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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

#381

Post by tsimionescu »

jaywalk wrote: post #273
NoraCodes wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people generally oppose [...] high-density, low-income housing. And there are good reasons for that. Are there, other than "I don't want to live near the poors" and "I don't want to see people who have problems"? That's not a good reason.

Quoted post unavailable.

What makes them good reasons? Plenty of things are real without being good.

There is no ethical framework in which "I don't want to live next to the poors" is an ethical sentiment - even though it is understandable in some ways. Well, maybe in Objectivism, or "Fuck You, Got Mine". Though even an Objectivist would be hard pressed to argue against someone else's right to build whatever they want on their own property.

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

#382

Post by mikestew »

alexb_ wrote: post #332
mikestew wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Eyesores" need a place to live too. And I said "look like me" for a reason: class is a bigger part of this than anything else.

The examples I list look just like me: white, male, and a little on the scraggly side. And at least one household member in each example works at Microsoft. So I am a loss at what you're driving at in reference to class.

We know how people treat rental cars. I don't know why it's a big shock that people will treat rental properties in the same manner, and why other folks would rather not live next to that. Blame race and class if you like, but to not allow at least a little more nuance to the discussion is silly.

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

#383

Post by davidw »

heleninboodler wrote: post #365
ryukafalz wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

You can't avoid change. You have to pick what kind of change you want. This graphic sums it up pretty well:

https://twitter.com/issiromem/status/1557816668604141568

What your friend has observed is what happens when you keep it bottled up for years and years.

Instead of gradually moving to 4-plexes and 3 story apartments and narrow townhomes, when all that demand finally gets unleashed, it's a larger change.

Change can be disturbing, so we should aim for more frequent gradual changes than 'quantum leap' type stuff. That said, at least your friend has options in that their land is probably worth a ton of money now and they do have the possibility to get out and go somewhere more to their liking.

Tons of people in high cost cities like Seattle have no home at all due to housing costs.

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

#384

Post by mulmen »

rngname22 wrote: post #268
mulmen wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full time van life is unsustainable and selfish. The infrastructure does not and should not exist to make this feasible.

This is a thread about the wealthy investor class buying the literal land and shelter and hoarding it so they can profit off those they lease to. What was that you were saying about unsustainable and selfish? Fight selfish with selfish.

Van life isn’t a scalable alternative to permanent housing. The reasons for this are many. One of the obvious ones is that if a wealthy investor class can buy up houses and extract rent they can certainly buy up vans and extract rent. So it isn’t even resistant to the very problem you suggest it can solve.

Take a look at how much a 1980s VW Westfalia is these days. It’s as absurd as house prices.

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

#385

Post by AmVess »

davidw wrote: post #189
throwaway22032 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK social housing has a bad reputation because poor people are far more likely to just be nightmares to live nearby. I lived in one throughout my entire childhood. Around half of people were OK, the other half just generally dickheads. That has 0 to do with racism. Many UK towns have trivial populations of non-"White British". The problem is mostly that over time (years or generations) poverty gradually turns…

You can make a decent argument that concentrated poverty does cause some problems. Which is why you should do your best to spread all kinds of housing throughout a city, including plenty of upzoning in wealthier areas.

Good idea. We'll start with where you live. You get to put up with the noise at all hours, the high crime, and the generally shit condition lazy people keep their neighborhoods in. After living in it for a few years, you can come back and tell us how great it is.

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

#386

Post by coryfklein »

Key piece of information from the article:

> 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 the mega investors only make up 3% of that 25%. I'd love to see data on what the remaining 22% are, but my guess is:

* flippers

* middle class individuals buying a second property as an investment

* small time property management firms run by local businesses

Also the Inside Economics podcast's recent episode Cooling Inflation and Confounding Housing Riddles[0] adds even more interesting color to the dialog. They explain that a lot of this is driven by demand for single-family home rentals. Roughly half of Americans will want/need to rent a single-family home at some point in their lives! Many people want to live in a home on a short-term basis, like when a family with kids moves to a new city and wants to familiarize with the area before committing to a full mortgage. And COVID combined with the changing demographics has caused a huge surge in demand, so surprise prices have also gone up.

[0] https://moodys-talks-inside-economics.simplecast.com/episode...

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

#387

Post by NoraCodes »

jaywalk wrote: post #273
NoraCodes wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people generally oppose [...] high-density, low-income housing. And there are good reasons for that. Are there, other than "I don't want to live near the poors" and "I don't want to see people who have problems"? That's not a good reason.

Quoted post unavailable.

> It's harsh, but it's reality.

Right, it's harsh - pointlessly so. If your ethical system values the right of rich people to not interact with poor people over the right of everyone to have a roof over their head, that ethical system is evil.

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

#388

Post by mhuffman »

koolba wrote: post #194
davidw wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investors do not at all have the votes or weight at a local city level in most cases, especially large ones from out of town. Go to a planning meeting about some housing that people are pissed off about because reasons ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32569768 ) and you'll find a whole bunch of your neighbors. It's not institutional investors blocking this stuff, by and large. > they are worried about the value…

How would they vote at all? I’m not aware of any local council that grants votes based upon tax dollars paid or acreage. It’s one person one vote for actual residents. Now lobby dollars are another story. But renters can fix that by actually voting.

>How would they vote at all? I’m not aware of any local council that grants votes based upon tax dollars paid or acreage. It’s one person one vote for actual residents.

I don't know of any local councils that grant local votes to anyone -- they vote themselves. This should spark an idea of how rich people's dollars outweigh poor people's input. They only have to convince half of the council to vote one way. This can be done through wining and dining, sending "experts" to make presentations, making promises, and so on.

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

#389

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#390

Post by Kon-Peki »

jeffbee wrote: post #207
desperadovisa wrote: post #164

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.

Clearly it is ethically problematic for the people of San Francisco to squirt out babies and then 18 years later tell them to go fuck off, go live in Gary, Indiana.

Don't give anyone any ideas or they might discover that they can buy a house like this [1] that is walking distance to the commuter train, walking distance to the beach, and walking distance to the trails in a National Park [2] [3] [4]

[1] https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/8725-Maple-Ave-Gary-IN-46...

[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@41.6199213,-87.2571163,16z

[3] https://www.google.com/maps/@41.6199718,-87.2697873,16z

[4] https://www.google.com/maps/@41.6218829,-87.2348586,16z

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