, you have no idea. It was hard to even get the owners to get back to you, because they'd already accepted an offer; and I was being asked for 1,500 EUR - 1,650 EUR/month for a bedroom+living room apartment. And while that wasn't in Diemen or Bijlmer, they weren't in posh super-central locations.

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

#496

Post by WealthVsSurvive »

logicchains wrote: post #430
mcv wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. We've got laws to mitigate or redirect any harmful innate traits that we've got. Greed, like violence, is definitely among them.

>Exactly. We've got laws to mitigate or redirect any harmful innate traits that we've got. Greed, like violence, is definitely among them. And what about envy? That's clearly a big problem among commenters in this thread.

It's not. You're mistaking the will to live and prosper with envy. People are correctly identifying all across the world that centers of power and capital are objectively worsening their lives, and they are taking action against them in their own, perfectly justified self-interest. The difference between that desire and greed is that greed cannibalizes the existence of others to sustain its own existence. No one is confused. We're seeing a revolutionary period approaching that will be comparable to "The Enlightenment." Let's hope it happens because I think the unavoidable alternative is 1000 years of darkness, another longer, world dark-age.

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

#497

Post by Spooky23 »

com2kid wrote: post #474
Spooky23 wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not making any mistake, cheap money is absolutely the biggest problem that we have today. My former mentor bought a house on Nantucket for $150k in 1990, sold for $3.5M earlier this year. That appreciation isn’t due to inflation or the constrained supply of homes — it’s always been constrained. It’s due to increased demand fueled by excess capital. There’s no money in traditional banking. Even with negligible int…

> My former mentor bought a house on Nantucket for $150k in 1990, sold for $3.5M earlier this year. That is literally a luxury good with a fixed supply. As the # of people who desire that good has sky rocketed generation to generation, of course the price went up. There are limited production run cars from that era that underwent similar price inflation. For someone who wants to live in Nantucket, there is literally…

> That is literally a luxury good with a fixed supply. As the # of people who desire that good has sky rocketed generation to generation, of course the price went up.

We’re arguing the same thing. Everyone wants to go to the beach. The ability to get cash to do so increased demand.

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

#498

Post by acd »

I think beside limiting property investors, curbing central bank zero interest rates will make housing more affordable. Why? Zero interest rates drives up all asset prizes including housing. Buyers buy housing that they can afford to pay the monthly mortgage on. Zero interest rates by central banks undermines the UN article 17 human right to own property, instead you rent from banks. I argue that there wouldn't be so many property speculators if the interest rate weren't set artificially close to zero by central banks purchasing bonds.

UN human right of right to own property "Article 17

    Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others."

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

#499

Post by zhengiszen »

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,…

Thanks for the review it comes like a revelation.

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

#500

Post by marvin »

distances wrote: post #277
marvin wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is suggesting ineffective solutions with idiotic side effects. The proper way of solving this problem is to build a lot more homes. Otherwise you'll be creating a plan economy where bureaucrats are constantly scrambling to alleviate the side effects of their shuffling of deck-chairs on the sinking ship. But of course, few cities want to do this. The biggest cities in Norway are particularly bad at not even a…

Do you have any examples where building more would have resulted in stabilizing or lowering housing prices? This is the classical suggestion but doesn't seem like there would be any supporting evidence of it actually working in practice. Of course I want cities to build more. But I don't imagine it will ever actually lower the housing costs.

Cities rarely try this out in practice. There are examples of smaller cities that manage to keep up - e.g. Kristiansand in Norway, which kept the real estate price development slightly negative during a decade when the rest of the country had a massive increase. I get the impression Copenhagen has also managed to build enough. Their bubble popped in 2006 AFAICT, with moderate development since then in spite of negative interest rates.

But for large cities, there seems to almost universally be democratic agreement that we won’t build a lot more right here.

You get the odd symbolic attempt. But I’m not talking about re-zoning the odd industrial park and rationing them out to the three developers that get things done in this town.

I’m talking about building 40 stories everywhere, where previously there were 8. Consistently allowing developers to build in front of their neighbors’ ocean view. Turning 50% of the beloved hills around the city into high-rise apartments. Stuff like this, to a degree proportional with demand. Annual price increase or decrease is the signal to steer by.

My point: If you support local democratic policy that will lead to an outcome every passing ECON101 student can predict -

Own it.

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