451–460 of 691 posts
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A lot of what I've seen is people worried about "low quality tenants" (read: people who don't look just like me)
That feels like a pretty cheap and dishonest dismissal to me, since in my extremely-homogenous neighborhood, all the "low quality tenants" do look just like me.
In 2012 I was looking at investing in REITs. One REIT's pitch was that they owned such a large percentage of the rental housing in Tampa Florida, that even though vacancy rates were high, and rents were going down throughout the nation and other areas in the state of Florida, they were able to keep rents high in Tampa. Disgusted, I realized the harm that REITs and private equity are doing to housing markets, and want…
I agree, and I feel like limiting the mortgage interest deduction to owner-occupied homes would get us most of the way there at the stroke of a pen. It's a huge subsidy and I can't think of any good reason to extend it to rentals and investment properties. In fact, we should probably repeal it altogether - in theory it subsidizes home ownership for the poor and middle class, but in practice the only people who take i…
As an investor, you don't have a mortgage interest deduction benefit. You have a business expense benefit.
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>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…
> So what are the added costs that landlords are "saving" renters from? Utilities will generally cost a bit more. But the real killers with home ownership tend to be large expenses that come due all at once. Roof needs to be replaced, AC unit needs to be replaced, major appliance replacement, foundation problems, any number of expensive things can and will come up.
In my case I had to replace the dishwasher. I wanted a quiet one, so it ran about $1200. I bought it on credit and got 0% financing. So my housing price increases by $100 for the next year.
Now if I were renting? $2000/month. The landlord gets the absolute cheapest dishwasher they can find. It maybe runs them $300. So the landlord would be saving me ... $-475.
Paying $5700 extra a year to avoid a $300 added cost makes no sense. Paying $6000 a year in perpetuity for a one-time expense that lasts the next 20 years also makes no sense.
The point is that the tenant is not being protected from any added costs, they are paying way above market value for them.
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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…
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…
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This always strikes me as an unsatisfying response. What about America is so fundamentally different than Europe that would make the same policies that work there not work here? Every time I’ve seen this type of argument brought up, it’s fallen flat when the same infrastructure is built here because it does end up working . We’re really not so unique.
> What about America is so fundamentally different than Europe that would make the same policies that work there not work here? And yet, if I suggested that the US do something a lot of (all?) European countries do, like having to present ID when voting, I’d get an endless stream of replies about why that’s fundamentally impossible in the US (and racist, naturally). And that’s a FAR easier problem to solve than pie-i…
Complaints about this usually revolve around the fact that voter ID laws aren't accompanied with increased funding for and availability of voter ID services. Show me a law where they added Saturday and late-evening DMV services, or pop-up voter ID registration services at grocery stores, pharmacies, post offices, churches, community recreation centers, and schools.
The purpose behind these laws is quite clear. It's fundamentally unfair to add voter ID laws to depress turnout under the guise of "election security".
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> 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. Having recently bought a home, I think there isn't so much of a gap and in many cases the gap is inverted: it's cheaper to buy than to rent.
Key phrase here being “recently bought.” Get back to us after you’ve had to replace the roof, had a water main burst, or something of that nature that requires you to cough up $10K+ all at once. The mortgage is the _minimum_ monthly payment, not the maximum.
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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.
I mean property tax is already rent.
The LVT as envisioned by its advocates isn’t like that. It’s a fee—largely determined by market forces—to continue to occupy and make use of “your” land. If the government can insist you pay some market-set cost to remain on a plot of land, you don’t own it in the way we classically think about land title ownership. You’re not the market participant, the government is.
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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…
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…
Make it so neighbors are competing to host whatever they are NIMBYing about currently because it comes with a package of goodies that will offset the problems. It doesn't have to include much new spending, rebalancing or reprioritization of existing resources to ensure fairness can be part of it.
Is this the norm? I feel like I haven't heard it often during debates over unpopular new developments.
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"I'm tentatively alright with the idea of renting forever and never owning property" This sounds akin to feudal peonage.
Renting for life isn't the same thing as being indebted for life. You can move out at any time and the landlord doesn't have any hold over you. Doesn't sound much like peonage to me.
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"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?…