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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

#361

Post by tsimionescu »

giantg2 wrote: post #215
ryukafalz wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you ignore the racist roots mentioned in a sibling thread (and I maintain that you shouldn’t), we will need low-income housing as long as there are people with low incomes! And it’s best for everyone involved if that housing is commingled in every community rather than being concentrated in one place. It’s well documented that the neighborhood you grow up in has a huge impact on how upwardly mobile you’ll be…

"And it’s best for everyone..." How exactly is it best for the well-off? I'm curious what pros and cons it would have for them.

When there's no more food to eat, the poor will always turn to eating the rich, if we want to take this to the extreme (or, well, when there's nowhere left to live, they'll live inside the rich, I guess?).

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

#362

Post by mikestew »

sleepdreamy wrote: post #277
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am not alright with paying absurd rent. Then you should either: 1) Buy a house to live in 2) Buy a house to hedge against rents going bananas The 30-year fixed rate mortgage at negative real rates is the biggest handout the world has ever seen.

Can you elaborate on your last sentence a bit more? Just trying to get a more thorough explanation. I just got my first 30 year mortgage so, trying to make myself feel better I guess.

I'll take a whack at it. You have your mortgage, and let's say the hypothetical payment is $1000/month. That is all you'll ever be obligated to pay each month in order to live in your house (we'll ignore property taxes for the moment). Whereas your neighbor rents her house for $1000/month. But next year her rent is $1050/month, and so on. In ten years, she'll pay on the order of 50% more to stay in that house. But you'll still be paying $1000/month, and will continue to do so for 30 more years.

But that's just how mortgages work, right? Lock into a rate, and have that for 30 years? Only in the U. S., AFAICT. Canadians will correct my details, but as one example in Canada one gets a mortgage for, say, five years at x%. After five years, go renegotiate? (Help me out here, Canucks; as soon as I went to write it out, I knew I had it wrong.) Anyway, point is, the "lock it in at 2.5% for 30 years" seems to be unique to the U. S., and assuming that your wages increase, after a period of years you will keep more money in your pocket than the neighbor that rents.

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

#363

Post by robk »

wiradikusuma wrote: post #154

"but many Republican lawmakers oppose such controls." — I'm not American and not in in the US, so I'm wondering, why in many articles I read, "Doing Good Things For People™" tend to be opposed by Republicans? 1. Are there a scheme to vilify them? Bcoz it's not even mentioned why they oppose (maybe they see Bad Things™ far ahead). 2. Are they not elected by the people?

Media is mostly run by the left so easy to vilify the other side.

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

#364

Post by danem »

infogulch wrote: post #100

Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020) | 379 points | 6 days ago | 794 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32493549 On this post I wrote: > A couple ideas for how to fix some real estate problems: > 1. A zoning rule that requires home owners to live in the owned home. ... And the general response? > The mega reit buying residential properties is also overblown. 70% of rental pr…

These are just bandaid solutions that do little to solve the underlaying problem and well established fact that we simply haven't been building enough homes over the last 50 years. Proposals that don't address this, or remove capital from the market should be met with skepticism imo.

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

#365

Post by heleninboodler »

ryukafalz wrote: post #271
jaywalk wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manhattan is Manhattan. My nice, quiet suburb is not Manhattan.

And your nice, quiet suburb is unlikely to get many high-rises if it’s actually far enough away from the nearest city center, because it doesn’t particularly make sense to build towers in the middle of nowhere. By contrast if your suburb is nice and quiet despite being right next to a city because decades of policy have locked it in place and it’s pricing people out… too bad? Other people need housing too and outward…

We should stop pretending it's a choice between single-family houses and 30 story high-rises. There are lots of seattle neighborhoods, for example, where people bought single family houses 20, 30, 40 years ago because of the character of the neighborhood and now suddenly the yimbys have changed the zoning to accept seven story buildings. A good friend of mine has lived in and cared for his home for 25 years and now the houses bordering him directly to the south have been sold and a 7 story apartment building is going up 5 feet from his property. Once it's built, he will literally never get direct sunlight again. That's pretty significant.

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

#366

Post by davidw »

giantg2 wrote: post #215
ryukafalz wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you ignore the racist roots mentioned in a sibling thread (and I maintain that you shouldn’t), we will need low-income housing as long as there are people with low incomes! And it’s best for everyone involved if that housing is commingled in every community rather than being concentrated in one place. It’s well documented that the neighborhood you grow up in has a huge impact on how upwardly mobile you’ll be…

"And it’s best for everyone..." How exactly is it best for the well-off? I'm curious what pros and cons it would have for them.

Where I live, the hospital is struggling to hire nurses due to the lack of housing options. That's not even the 'low income' bracket. Teachers struggle to find housing as well. Those are both things that high income people need, especially the former.

Restaurants are shutting down for want of workers. Because they can't afford it.

Low income workers provide valuable services in our communities. Telling them they can't live where they work creates all kinds of problems, both social and environmental - they often drive in to do those jobs, creating more pollution and traffic.

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

#367

Post by keewee7 »

wil421 wrote: post #349
keewee7 wrote: post #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.

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?

Real estate investors are legally required to rent out their units.

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

#368

Post by jaywalk »

travisathougies wrote: post #348
ROTMetro wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nobody is talking about buying or selling zoning laws. However, the value of property and the taxes paid on it are very much impacted by zoning laws. So people absolutely do make decisions on buying property based on zoning laws.

The value of my house would be decimated if there were a pawn shop next door to it. I wouldn't have bought my house if that were even a remote possibility.

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

#369

Post by jmyeet »

nineplay wrote: post #354
jmyeet wrote: post #177

Let me summarize all the problems here: 1. In most of the US it is quite literally illegal to build anything other than single-family homes ("SFHs"). This is a form of NIMBYism and reduces housing supply; 2. Part of (1) is that absolute necessity of car ownership in the US. This is by design to keep the riffraff (ie poor people) out; 3. We need robust public transit infrastructure to give people the option of living…

> Homeowners that own an extra unit or two on the same site as where they live is about the most ethical form of supply private rentals I'd never build or buy a MFD at least partly because I don't trust that the current vilification of landlords wouldn't eventually expand to MFD owners. MFD owners will still raise rents, they will still evict, they will still have disputes with tenants over maintenance and common-are…

That's fine if you don't want to do that. Really. A lot of people (and, to be clear, I'm not saying you specifically here) fall into the trap when seeing things like this and they feel like it'll be forced on them like someone will come along and just build a second house on their hand and say "congrats, you're a landlord now".

But plenty of people will do that. They will want the extra income. The problem is currently that's literally illegal in most of the US.

As for evictions, these vary state by state but evictions are only really a huge problem with housing supply is so restricted. Yes there are some bad actors. But a lot of times eviction means homelessness for some people.

I'd personally be OK with making it relatively easy to evict someone who is living on your property (as opposed to say living in an apartment building).

But a very real problem with treating real estate as an investment is the owner profits by forcing negative externalities on their neighbours without having to suffer through them themselves (eg AirBnB). We need to clamp down on that.

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

#370

Post by kritiko »

giantg2 wrote: post #242
bobthepanda wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can lead a horse to water but you can‘t make it drink. Job poor areas in the US have no shortage of incentives or policies designed to lure companies there, but have had little success over the past few decades.

I'm wondering why that is. I would think that with the growing movement against NIMBYism that there would be enough people fed up with those sorts of policies to start moving out of the areas they don't agree with.

And move where? Most of the cities that are growing have a housing crisis. Most of the cities that are shrinking can have major safety issues - see @pontifier's misadventure in Pine Bluff, AR[1] for a particularly extreme anecdote.

1. https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-man-who-bought-pine-bluff...

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