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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

#371

Post by tomjakubowski »

twoodfin wrote: post #341
ethanbond wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 don't see how this follows. Would you mind explaining?

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

#372

Post by davidw »

mikestew wrote: post #325
alexb_ wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of what I've seen is people worried about "low quality tenants" (read: people who don't look just like me)

The two tenants within a few houses of us in either direction would fit my definition (and likely that of many other folks) of "low quality tenant": don't bother picking up the beer can out of their yard, don't mow (at all ), loud-ass exhaust on their shitty cars, etc. More of an eyesore than a contribution to the local community, and causing me to realize why HOAs come about. But, yeah, it's all because they have br…

> HOAs

If people are going to do restrictions about who lives where, HOA's are probably better than zoning. They're more localized, and the costs of administering them are born by those who perceive them to be beneficial.

I'd never live in one, but to each their own. I'd rather have someone choose one of those in a free market than get involved to zone the entire city one way.

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

#373

Post by lastofthemojito »

jaywalk wrote: post #87
davidw wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article, speaking to your point, is pretty convincing in terms of the data: https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/22524829/wall-street-housin... > The role of institutional investors is still being studied, but the popularity of the narrative strikes at something dangerous: People want a convenient boogeyman and when they get it, they often ignore the structural problems that are harder to combat. Housing undersupply…

Quoted post unavailable.

Definitely not the case.

In my middle- to upper-middle-class mill town there's a proposal to turn a disused historic mill building into luxury apartments and residents are fighting hard against it. The main stated reason is traffic, although it's unclear to me if having a bunch of apartments will generate noticeably more rush-hour traffic than when the mill was operational. I think some folks are also put off by the term "luxury apartment" too, as this area is becoming less affordable than it once was. So they counter-productively fight against increasing the housing supply, which would actually create downward pressure on rent, even for non-luxury places, as folks in more modest apartments might be tempted to move to these fancy new places, creating vacancies for others.

I think a lot of people just don't like change, so they fight it - they want their town/neighborhood/whatever to be just the way it was in the "good ol' days", which just isn't realistic. The mill jobs aren't coming back, but we do have white collar workers willing to pay for attractive places to live. Why not re-use the damn mill building?

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

#374

Post by charlescearl »

References to the racialization of property in the united states. The issue is not simply who has a right to a own home, but who has a right to housing.

- The History Wars and Property Law: Conquest and Slavery as Foundational to the Field, K-Sue Park, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3793972

- Racialized geographies of housing financialization, Desiree Fields, Elora Lee Raymond, https://escholarship.org/content/qt5gd214jn/qt5gd214jn.pdf

- Race and uneven recovery: neighborhood home value trajectories in Atlanta before and after the housing crisis, Elora Raymond, Kyungsoon Wang & Dan Immergluck, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Elora-Raymond/publicati...

- Race for Profit: The Political Economy of Black Urban Housing in the 1970s, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

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

#375

Post by [deleted] »

dqv wrote: post #101
_fat_santa wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems everyone that bought a home for anything other than living in it. In the article they even mention: > The CoreLogic data shows that what it calls “mega” investors, with a thousand or more homes, bought 3% of houses last year and in 2022, compared with about 1% in previous years, with the bulk of investor purchases made by smaller groups. So most of the percentage increase is done by mom-and-pop investors rather…

>I get the hate against institutional investors going in and buying up entire neighborhoods. But the sentiment that we should just abolish landlords is rather dumb IMO. There's a massive gap between someone being able to afford $1200 in rent and being able to afford a home with all of the added costs. As opposed to... being able to afford the rent with the same added costs? Take my area for example: rent in my neighb…

[deleted]

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

#376

Post by twawaaay »

Except the problem isn't investors buying property.

Investors are buying up property for rental because it is profitable because there is huge demand for it because a lot of people simply are unable to own their own house and that is because housing is getting expensive faster than salaries.

The problem is government tied in stupid games while important problems like encouraging new, more affordable housing is set aside as some kind of communist agenda. A house does not need to cost the equivalent of your entire life's savings.

Also government sleeping on the job not including useful knowledge in school curriculum -- like basics of personal finances and economics.

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

#377

Post by slg »

missedthecue wrote: post #331
slg wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the investors are the symptom and not the cause. They are going where the money leads them. However a big problem with institutional investors is that they also institutionalize NIMBYism. They won't just block housing in a select neighborhood, they will block housing everywhere and they put more pressure on the federal government to ensure that housing is protected as an investment class. Both will contribute to…

"They are treating their home primarily as an investment because that is what they have been told to do their whole life." It's not some psyop that has duped an entire nation, it's people accurately recognizing that their home is the biggest purchase they will ever make in their life, it's almost completely done with debt, and most don't want to end up underwater.

> it's people accurately recognizing that their home is the biggest purchase they will ever make in their life, it's almost completely done with debt, and most don't want to end up underwater.

What is those people's second biggest purchase which is also usually done with debt? Does anyone believe that the government should enact policies to ensure that car prices always increase so they would be a better investment? Houses obviously have a longer lifespan than cars, so I'm not suggesting they should necessarily depreciate the same way, but there is also no reason housing should always be appreciating.

We have this idea that the price you sell your home for should always be higher than the price you bought it for. There is no reason for us to preserve that idea beyond the fact that people have now internalized that idea and plan their financial lives around it. The longer we allow that to continue, the harder it becomes to change, but the idea itself is not some fundamental requirement of society.

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

#378

Post by stevenwoo »

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?

In Capital and Ideology, Piketty does a review of modern democracies, there's a two party system of left and right in every one except Poland where there was at the time of writing a far right and right wing party competing for dominance. Conservative parties typically rely on rural voting bloc, less educated and much older people, it's almost universal somehow, that doesn't make their opinion wrong off the bat, it's just demographics of voting. There's also actually a component of "harming these people I disagree with" that drives the vote for reactionary groups and is an active part of Murdoch sponsored media, there's not really a thoughtful process about how it could harm themselves.

For example, there was the irony of multiple cases of people voting for Trump because immigrants are bad, and then having their spouse deported for some visa violation. Or one can look at the people who have opposition to abortion voting for Republicans. Then someone who cannot consent is raped or someone has a non viable pregnancy and neither is eligible for an abortion, which has happened since Roe v Wade was re decided. In the USA, the Senate is decidedly unrepresentative of the people of the United States as a whole, the House less so with the limit to 435 members, but not as bad in some ways.

You can also look to Brexit post vote interviews where people who voted in favor of it said they didn't care if it hurt the UK, they wanted it to happen.

An older example in the USA, the Reagan administration characterized AIDs as the "gay plague" and played down the effects and had no official response to the health crisis other than to joke about it, delaying an effective national strategy. Today there is still a gay faction of the the GOP called the Log Cabin Republicans that is barred from some party events but still back the GOP, Peter Thiel has become a big GOP backer in spite of most state party platforms calling gay people abnormal and most subsequent federal GOP administrations sending and supporting people in Africa to criminalize gay sex.

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

#380

Post by sigstoat »

aprdm wrote: post #69
JamesBarney wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just need to remember that banning housing investment means banning rentals which is problematic for people who don't have good credit and a down payment.

The concept of credit score isn't something that has always existed in humanity. It's something that we can go on without, even more so given the ridiculous profitability of banks

you don't do someone a favor when you lend them money they can't pay back.
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