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Ask HN: Anyone else feels the commoditization of real estate is unethical?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feels the commoditization of real estate is unethical?

#301

Post by lolinder »

MattRix wrote: post #239
targ65 wrote: post #172

Like another comment here mentioned, housing is complicated. People don't want to live in a random house in the middle of nowhere ('roof over your head'). Some people prefer to be homeless on the street versus getting to a roof over their head that they don't like. People want to live where they want to live (near family, jobs, culture etc) Take NYC for instance. Politicians try to address the NYC housing crisis from…

A huge amount of housing issues across North America are due to zoning issues, with areas that don’t allow high density housing to be built (or where the residents fight fiercely against it). You don’t need to deal with most of the other problems you mentioned if you fix this first. The other issue is vacancy. 10% of homes are unoccupied. Coming up with ways to fill even some of those properties would be hugely impac…

> The other issue is vacancy. 10% of homes are unoccupied.

This is the second time I've seen this number thrown around, but as near as I can tell it's completely wrong[0]. Homeowner vacancy has never reached higher than 3%, and the 10% figure was rental vacancy at the height of the last recession: it's now 5.8%.

Aside from the fact that the number itself is outdated, it also lumps the entire US into a single category. Most of the land in the US isn't suffering from a housing crisis, and including homes in those areas in one big national vacancy rate doesn't help understand the degree to which vacancy is playing a role in the big cities. You need to be looking at vacancy by neighborhood, not by country.

[0] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/05/housing-vacan...

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feels the commoditization of real estate is unethical?

#302

Post by roenxi »

shuntress wrote: post #274
roenxi wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shooting the messenger has a bad record for making things better. Speculators don't drive markets, they just signal how the situation will develop as early as it is possible for predictions to be made. Cracking down on speculators won't help people get roofs over their heads. Nor will calling them unethical. Speculators are the signal for whether there is going to be a housing problem in a few years time. We should w…

This assumes that the speculators are correct. That is not a good assumption to make.

If the speculators are wrong the price goes down and people tend not to complain about them. People only start bringing up speculators when they are correct.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feels the commoditization of real estate is unethical?

#303

Post by badtension »

Lazare wrote: post #270

Food and shelter are basic human needs, but food is one of the oldest commodities, and the financialisation of food has real advantages in ensuring an adequate supply of food, stable prices, etc. There's extensive empircal and theoretcial evidence here. There are issues with housing markets in many areas of many countries. There may also be issues with the trend you've identified. But if so, you need to identify a mu…

> financialisation of food has real advantages in ensuring an adequate supply of food, stable prices, etc. There's extensive empircal and theoretcial evidence here.

Would you mind sharing some links or expand on this? I have always had the impression that as a civilization we should be moving towards providing completely free resources to people (limited in quantity and only basic ones, like water, rice, potatoes).

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feels the commoditization of real estate is unethical?

#304

Post by bamboozled »

targ65 wrote: post #172

Like another comment here mentioned, housing is complicated. People don't want to live in a random house in the middle of nowhere ('roof over your head'). Some people prefer to be homeless on the street versus getting to a roof over their head that they don't like. People want to live where they want to live (near family, jobs, culture etc) Take NYC for instance. Politicians try to address the NYC housing crisis from…

housing is complicated

My bullshit detector went off right here. Housing isn't complicated. It's only complicated by investment money being involved. Having a roof over ones head is a basic human right.

In Australia, the market is so hot, very few young people can afford anything, if you're living in a nice place, you can easily be kicked out after your rent doubles. I know of good, professional people who migrated to Australia and went back to their home country of this behavior.

It's complicated because we've made it complicated. I also think it's why we're living in a world with a lot less creativity. Who can make nice things when all we're doing is racing to the bottom to make ends meet ?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feels the commoditization of real estate is unethical?

#305

Post by drdec »

smt88 wrote: post #5

I definitely do. It's something that turns a basic necessity into a speculative asset, with a price distorted by the money poured into it. Airbnb is also a deeply harmful influence on housing prices. Imagine if we did the same thing with, say, water: privatized it and then "democratized" ownership of it. It's easy to get retail investors to buy things at inflated, speculative prices, so the price of water would go up…

> It's something that turns a basic necessity into a speculative asset

The solution to that is the same as the housing problem - build more housing.

And it's fine if the new housing is "luxury" housing - then yesterday's luxury housing becomes today's not-so-luxurious, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feels the commoditization of real estate is unethical?

#306

Post by birdyrooster »

_8j50 wrote: post #228
targ65 wrote: post #172

Like another comment here mentioned, housing is complicated. People don't want to live in a random house in the middle of nowhere ('roof over your head'). Some people prefer to be homeless on the street versus getting to a roof over their head that they don't like. People want to live where they want to live (near family, jobs, culture etc) Take NYC for instance. Politicians try to address the NYC housing crisis from…

You are right that throwing money at it isn't a solution. But corporations should not own residencial housing and no one should be allowed to sell propery at a meaningful profit if they own multiple properties. The government should excecise it's power of taxation to take the profits of an investment housing sell (as defined above: multiple property owner selling at profit) with something like a 95% tax on profit and…

No one needs more than one house period.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feels the commoditization of real estate is unethical?

#308

Post by nrmitchi »

pkrotich wrote: post #256

As others have mentioned the solution is to build more affordable housing… but where?! More unaffordable houses won’t solve the issue. I think decentralization of work (WFH) will counter it in the long term. If you can work from anywhere then your housing options become limitless. I’ve lived in the country the last 15 years - absolutely no way I’ll live in pricy cities. That said, people in the service industry will…

I think the “decentralization of work” will only lead to large scale improvement if it also comes with decentralization of other needs as well; having social, cultural, and other needs met outside of large cities.

The decentralization of means that I could live in a flyover state or much more rural area, but there are many things one would still lose easy access to. You’re not going to convince most people to move to a food desert with unreliable internet, a 45 minute drive to the nearest grocery store, and 2 hours from the nearest airport just because their job is decentralized now

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feels the commoditization of real estate is unethical?

#309

Post by capitalsigma »

horsawlarway wrote: post #68
lr4444lr wrote: post #40

No, because governments' ability to procure it for the needy is a very separable problem. But let me play Devil's Advocate: agriculture, the foundation of the food supply, is one of the most commoditized markets that exist. Does this bother you too? Why not? If it's because food is generally a smaller part of income, highly responsive to market pressure to keep prices low in addition to some stabilizing subsidies fro…

> why can't real estate work the same way? So I'll tackle this... Food is highly responsive to market pressure because it is nearly entirely fungible. I'll throw this here for the sake of making sure we're on the same page when I say that --- Fungible: able to replace or be replaced by another identical item; mutually interchangeable. --- So food markets are sensitive to pressure because there is hardly ever anything…

> I think we'd see pretty insane food prices then as well.

All you are saying is "imagine if food supply was more constrained" with more words. Commodification and constrained supply are orthogonal concepts -- the argument here is that increased commodification may lead to increased supply, so long as the market is allowed to act freely.

> that ear of corn was where your family has been buried for centuries,

This argument of "what if your family lived there before" in housing discussions annoys me to no end. We don't live in a feudal society where the right to a particular village is passed down through bloodlines. The fact that your family lived somewhere in the past doesn't entitle you to anything; you're not a Hapsburg monarch.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feels the commoditization of real estate is unethical?

#310

Post by theplumber »

targ65 wrote: post #172

Like another comment here mentioned, housing is complicated. People don't want to live in a random house in the middle of nowhere ('roof over your head'). Some people prefer to be homeless on the street versus getting to a roof over their head that they don't like. People want to live where they want to live (near family, jobs, culture etc) Take NYC for instance. Politicians try to address the NYC housing crisis from…

It looks like you can't see the real issue: too many people want to live in NYC. If you make it cheaper to own, build or rent in NYC even more people will come and the there will not be enough housing. Perhaps people should be encouraged to live somewhere else/in more places? Living in NYC is not a human right either.
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