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Homes in 97% of U.S. cities are overvalued, Moody's says

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Re: Homes in 97% of U.S. cities are overvalued, Moody's says

#581

Post by dahfizz »

aqme28 wrote: post #547
kriops wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia: "A commodity is an economic good (...) that has full or substantial fungibility. (...)" On the basis of geography alone, housing can not be a commodity.

Eh I see your point but I disagree. Look for housing in a highly competitive city, and soon enough you stop caring about geographical specifics and instead look for some combination of useful attributes. In practice, that's fungibility.

Just because you're willing to accept a wide range of houses does not make them fungible. Each house is unique and each home buyer has different priorities.

That's why houses a priced individually. When you go to the grocery store, they don't individually price each cob of corn. There might be two different buckets with a differentiator (organic vs non organic), but within the bucket each cob is fungible. It doesn't matter which one you grab.

Each house gets its own bucket.

Re: Homes in 97% of U.S. cities are overvalued, Moody's says

#582

Post by aperson_hello »

me_me_mu_mu wrote: post #351
turtledove wrote: post #345

The sooner we collectively decide that housing shouldn't be a market, the better. We all need it, and we should figure out mechanisms to make it available to all. Practically that means paying to build and maintain housing stocks, changing tax incentives so developers are incentivized to build more housing and less luxury housing, charging a premium for unused land in desirable areas (parking lots don't house people)…

Cut down home ownership to max 3 homes per household. Otherwise rent from someone else. And yes it’s possible to be capitalist and agree with sensible regulations. I’d rather we focus on building amazing companies and utilizing labor effectively.

I'd claim the big issue is Blackrock coming in and buying all the available housing and renting it out for the max amount possible. If you restrict individuals, but not corporations, you create a worse problem!

Re: Homes in 97% of U.S. cities are overvalued, Moody's says

#583

Post by dahfizz »

aqme28 wrote: post #550
paisawalla wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will you be deciding who gets to have a view of the ocean, and who gets to sleep next to the overpass? First come first serve? Birthright?

Is anyone in this thread proposing this kind of system? This is kind of an insane strawman. You can have a regulated market that still has prices. OP only proposed incentives to build and disincentives to hoard. Homes would still have prices, there would just be less scarcity.

OP is claiming that housing is a commodity. If treated as a commodity, all houses would be priced the same. Then the reality sets in and you have to deal with the fact that some houses are more desirable than others, so you need to distribute them somehow without changing the price.

Re: Homes in 97% of U.S. cities are overvalued, Moody's says

#584

Post by b112 »

turtledove wrote: post #431
b112 wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Washington State is considering removing single family zoning. No, no they are not. Washington state has more than Seattle in it. It has rural areas, and mountainous regions, and no, every house in a rural area is not on agriculturally zoned land. Nor does it make sense to have multidwelling houses, miles apart from each other. I think, as others in this thread have stated, you are mistaking musings, ponderings, and…

https://mynorthwest.com/3284239/ross-gov-inslee-plan-move-be... Yes, Washington State is considering this. Yes, it's back on the drawing board, but it's very much in active discussion at the state level.

Interesting, I get it now.

They have "area zoning", which says "only single family homes may exist here".

Thus, changing this won't ban single family dwellings. Only enable other types of dwellings.

A strange concept, but OK. Understood, thanks.

Re: Homes in 97% of U.S. cities are overvalued, Moody's says

#586

Post by Cederfjard »

LMYahooTFY wrote: post #334
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t know how it is in most of Europe, but I think that, in the UK, you don’t actually own the land your house sits on; Lord Such-and-Such owns it, and collects rent from you. In the US, we own the land, and that is usually the real value. I’m the proud owner of a 0.125-acre New York postage stamp. It’s in a fairly affluent area, so is fairly valuable. In Wyoming, they’d laugh at it. I think Japan is similar.

> but I think that, in the UK, you don’t actually own the land your house sits on; Lord Such-and-Such owns it, and collects rent from you. I've never heard this before. Is this actually true? Is this some background technical legal truth that isn't noticed in practice?

To be clear, anyone can own the freehold that you’re leasing the property from. The mention of ”Lord Such-and-Such” could give you the idea that this is some antiquated construct where all lands are somehow truly owned by the nobility, but that’s not how it is.

Re: Homes in 97% of U.S. cities are overvalued, Moody's says

#587

Post by RealityVoid »

somenameforme wrote: post #423
dodobirdlord wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crux of MMT is the idea that spending creates money and taxing destroys money, so deficits are made up and only inflation matters. Doesn’t seem like a “so much for” moment for MMT, which also predicts this if there’s too much money in the economy. The real question is whether there’s political appetite for the MMT-prescribed treatment here, which is to significantly raise taxes. I’m guessing no.

Why would taxation "destroy money" in times of endless deficits? All that taxed money, and much more on top, is spent before it's even received.

The essence of MMT as I understand it is that money is made up so the government should spent as much as necessary for infrastructure, essentially creating money, and in order to cut off inflation it should tax money and just... do nothing with it, just destroy it.

I know that MMT is very hated but it seems very compelling.

Re: Homes in 97% of U.S. cities are overvalued, Moody's says

#588

Post by bjourne »

nivenkos wrote: post #577
bjourne wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The probability of an average person being able to afford to live in a home in a "nice area" is much higher in Sweden and other countries with rent control than in countries without. There is no shortage of homes, there is a shortage of homes that people can afford.

Hardly anyone can get rent control apartments though. The system has failed.

Not true. There are over a million rent-controlled apartments in Sweden.

Re: Homes in 97% of U.S. cities are overvalued, Moody's says

#589

Post by UncleMeat »

merrywhether wrote: post #402
turtledove wrote: post #345

The sooner we collectively decide that housing shouldn't be a market, the better. We all need it, and we should figure out mechanisms to make it available to all. Practically that means paying to build and maintain housing stocks, changing tax incentives so developers are incentivized to build more housing and less luxury housing, charging a premium for unused land in desirable areas (parking lots don't house people)…

Isn’t there tension between what I’m assuming is land-value tax to push developers to create more housing and keeping people in the home they’ve lived in for 20 years? That home has probably become inefficient from a public value standpoint and would better contribute if it was a multi-unit dwelling. I’m with you that people should be able to continue to afford to live in the same neighborhood even (with a shift in t…

There is huge tension. We've forced ourselves into a situation where it is difficult to fix things because housing is such a huge portion of many people's wealth. Policies that improve things for the poor and lower middle class in meaningful ways will crush the upper middle class, who have a lot of local political influence because they've got enough money to have free time but there are still a lot of them. Somebody with a mortgage 4x their gross annual income is going to fight hard to prevent their house from tanking in price, even if that means promoting anti-social policies.

It is a mess.

Re: Homes in 97% of U.S. cities are overvalued, Moody's says

#590

Post by UncleMeat »

turtledove wrote: post #475
shetill wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason the housing has turned into such a market is not because the evil overlords are deciding. It's due to overwhelming demand and the supply cannot keep up, so landlords have the freedom to choose any prices. The reason there is so much demand is because there are way more people on this planet now than there ever used to be. So if you want cheaper houses, solve the overpopulation problem first.

Landlords don't need to raise rent if their costs aren't rising.

We should enforce this with the law. Right now, landlords raise rents anyway. I've never once heard of a landlord lowering the rent once they finish paying their mortgage, even though their expenses are now far lower.
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