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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?

#591
post #201

Unethical? Should be disallowed period. I do strongly believe that once a propery is yours what you do with it is your concern and nobody else's. However, the business practice of purchasing properties to profit from selling it again in the future should not be allowed. So, what should happen is the government should not allow the transfer of ownership when the seller has a) multiple properties and b) is selling a pr…

>b) is selling a propery for more than 3% (inflation adjusted) of the intial purchase value

This makes it more profitable to sit and collect rent than to sell. Property will never change hands. I hope the current owner knows how to build.

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

#592
post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Middleman maintaining 100 apartments can do so for less money per unit than the guy maintaining a single apartment.

Wat? Is this skipping the real world of every condominium building apartment owner paying a maintenance fee and having a say in where/how the money gets allocated? When you rent, you just give the power of choice away and have misaligned incentives (when you own, you give more of a shit than when you are merely extracting profit)

No, you’re ignoring all the maintenance your landlord would usually be responsible for.

Things like internal plumbing, internal wiring, air conditioning and appliances.

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

#593
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most of the UK (England and Wales), water was privitised in 1989 General consensus even amongst the right-wing media and the media that aims to appeal to conservative voters [1-4] seems to be is that we have drought and hosepipe bans while the private companies pay out £1b dividends and it's not right. [1] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/54e5542a-1a6b-11ed-b1f4-6... [2] https://www.guardian-series.co.uk/news/20…

Showing my age, but back in 1976, where I lived, water was being brought in by tanker day and night during the hottest summer on record. I'm not saying privatisation has been a glowing success but supply issues were much worse in the days of nationalisation, especially when you factor in the population growth over the past few decades.

There are still houses in the US being built right now that have zero water and all must be delivered by tanker.

No wells to be dug, no neighbors to beg from, and now that the Colorado River is dangerously low they are stopping the delivery trucks.

This means people will have to move eventually, and good luck selling your 1.5 million dollar home with no water access.

Lol, California has 'severe drought conserve water' as all the businesses keep watering their 100% unnecessary grass, Nestle bottles it up and sells it back to us, we have almonds being grown to make fucking almond milk, and we have strained power grids warning of high power consumption while every fucking business leaves their signage and parking lots lit up like fucking Christmas.

But it's we the people taking showers and running the AC that is the problem.

None of this makes any sense!

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

#594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single homeless person in Boston can get free transitional housing but the Mass and Cass street area is still packed with tents and drug users

What is required of the homeless to qualify? Often there are big strings attached like you have to be sober or at least be working towards that. They often don't want to help addicts who don't want to quit using.

Do you think it is wrong for society to have contractual requirements such as "I will help you if you are trying to help yourself"?

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

#596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

The value of the land is based on 1. The inherit value of the land - rivers, gold or oil being key examples. 2. The nearby infrastructure 3. The zoning policies 4. The community and commercial services If there is land zoned for another NYC, with the infrastructure of NYC, including the excellent port access, it would very quickly become worth what NYC is worth as people showed up. We see this with the pop-up cities…

I completely agree with that last post's reasoning for why a pop-up city might stay empty or become another New York.

I don't see why it needs a land value tax and having one causes anything. All the things you are putting into your land value calculation cause that. Not the tax.

Now don't get me wrong. I'd love me a land value tax as it would probably mean I'd pay less for where I live. But that's it so far. Color me unconvinced otherwise.

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

#597
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. You just have to build more. Simple as that. I was talking to a NIMBY and converted her to YIMBY by relating to her that in Santiago anybody builds whatever the fuck wherever the fuck, zoning be damned basically, and that leads to rent being like $150 a month. For real, you get what you get in SF for $4000 a month for ah...$400 a month in Santiago. And the minimum is very low. Sometimes $100.

Santiago de Chile or Cuba? I know that’s not the case in Chile for any of the central neighborhoods (Yungay, Brazil, Lastarria, Franklin, etc…) which I think are probably close to SF in terms of size. 325k CLP is about the lower end for a nice, small 2BR. You can get more rooms but the square footage is smaller. Las Condes/Vitacura goes up from there. You can buy a nice 2BR apartment for $175k USD though.

Haha yeah Santiago de Chile. Hey I bet you can get a great deal in Santiago de Cuba, way under $100, and it's notable enough people say "which Santiago" like you just did. Cuba has incredibly cheap rent, like Communism works, works mandatory unpaid overtime, in terms of cheap rent.

So those are all beautiful quaint neighborhoods--myself I'm in Lastarria, but come on that's expensive. Yungay, little less. Barrio Brasil, no he cotizado [I haven't seen prices]. Franklin I don't know. I bet Franklin isn't that bad. But uh, try Estación Central. Another place I heard of that sounded like a great idea was Parque Forestal near Baquedano. Huge places at a third the going rate, just because of the violence, which I seek out because it comes with low rent, and which I in particular can handle, as a local. That's my niche. Las Condes/Vitacura is of course much more expensive, because first there's zoning, second it's for GCU--gente como uno[1], they're much more restrictive with buildings than other neighborhoods. Another cheap one is Ñuñoa, practically no zoning, on the subway line and there's tons of huge buildings.

But you gotta be a street cat and adjust expectations. So for instance, there's lots of burglary. All the time. Steal anything, shoes shaver knives children's toys all kinds of shit. Anything. But they're looking for the macbooks. Violence: there's guns these days. It depends on the neighborhood. Bad sentences for armed crooks, like I knew in rehab a guy who put a kitchen knife like between his cheeks but at any rate in his pants for protection when he was partying in the poorer parts of town. He got busted, it looked bad on him, weapons are forbidden. But dude then there's poorer and poorer neighborhoods, cheaper and cheaper rent, it's only a matter of being tough enough for the cheap street. People live in Maipú (pronounced as you fear) for hella cheap.

You just mentioned the neighborhoods where the privileged live. Those are all nice neighborhoods, for the HN crowd, American-friendly (they'll cheat you and steal from you--not from me, but from you--but hell it's cheaper than SF rent). Hell, go live near Pajaritos or Neptuno, I can tell you the rent won't fuck up your checking account. And none of the places I mentioned are tent cities, there's those here too, along with--more common previously--poblaciones callampa, shroomtowns, popping up out of nowhere squatting on unsuited land like shrooms out of the ground, from one day to the next.

It's a mixture of continents. Europe in Sector Oriente, Asia a bit in Patronato (my agent scouted there when he needed Asian actors/models), like there's real Latin American poverty too, but not that that's worse, just poverty is suffering, not a stain on the dignity of the sufferer.

But there's no overlap with San Francisco. The most expensive Santiago place will come in cheaper than the cheapest San Francisco place.

[1] This is a joke indigenous to Chile. They idea is going back not many generations, the people in the target audience for this joke had some money and some status, before downward mobility as the fortunes of the country rose and fell repeatedly. So there's an in-crowd. Specifically, in Chile, one sociological measure of status is whether you have a Spanish surname. So Gutiérrez, Pérez, those are considered--by sociologists, and in general by the culture--low status. Then on the other side is the Basque surnames, with lots of z's and r's, very recognizable, long names. Basques did very well for themselves in Chile, and that's more or less the only thing that matters for status really, is money. Power much less. It has to do with the neoliberal economy, so like the lay of the land up til 2019 was best understood by reading an introductory economics textbook, whereas in America it's the Bible. Money is everything, and like how you go about getting it, where it springs and where it's scarce, and the myriad ways you get fucked when you don't know the trick they're pulling on you. Which you can usually figure out, again with an econ textbook. Gente como uno is like an in-joke of the recent immigrants, not the very recent immigrants from eg Venezuela, but the wave from before which had non-Spanish surnames, like Basque, but also Italian or Dutch or German, or English is good too, Irish is very good in Chile in particular despite the Irish community being vanishingly small (most of it mixed in producing more redheads than blondes, blonde hair is incredibly rare in Chile, to the point any shade of hair that is brown or blonde is called "rubio", which stands for blond/blonde. I got put down as "rubio" in castings, it's a cultural thing, in America I say I have brown hair. It's just blond by American standards, platinum blond, like many Chilean men I know before their hair darkens dramatically (Pedro Pascal being one example, the Mandalorian. I saw an analog picture of him as a child, platinum blond, just darkened dramatically, to jet black, this happens to some Chilean men), so platinum blond, is incredibly rare here, 1 in 10000 people or so. Like if you're a blonde woman interested in Latin men like the bravado the dancing, and sure it's the safest part of Latin America, if you're blonde Chile is not for you, it's considered intimidatingly beautiful, nobody will hit on you. So I'm told.

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

#598
post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true, but I'm a Georgist so would be against the GP's targeting non-owner tax. Tax everyone according to the value of the unimproved value of their land. I can show you plenty of places with $3k+ rents in SF with prop 13 property taxes that have not changed their tax meaningfully in decades. Taxes have absolutely no effect on what the renter pays. The tenant is always paying the land value. It's just going straig…

Are there any canonical examples / cities you can point us to where this approach is being taken successfully?

A full land value tax has never been tried.

Currently the closest example is Singapore[0], but they have much more central control than what a Georgist would find ideal. 99 year leases are far to long, and shorter leases would have much more beneficial effects.

Detroit was an example of a city that massively expanded[1] because of it, but eventually lost it's way.

Harrison, PA[2] is an example of a city that 'recently' used a revenue neutral split-rate system to keep from going bankrupt.

[0]: https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/singapore-economic...

[1]: https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2013/0813clevelandg...

[2]: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/3/6/non-glamorous-g...

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

#599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This falls flat on its head when you consider that this would force a bunch of people in becoming small time landlords, with the inability to invest in their skills and competency by scaling up to multiple properties. Barely anyone would be interested in running multi-family real estate and they would migrate to commercial real estate. What would remain for residential is low density condos and shitty small time land…

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

#600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax land value appreciation, that is the rent seeking part of the equation. You want to incentivize developers to create more units, you want to discourage people buying units hoping to bank on appreciation.

Then you’ve pretty much forced every retired homeowner to sell and move when their neighborhood starts to become desired.

I didn’t mean as a property tax, I meant upon sale/transfer.
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