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The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership

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Re: The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership

#201

Post by halpert »

Nelkins wrote: post #200
halpert wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your sources contradict themselves. For instance, the Furman Center article states that adding luxury housing does not make housing more affordable. The paper from Northwestern states the opposite (luxury housing decreases surrounding rents). Just from looking at the paper from Northwestern, their area of study has significantly lower rents than their control group. It’s not as clear cut as you make it seem. Also, jobs growing with housing supply could possibly be an example of induced demand.

Re: The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership

#202

Post by ausbah »

chmod600 wrote: post #85
ausbah wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is one of the incentives for those who rent housing not to keep the available housing supply low (at least to a certain point)?

If you grow carrots, you would prefer to keep the overall supply of carrots low so that your carrots will fetch the highest price. But what you are actually doing is increasing the supply of carrots. So incentives and results are two different things and we shouldn't conflate the two. I assume by "incentives", you mean that they'd manipulate the law to limit other suppliers. I'm sure that happens, but as a landlord y…

landlords rarely build housing, they usually buy up existing housing and rent it out

and the don't have to do anything illegal to restrict the housing supply - they can lobby, regulate, and vote

Re: The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership

#203

Post by colechristensen »

gruez wrote: post #198
snedfree wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. Technocrats are just oligarchs branding themselves as smarter than everybody else.

Re: The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership

#204

Post by sangnoir »

aww_dang wrote: post #185
bradlys wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Main thing I see people attacking this guy over is the “I did it and so can you” mentality more than anything. It’s survivorship bias at its strongest. No different than the FIRE post trending here as well. Dude literally saw his NW double in a year and income go up 50% cause of stock appreciation. Along with incredible starting salary and overall close to top tier comp the entire way - and no kids or what not. I thi…

>"I did it and so can you" What is the antithesis here? "You won't succeed, so don't bother trying. Become an employee, rail against capitalism and wage slavery." Dismissing it as luck can only work if the author succeeded on the first try. Did everyone succeed on the first try? Before it can be called "survivor's bias", you need to survive. If you croak at the first unforeseen and perhaps unfair hardship... What is…

> Dismissing it as luck can only work if the author succeeded on the first try.

This is wrong, or your definition of "luck" is different to mine and most other people, I assume.

Re: The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership

#205

Post by VRay »

gonzo41 wrote: post #90
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…

Out of curiosity, how big is a 3 bedroom apartment in Japan?

It's tiny by US standards, but they use different types of furniture, so it's comfortable. They tend to use a lot of wall hooks, tons of tiny drawers, smaller convertible beds, etc.

I was living there with my wife and her two family members and had no trouble at all. That place was about 700 square feet, but it felt like an 1100 square foot place would in the US with giant furniture and large open floor spaces. I had a ~150 square foot room set aside for my office and VR space, the in-laws had a bedroom with tatami mats, there was a large-ish living room/kitchen with a big TV and couch, and then a bedroom for me and the wife

Re: The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership

#206

Post by VRay »

bluGill wrote: post #169
chaostheory wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but they still don’t have as much influence on local government as much as more affluent residents. The prime example would be Palo Alto. It’s the NIMBY capital of the world. Even Stanford University has trouble with development on land that they own.

That is mostly their fault for not voting (renters are less likely go vote and thus don't matter). Also their fault for not realizing property tax that the landlord pays comes from rent or lack of maintenance (complex because supply and demand sets rent prices, so tax is a second order effect)

yeah, I wonder if there's anything we can do about this situation

All I can think of is to spread the word about zoning laws, since currently we're still in a situation where renters mostly just get angry at foreigners, rich people, corporations, etc.

Tokyo probably takes things to an extreme that Americans wouldn't like (all the zoning laws are restricted by the national government, as I understand it). I just think it'd be nice if everyone stuck renting overpriced crapholes in the SF Bay Area would start showing up and voting for denser housing

Re: The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership

#207

Post by RickJWagner »

Today's good guy / builder-of-society is tomorrow's slumlord.

It happened to lots of people who are successful today. I don't see why it won't happen tomorrow.

(To be clear: The business person doesn't change positions. It's jealousy on the part of the non-doers.)

Re: The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership

#208

Post by bradlys »

stevehawk wrote: post #160
bradlys wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol - did you not look at the prices they were dealing with? They bought an apartment building with friends and their share of the mortgage was only $900/month - half of which was shared with their partner. $900/month is a joke - even for back then. They bought land with cash that was even remotely near SF as well - unfathomable now. This person bought before prices in SF were so above and beyond what anyone near tha…

You're not wrong that they did it during a better time. But the move to get a bunch of friends to essentially move in and take over an apartment building and then buy it (in a non-forced manner) was pretty clever.

I think my issue with that is that it’s not going to be easy to do in the current market. Back then - it was more doable. They were able to buy under market value (when that likely wasn’t very much to begin with) and manage the loan with each other. Now where each person needs to make $250k+ to afford buying the apartment - you’re getting into territory where you’re unlikely to find people who want to buy that apartment and move into one whole place with you. Maybe it’s doable but the virtue of it being so expensive and the incomes required being so high means that it’s very unlikely to be reproducible unless you only associate with very high income people and those people also like apartments.

I find high income folks generally want to move away from apartments as they age and they want to do so at a much faster rate than someone in a much lower income bracket would.

Re: The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership

#209

Post by bradlys »

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #99
srvmshr wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It should be a depreciating asset, like a car or at most value-neutral. The building unit depreciates, but the total value usually goes up due to the land value, not the construction value. Cars would also appreciate hypothetically if metals suddenly became more expensive.

Wasn't there actually an "inflation" of used car prices in recent months because of supply issues?

Yes. But ignore that - doesn’t make sense with their argument!
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