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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?

#561

Post by liketochill »

nrmitchi wrote: post #483
rojobuffalo wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4x higher tax, not 4x total cost. First housing prices would crash, so rental prices would also drop. And they wouldn't go up 1:1 with tax increases. They would go up by some percentage which is fine. It should be a little more expensive month-to-month to rent vs. own. Renting should still be available, but a lower proportion of housing should be rentals.

“It should be more expensive month to month to rent vs own” It already is. There are many tax incentives geared towards making owning cheaper. If owning was t already subsidized do you really think anyone would be handing out 4% 30-yr fixed rate mortgages like candy? Removing these would also make housing prices crash, which would lower both purchase cost AND rent, yet I don’t see many people pushing that idea forwar…

In Canada we don’t have 30 year fixed mortgages, the longest I have heard of anyone getting is 7 years and that’s me. Despite not having cost certainty in the long term we have the same property market issues as every other desirable place to live.

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

#562

Post by AndrewUnmuted »

rojobuffalo wrote: post #257
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…

I would start by making property taxes substantially higher for non-owner-occupied property. If you are rent-seeking rather than residing on the property you should pay way more, maybe 4x or higher, in taxes. Housing prices would crash and that would be the point; but everyone who owns property would be against it because they don't want to see their assets drop in value. The counter-argument people make is "that wou…

No post body was provided.

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

#563

Post by notpachet »

lezojeda wrote: post #241
notpachet wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we should all take turns cleaning the toilets. Like jury duty.

If someone is willing to do it for money and I'm willing to pay them for it, why should I do it?

Your question presupposes that the arrangement where certain people have to do shit jobs to survive, and others don't, is desirable. It works out fine for you individually, but the more charitable and humane arrangement is to spread the shit jobs around so no one bears the full brunt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

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

#564

Post by tharkun__ »

ItsMonkk wrote: post #551
tharkun__ wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how one follows from the other. In either system living in an industrial zone (or on the edge of it) will cost less as it is less desirable to live there (noise, air pollution, smells, further from grocery store, no parks etc) and nobody in their right mind would pay high rent there. Nothing to do with land value taxes. Zoning changes what people will build there (we assumed it was even legal to have hous…

Your argument is that places that are zoned lower are worth less, and places that are zoned higher are worth more. That's only true in the existing paradigm. What would be true in the new paradigm is that places would only allowed to be zoned lower if people are willing to pay for that exclusive access. It's not just industrial areas, all higher zoned areas would be cheaper than lower zoned areas. Land Value Tax ince…

That is not my argument at all.

In fact the residential zoned houses at the edge of the industrial zone are worth less potentially than the industrial piece of land on that edge. (maybe not, because residential neighbors will get complainy ;))

I am saying that I don't see how a land value tax does what you propose. I had no idea what that even was until I read these posts and looked it up.

I don't see what you mean by zoned "lower" and "higher" actually. I can zone the land for another New York City in the middle of flyover country and that doesn't mean people will come just like that. The price this will command will be super low because there's nothing there (this is actually part of your land value tax system's reasoning). If I can find someone interested at all.

If instead I zone it agricultural I can sell it depending on vicinity to a small town, how flat it is (mountain side? No thank you for big agri, only small homesteaders will pay you a little at all). Flat and great soil near other agri infrastructure? Now we are talking pricy!

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

#565

Post by s1artibartfast »

colinmhayes wrote: post #440
s1artibartfast wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are multiple taxes on rental properties. You have to pay both income tax, and if you are a corporation you have to pay corporate taxes. That's roughly 20% and then another 20%. If you wanted to go with this approach, the better solution is to remove tax deductions for corporate residential real estate investment

Competent landlords don’t pay income tax because they use depreciation and reinvesting to claim 0 income.

That's exactly what I was pointing out in the post you responded to

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

#566

Post by luxuryballs »

unlikelymordant wrote: post #204
luxuryballs wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure there’s a practical or fair way to quantify what someone needs, how can that be measured? Or worse, enforced?

In general i think its not about enforcement, but incentives e.g. designing a tax system that penalises owning many homes.

but what if you have a valid plan in the work for the many homes? I think it is a huge violation of privacy for the government to need to vet you on the reasons for your private property

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

#567

Post by carom »

larsiusprime wrote: post #269
thepasswordis wrote: post #132

>a basic human right You do not have a basic human right to the labor of the people who build and maintain these houses. This is where this entire discussion collapses for me. Yes, I agree there needs to be more access to housing. And it’s frustrating to me that our government is too inept to simply provide it. For instance: we have committed to about 45 Billion to Ukraine. At a cost of $100k/unit (achievable at scal…

> You do not have a basic human right to the labor of the people who build and maintain these houses. Correct! However, a significant portion of housing costs is not due to the stuff that's built on them -- something produced by labor -- but by the LAND that lies underneath it. Nobody built the land, it was already there. Someone just acquired it one day, and as it exchanges hands the prices have been progressively b…

In other parts of this thread people are arguing that a land value tax wouldn't increase rental prices because landlords are price takers. How does land trading hands drive up rents if landlords are price takers?

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

#568

Post by polio »

ErikVandeWater wrote: post #378
horsawlarway wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There are thousands of homes/apartments around where I live that are about equally attractive for me to live at. Most sold by different sellers. Housing is fungible.

It's fungible for you, since apparently few dimensions of housing are salient to you. In my experience, this is not the case for most people. Units on the same floor can differ vastly; buildings on the same block can differ vastly; the neighbors you have, the direction a unit faces, square footage, street noise are all examples of factors that matter to many people and which can vary dramatically on a geographic scale measured in feet. Many people don't consider housing fungible to the extent that produce is.

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

#569

Post by throwfh80h82 »

welshwelsh wrote: post #148
throwfh80h82 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you can make more food but god ain't making any more land.

We have plenty of land. When I moved to Manhattan, I was shocked to see how many apartment buildings that are only a couple floors tall and don't have elevators. I assumed every building in Midtown would be at least 50 floors and house thousands of people. Counting the office space, which is completely unnecessary when people can work from home, even the densest neighborhood of America's most populated city has tons…

Cramming people together more tightly does not create more land.

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

#570

Post by mistermann »

z9znz wrote: post #467
mistermann wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's complicated because we've made it complicated. And thus, it is complicated. Also worth taking into consideration: we may not be able to do otherwise. Currently, for sure (hence the commonality of conversations on this topic), and perhaps never if we don't/can't change the way we think.

Some of us can change how we think, but big corporations and investment firms (and banks with investment divisions) are not going to adopt our way of thinking. They are thinking of what to do with their piles of cash, and how to make their piles grow. They are absolutely not concerned about the wellbeing of individuals outside their own organizations/families. This is basically the housing ownership version of the mo…

> Some of us can change how we think, but big corporations and investment firms (and banks with investment divisions) are not going to adopt our way of thinking.

I wonder: can you overcome this way of thinking?

> People (and governments) realized that once a company grows and consumes or blocks out all its competition, things eventually get very bad for the consumers/public.

Realized to some degree.

> And now we see that there need to be similar regulations to prevent the equivalent in housing.

Some see this, some see other things (sometimes the opposite). Whose visions are correct?

> It will be ironic if the camp that has been promoting gun ownership while simultaneously screwing its supporters becomes subject to forceful demands of its angry former followers.

It would be even more ironic if all followers began to question the stories their leaders tell them, and the stories they tell themselves.

> Perhaps once enough of those armed good old boys finally put their puzzles together and realize they've been fooled on a grand scale, we'll start to see some change.

Surely, to some degree. But even more powerful would be if all people could do this simultaneously...or even a critical mass of people, especially if they managed to do it according to a non-partisan methodology. Perhaps someone will create something like that some day. Or, perhaps not, and we will remain at this local optimum indefinitely, content in the knowledge that it is all someone else's fault.

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