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Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

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Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#341
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how a high land value tax increase investment & decrease speculation? If your talking about flipping homes that's one thing but REIT ownership isn't home flipping for the most part...

High LVT means you pay a high tax on the land itself and little or no tax on what you do on top of that land. It encourages highly efficient land development which means increased supply of commercial and residential units (thus reducing rents), and it makes lots of speculation prohibitively expensive. Since holding undeveloped land is just as expensive as holding developed land, you’re going to want to put it to pro…

At the levels where an LVT is effectively coercive, it’s functionally indistinguishable from rent paid to the government for land you don’t actually own.

I expect most citizens would recognize this and any effective LVT would be politically DOA.

Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#342
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on where you live - this "renting is a poverty trap" only applies to certain places and depends on home values constantly increasing. If home values crash where you live then you spent years putting money towards a worthless asset.

Renting is always worth 0 as equity, so it's a total loss regardless.

This is true only if you place zero value on "having a roof over my head".

Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#343
In Denmark housing built before 1992 cannot be rented out for profit. The owner can only demand enough rent to cover for upkeep and maintenance. However it's still a lucrative business to invest in old housing in the bigger towns and cities because the price is only trending upwards.

Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP buying reduces the hosing supply for owners and raises the price to become an owner pushing more people out of the "privileged" owners bracket. At the same time doing it to the most accessible to own property and making money in the process.

Likewise, the person who buys the house and lives in it takes it off the market for renters, thereby increasing costs to the "unprivileged" renters bracket.

indeed. this is why rent control, when coupled with artificial supply constraints, is a net negative

Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#345

I'm so frustrated by some of the conversations people get in around housing. They want to live in the most desirable places on planet earth, and seem to think that we should just abolish the concept of property ownership to accomplish this. What do you guys think happens when you get what you want, and nobody can "own" property anymore? Do you think there is an unlimited amount of single family 3000 square foot homes…

I can’t live in Indiana because the entire state is racist. This should be obvious.

Edit: /s for those who need it

Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but with all due respect, "too bad, go live in the middle of nowhere" is absolutely an acceptable answer. You're acting like you're entitled to live where ever you want, but the simple reality is that this is not possible. You need to come to grips with that objective fact.

This is a pretty silly response. Are people entitled to live wherever they want? No. But the situation is very obviously not that black and white. We allow many things in society that people aren't entitled to, largely because we believe it will build a better society. Am I entitled to own my investment properties? No. Am I entitled to block neighbouring housing from being built? No. But society allows both of these…

Why are you not entitled to own your investment properties?

Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you friend. Posters throw out lines like "property shouldn't be an investment" as though the idea that property has intrinsic value is something invented in the last 50 years or so, not something that has been true for millennia. I've been told that "housing is a right" which, if conceded, still runs into your point - housing may be a right, housing in the most expensive and populated areas in the US is not…

> I've been told that "housing is a right" An easy reply to these same people is to ask if they think they have a right to wood, brick, concrete, sewer pipes, electrical wire, all the other materials that go into making a livable house, and, on top of that, if they think they're freely entitled to the labor required to construct a house out of these properties.

Every right requires infrastructure, investment, and labor to ensure. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness aren’t free.

Whether or not housing should be a right, rights that are expensive to provide but are nonetheless provided anyway are nothing new.

Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#348
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are reasons for that, but they are generally bad ones involving people not wanting to live near other people who look like the author of the article, even if they won't say that part out loud. Higher density housing is a massive component of building lower carbon footprint cities, as well as making our cities more financially resilient. It's also something that can increase equity a lot by giving people with lo…

I don't want higher density for the same reason I don't go on vacations on cruise ships and don't use public transportation. People are gross and assholes. The more people the more chance of tragedy of the commons, and once it sets in it is hard to stop. Most college educated Americans lived in college dorms, and went on to NOT want to live in shared building environments. It's not about racism, it's about not wantin…

Actually, zoning laws are not part of your property rights. Zoning restriction dictate what you can build on your property, but ownership interest in your property does not entitle you to 'buy' zoning laws. This is easily seen as you cannot sell zoning laws.

Zoning laws ultimately restrict your property rights as you lose the right to do what you wish with your property. They ought to be abolished to protect property rights.

Most societies did just fine without zoning laws for the entirety of human history.

Note, that I don't approach this from the YIMBY or woke side of things. Rather, as a pretty staunch free market advocate, it is painfully obvious to me that we should not restrict people's rights to do with their property as they see fit.

As an example, I was recently going to buy land to develop into a business. However, zoning laws in this area of the county (in the middle of nowhere mind you) meant I would have to jump through endless permit and red tape. Any so-called supporter of property rights should be livid that this goes on in this country. Buying the land should be enough to give me rights to do what I wish with it. Environmental laws should deal with actual human health hazards, not how much shadow I'm spilling onto a neighboring property or how much view I'm blocking.

A lot of the issues with zoning is people attempting to own that which they don't. You don't own your neighbor's property.

Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#349

In Denmark housing built before 1992 cannot be rented out for profit. The owner can only demand enough rent to cover for upkeep and maintenance. However it's still a lucrative business to invest in old housing in the bigger towns and cities because the price is only trending upwards.

What if someone or some company just bought a lot of property, kept it empty, and then waited for the price to go up? Or bought housing to rebuild it?

Re: Investors bought a quarter of US homes sold last year

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Also, inevitably, more fingers per square foot, more calories consumed per acre, higher water usage, and more conversations per minute in the neighborhood. things that people do increase when there are more people. really unclear what your point is here, and the way you said it really makes you look mean.

Per capita murder rates are much higher in large cities than in rural areas.
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