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What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

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Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#271

Post by JeremyNT »

satvikpendem wrote: post #105
amelius wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the rich get richer (...) and the poor get poorer It's always the same story. Can't we just make the economy more fair by saying that the wealth gap must at least be smaller than some value or else the rich will pay (taxes) to make it so?

Lots of people say this but very few have a concrete idea of what is needed to accomplish this. What taxes are the rich going to pay? Who among the rich? How does one define "rich?" Et cetera.

Taxes on real estate are the obvious answer here. Every residential property you own after your first should increase your tax burden substantially, such that you are incentived to sell them rather than hoard them and rent them out.

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#272

Post by reducesuffering »

remote_phone wrote: post #168
jmspring wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the mid/late 90s Vancouver was affordable and a lot of flats being built. It was still more expensive that the suburbs, etc. but still cheaper than metros across the border. Sometime in the 2000s money started flowing in and those flats I was seeing in place like Kits for $150-$200k were suddenly going up a lot. Rents were also escalating. A lot seemed to be fueled by foreign money. I was looking at relocatin…

This is wrong. Vancouver was never “affordable”. My family moved to Vancouver in the mid-80s and it was by far the most expensive place in Canada. Prices had already climbed rapidly by the time we got there and prices never crashed for 40 years. At worst, it was flat for a few years. Our 1000 sqft house in the West End was almost 300k in the mid-80s and our family was struggling financially but we were in the best sc…

Vancouver is not a mystery.

Geographically constrained in 3 directions.

Only decent-weather locale for Canadians (US has hundreds of release valves for people that get sick of prices in SF / NYC / etc.)

Large rich Chinese immigration.

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#273

Post by rickydroll »

baseline-shift wrote: post #217
kfarr wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the difference here is fundamentally there is insufficient supply for the demand of housing globally, or at least US, UK and EU. The previous generation made new builds extremely difficult or impossible in many jurisdictions.

Yes, insane zoning limits in cities in the US since the 60s have indeed made it impossible to build near jobs. But there's abandoned medieval villages (no plumbing or electricity so far...) in hilly rural Italy.

zoning would not matter to my commute length unless I moved every time I changed jobs and had no dogs or human partners. I have made 30 years of compromises because of partners and pets. I've stayed at shitty jobs because good ones were too far away and I could not move.

building near jobs is either building company towns or embedding classism and environmental injustice into property. would you live next door to a small nuke power plant because it was colocated with your office job? how about a refinery? a bsl3 lab? sewer treatment? or would you force those workers to live near their work and put them and all the dirty parts of civilization far away from the upper class clean places?

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#274

Post by ZephyrBlu »

OnlineGladiator wrote: post #266
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically I feel like you are the one not arguing in good faith. > Everything we're discussing is a hypothetical. In this scenario, they would tax that and everything else Your hypothetical is "the government taxes everything". Then someone asked, "how would that work?" and your response was "everything we're discussing is a hypothetical!". There are many obvious ideas around taxing wealth. The problem is that when…

> Your hypothetical is "the government taxes everything". Then someone asked, "how would that work?" and your response was "everything we're discussing is a hypothetical!" Because he was mixing reality with the hypothetical. He was saying the IRS doesn't work that way in reality, which has no bearing to the discussions we were having which is a hypothetical. I explicitly stated in a previous comment that the IRS woul…

You have proposed an idea which does not actually provide any solution to the difficult part of your idea, which is this bit: "this wealth is determined by the IRS".

"determined by the IRS" is passing the buck big time.

> In this scenario they do, so why does that matter?

Because you're skipping the most difficult and pertinent part of the solution. There's not much substance to proposing a wealth tax based on wealth brackets. All the difficulty and nuance of a wealth tax is in determining how to reasonably tax someone's wealth (E.g. assets and unrealized gains).

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#275

Post by xist »

LegitShady wrote: post #242
xist wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Businesses underpay and when they can't find people willing to impoverish themselves to work for them, they apply to the government to bring in "temporary foreign workers" - for things like fast food restaurant workers not essential business, keeping the wages down. > Temporary foreign workers and international students in canada are allowed to buy housing, so aside from renting the rich ones who make it here actua…

Some TFWs and international students some come from wealthy families in their home country and use whatever program they can to get into canada to get a foot in the door, and be allowed to buy a house here. I live in an east indian heavy neighborhood and I know a dozen people who were extremely rich before every coming to canada, far far more than the average canadian.

Make sense, rich people would have an easier time to immigrate. But how many of this dozen are here on TFW like you're suggesting?

I'm doubtful that it's TFW that are buying the properties you're concerned with, especially since they're still at the mercy of PR/work authorization laws that could make them leave the country at any time.

It _could_ happen, but that would be pretty exceptional. You want to complain about foreigners making house prices too high for you, you do you. Just be accurate in your complaints.

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#276

Post by peterashford »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #239
watrami wrote: post #103

It seems like it's the same story everywhere I look. Housing is the main driver of inequality and there is little change happening. We have the same problem here in Germany. I am currently living in Munich to finish my CS Master's at TUM and build a startup, and it is absolutely impossible to find anything remotely affordable. I am supported by two startup scholarships and make enough to get by, but no landlord even…

> It seems like it's the same story everywhere I look. Housing is the main driver of inequality and there is little change happening. It's a way of transferring money from younger adults to older adults, and older adults vote. It's basically an intergenerational pyramid scheme where each generation pays to the previous one, and each time they pay more. Of course, like any pyramid scheme, you can only keep it up so lo…

This is it. Nailed it

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#277

Post by mthoms »

gruez wrote: post #33
styren wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure, I live in a rent controller apartment and it certainly is great for the many people in my apartment who work in the city but could never pay the rents. Thankfully me and my girlfriend can afford and we're therefore planning to buy and lose our contract, but to be honest it probably going to go to someone who needs it. Because owning your own place, being able to modify it to your liking and having peopl…

> I'm not sure, I live in a rent controller apartment and it certainly is great for the many people in my apartment who work in the city but could never pay the rents. That's kind of like saying "What's so bad about zoning restrictions? I own a house and it's not affecting me at all!". Of course it's great for you and other people who have a rent controlled unit. The OP explicitly acknowledges this. The issue is for…

By the same token, op claimed rent control “never” works. But some places implement a sort of rent control that applies to all rental housing not just some. For instance, in B.C. rents are only allowed to be raised each year by a fixed percentage (calculated annually based on inflation I believe).

It’s not perfect by any stretch but all renters across the province do benefit equally.

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#278

Post by satvikpendem »

OnlineGladiator wrote: post #266
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically I feel like you are the one not arguing in good faith. > Everything we're discussing is a hypothetical. In this scenario, they would tax that and everything else Your hypothetical is "the government taxes everything". Then someone asked, "how would that work?" and your response was "everything we're discussing is a hypothetical!". There are many obvious ideas around taxing wealth. The problem is that when…

> Your hypothetical is "the government taxes everything". Then someone asked, "how would that work?" and your response was "everything we're discussing is a hypothetical!" Because he was mixing reality with the hypothetical. He was saying the IRS doesn't work that way in reality, which has no bearing to the discussions we were having which is a hypothetical. I explicitly stated in a previous comment that the IRS woul…

You're the one who brought the IRS, a concrete institution, into this hypothetical discussion, talking about "just [giving] them more money and resources to do their job, which would include wealth evaluation." Okay? So when I asked something like, how would this work, because this is such a hand-wavey answer as to be a non-answer entirely (how would they determine wealth evaluation? Sounds to me like you're saying, they just would), you couldn't answer.

The reality is, like the sibling comment says, just proposing a simple solution doesn't work, that's not the hard part. The hard part is actually exploring and understanding the problem of what actually happens were an institution such as the IRS be assessing wealth for taxation.

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#279

Post by timonoko »

Only difference between Sweden and Finland is that Finland stopped all rent regulation in 1985.

I was a landlord during that era, and after few years of turmoil, most rents started go down.

Nowadays the rents are mostly costs + 40% -(32% capital gains tax) ie worse than most other investment. You only invest on housing because you expect home ownership raise on that area.

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#280

Post by epivosism »

Aeolun wrote: post #187
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your GF gets rejected on a financial basis while making 75k euros? How expensive are the places she's trying to rent? > We are already looking to move to other places and created a university-wide google sheet where we compare different countries and cities around the world for those kinds of categories It seems like if you want to live anywhere that's desirable you have to pay an arm and a leg for rent, no matter wh…

Tokyo is pretty affordable. Certainly enough to have a whole range of options for €75000.

I like this video about the cost of housing in Tokyo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGbC5j4pG9w
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