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The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership

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Re: The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership

#191

Post by HarryHirsch »

refurb wrote: post #184
HarryHirsch wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Established landlords have friends on the local council, and can determine who gets a building permit. Prices are set by the two or three biggest players, who all know each other. That stuff happens all the time.

Sure, but someone still makes a decision “yes this rent is worth it” or “no I’ll go somewhere else”.

With a greater supply the clearing price will be lower. That's a trivial statement.

The real problem is elsewhere - by constraining supply landowners are inhibiting economic development. Newcomers have a choice, if accommodation is too high they'll go elsewhere, so economic growth in productive industries will take place elsewhere.

Man, not too long ago I shitcanned a new job 4 days in over the insane housing prices. A good number of my colleagues had a sideline in Airbnb, that asset inflation machine.

There's far too much capital sunk in real estate, where it could not be more unproductive.

Re: The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership

#192

Post by ahepp »

BirdieNZ wrote: post #132
refurb wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drive up the rent? “We are renting to willing tenants at the fair market price.” Landlord’s cant “drive up the rent” any more than employees can be unfairly paid too much.

Land rent works very differently than most other markets because land is of limited supply. "Fair market price" is determined by what people who live in an area can afford to pay, rather than primarily supply and demand. Add to that restrictive zoning laws and you end up with a situation where most landlords are extracting significant economic rents from their tenants without needing to provide any extra service or q…

It sounds to me like you are describing a situation where supply is constrained, rather than one where the price is not set primarily by supply and demand.

I feel this distinction is important because it could guide whether the solution is based on encouraging more capital investment to do things like increase density, or whether the solution is essentially to ban outside investment.

Re: The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership

#193

Post by bosie »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #152
bosie wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't comment on Kaiser or SF, not familiar with either. But great if Kaiser can just create GPs and consultants localised in newly built areas like that. well done them. To be honest, I forgot the private aspect of health care in the US. I wonder how city planners are planning around that. > Public transport: the last few times I've taken the bus, it's been easy to find a seat. The last time I took the BART it was…

"I can't comment on Kaiser or SF" The comment to which you replied was specifically talking about SF so I assumed (reasonably I think) that you were commenting about SF, too. "if that is the case, SF has either the most amazing public transportation already or the most under-used public transportation. or you are simply cheery-picking." Those are not the only explanations. And, given I said live in SF, maybe it's rea…

Mind sharing some other explanations?

Re: The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership

#194

Post by ahepp »

refurb wrote: post #6
tjr225 wrote: post #2

Lmao, a dude from San Francisco trying to justify his own landlordship back in the midwest. Amazing.

This is not a wealthy SF landlord story, this is an house cleaner . It’s an impressive story of someone slowly building up a real estate portfolio in the Bay Area. Most of it through creative means and living lean. It’s actually an impressive story.

It’s kinda difficult to hear about how someone owning multiple houses and renting them out is not a wealthy landlord. That’s the definition of a wealthy landlord. Sure, there are wealthier landlords out there. I’m sure the Wisconsin tenant paying their California landlord’a mortgage takes a lot of comfort in the fact that their landlord isn’t the richest one out there.

I think there are some good things landlords bring to the table, like increased capital investments and stability of ownership for short duration stays. But I feel one would have to live under a rock to not recognize the fundamentally extractive nature of landlordism under our current conditions. Perhaps with something like a land value tax, some degree of market functioning could be restored. However, in the mean time with asset prices increasingly out of reach to everyday Americans, expect lots of hate for landlords as the American dream continues to evaporate.

Re: The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership

#195

Post by bosie »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #158
bosie wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where exactly do you think schooling and medical practices happen or children are taken care of? in close vicinity of the housing. not sure i understand the question. > How hard is to coordinate to double the number of trains or buses? running a bus during peak hours at twice your current rate (unless the rate is completely ridicilous) does not sound easy. why do you assume it is? at that rate, for SF at least, you…

"running a bus during peak hours at twice your current rate (unless the rate is completely ridicilous) does not sound easy" The 14R (the fastest bus from my home to downtown SF) is scheduled to run every 10 mins (on average) during the morning peak. Running that bus every 5 mins (which presents no special difficulty) would double the capacity, and reduce average wait time by 5 mins.

Can you please back up the claim that doubling every bus and tram does not present special difficulty? I would genuinely love to read an actual analysis of 'just doubling the frequency', does not even have to be San Francisco per se.

Re: The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership

#196

Post by rahimnathwani »

bosie wrote: post #193
rahimnathwani wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I can't comment on Kaiser or SF" The comment to which you replied was specifically talking about SF so I assumed (reasonably I think) that you were commenting about SF, too. "if that is the case, SF has either the most amazing public transportation already or the most under-used public transportation. or you are simply cheery-picking." Those are not the only explanations. And, given I said live in SF, maybe it's rea…

Mind sharing some other explanations?

Some potential explanations off ghr top of my head...

- I happened to get lucky on my last 5 journeys

- Many people how have more flexibility about when they start/end work, even if they're not working remotely

- People are avoiding public transport due to worries about COVID and increasing crime

- Outside of peak hours, buses still need to run with some minimum frequency to be a viable option, so they often run empty or with only 1-5 passengers

You could come up with others...

Re: The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership

#197

Post by rahimnathwani »

bosie wrote: post #195
rahimnathwani wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"running a bus during peak hours at twice your current rate (unless the rate is completely ridicilous) does not sound easy" The 14R (the fastest bus from my home to downtown SF) is scheduled to run every 10 mins (on average) during the morning peak. Running that bus every 5 mins (which presents no special difficulty) would double the capacity, and reduce average wait time by 5 mins.

Can you please back up the claim that doubling every bus and tram does not present special difficulty? I would genuinely love to read an actual analysis of 'just doubling the frequency', does not even have to be San Francisco per se.

I didn't say every bus.

I didn't mention trams.

I wasn't making a general case that's applicable to every city.

I was talking about specifically about SF, which has relatively uncongested roads, bus lanes that are mostly empty, and where the busiest bus stops receive buses no more than ~10 times per hour.

Re: The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership

#198

Post by gruez »

snedfree wrote: post #171
colechristensen wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Democratic process isn’t coming to conclusions I agree with -> democracy is a scam -> an authoritarian solution is required because I’m more correct than everyone else It seems like too many people only have ideals about politics when those ideals result in everyone agreeing with them. Otherwise the whole thing is a rigged scam and not worth the time.

democratic process isn't actually happening -> it's a scam to call it democracy -> a technocratic solution that meets the needs of the burgeoning disenfranchised population is required because the degree of inequality that we're dealing with is creating severe social conflicts

>a technocratic solution that meets the needs of the burgeoning disenfranchised population is required because the degree of inequality that we're dealing with is creating severe social conflicts

I'm sure that the non-elected technocrats wouldn't be susceptible to the "represented by millionaires" problem that you bemoaned about earlier.

Re: The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership

#199

Post by bosie »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #197
bosie wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please back up the claim that doubling every bus and tram does not present special difficulty? I would genuinely love to read an actual analysis of 'just doubling the frequency', does not even have to be San Francisco per se.

I didn't say every bus. I didn't mention trams. I wasn't making a general case that's applicable to every city. I was talking about specifically about SF, which has relatively uncongested roads, bus lanes that are mostly empty, and where the busiest bus stops receive buses no more than ~10 times per hour.

You said this:

> Running that bus every 5 mins (which presents no special difficulty) would double the capacity, and reduce average wait time by 5 mins.

the problem with public transportation among other things are connections. running specific buses with a higher frequency does not give you a lower wait time (on the journey) but only on that stop.

> I didn't say every bus. > I didn't mention trams.

ok i don't get it. why did you bring this up at all then?

Re: The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership

#200

Post by Nelkins »

halpert wrote: post #168
VRay wrote: post #84

People are fighting the wrong fight when they attack this guy (or attack the people attacking this guy, for that matter) It isn't SF Bay Bros'/foreigners'/companies' fault that houses are too expensive. It's because of strict zoning laws and a lack of building enough housing to match supply with demand[1]. Demand keeps going up way faster than supply, nationwide, and we're all feeling the squeeze [1]: A great example…

I've looked into moving to Japan. My family has a house in Setagaya, which had severely distorted what I thought Tokyo living to be. It turns out, a typical one bedroom apartment is like 20 sq meters. Separate from that, I don't believe zoning has anything to do with housing shortages. Housing has "induced demand" similar to traffic. You can look at heavy traffic over a bridge and think, "if only we had another bridg…

This is absolutely wrong. Pretty much every single piece of evidence we have shows that zoning has a massively impactful effect on the supply of housing. Similarly, the vast majority of studies looking at the issue show that induced demand doesn't occur for housing (that is, adding housing supply does lower prices, rather than simply causing people to consume more).

With regard to NYC, even though it has added around 250-300K housing units over the past fifteen years or so, it has added around three times that in jobs. If housing supply isn't increasing in line with people, you will see increases in prices.

Some links:

- https://www.planetizen.com/news/2019/06/104783-doubt-cast-in...

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7FB_xI-U6w

- https://furmancenter.org/thestoop/entry/supply-skepticism-ho...

- https://furmancenter.org/files/sotc/SOC_2017_FOCUS_Changes_i... (the key quote here being: "In 2016, NYC had 8.2 percent more housing units, 11 percent more adults, and 16.5 percent more jobs than it did in 2000.")

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