111–120 of 347 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even without renters, most owners would prefer being house-poor rather than selling any extra houses they own.
House poor means you can’t afford to furnish the house you live in, not that real estate is your primary asset class.
The problem can not be solved by trying to manage supply or demand. We must ban the concept of the landlord entirely. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/19/end-of-... A landlord gets a loan from a bank to develop a residential property. That loan is paid by the tenants who live in that property. At the end of the day, the landlord owns the property. This is fundamentally unjust. If the tenant paid off…
So you want the government to be the only landlord or does everyone get their own home from the government (if they can’t afford one)?
Transpose the problem into a Taylor Swift concert and the problem becomes clearer: Everyone* wants to go see Taylor Swift. She comes to a stadium and the sell out is instant, the aftermarket is bloody and ruthless. The stadium has 90,000 seats, 2,000 floor spots, and they are gone before you can reload the ticket page. Taylor Swift is the embodiment of "good jobs". The stadium is the local housing market. Those VIP b…
There’s no such thing as “demand” in housing. Only supply. Housing has its own economics in which supply is the only solution ever put forward. Not a single politician or economist ever says that most dreaded and awful word “demand”. Property developers, politicians, economists, demographers, real estate agents, landlords all agree that supply supply supply will …….. errrr it will…… ummmmmm more supply will definitel…
Now if you want prices to go down, are you really going to do it by trying to decrease demand? What are you going to do, make your neighborhood a slum on purpose? Absolutely nobody is doing that. No matter how nice a place people live, they always want it to be nicer. They want better schools, nicer parks, clean streets, quality infrastructure. They want to attract nice businesses and cultural institutions. The probl…
Again none of this is something that benefits from heavily centralized control, unless you want cities to be expensive exclusive zones, and force poor people to only live in rarely built (and poorly maintained) government housing while the rest are forced out into sprawling suburbs, with just as restrictive building rules, which can only forever expand outward consuming forests and farmland + forcing more cars onto the highways.
Then everyone has to drive into the city for work, meaning a political base who doesn't care about downtown infrastructure like public transit that only serves a highly exclusive downtown.
That's a system where no one wins.
There’s no such thing as “demand” in housing. Only supply. Housing has its own economics in which supply is the only solution ever put forward. Not a single politician or economist ever says that most dreaded and awful word “demand”. Property developers, politicians, economists, demographers, real estate agents, landlords all agree that supply supply supply will …….. errrr it will…… ummmmmm more supply will definitel…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Demand isn't talked about because demand is solved by high prices. But, politically, we want to increase demand (by offering lower prices).
The demand is still there, it's just restricted. Someone living in the back of a van in a gym carpark on an industrial estate is typically doing that because the cost of a 1 bed flat is too high. Lowering prices allows that demand to be seen. In the UK 8.5 million people in England are facing some form of unmet housing need. That's more than 10% of the population. https://www.housing.org.uk/globalassets/files/people-…
It's not, though. That's the whole political contention. That demand is, because of high prices, not at the levels the population want to see.
Demand is defined as having desire and willingness to pay for a good or service. High prices maintains the desire in most cases, but chases off the willingness. That's the whole point of having prices!
> Even when it costs nothing, there's always a limit to demand.
Now you're describing a (technical) shortage: A situation where an external mechanism prevents price from rising. In a functioning market, buyers will pay more to stave off demand. But if price is forced to remain lower than people have the willingness to pay (free, in your example) then there is no control mechanism to see people back away from demand.
But that's not a problem in the housing market. If you have the desire and willingness to buy a home, you will have absolutely no trouble finding a home to buy. Price is doing its job.
The problem is for those who only have desire. They are not part of the demand, but that doesn't mean they don't want their desires filled. Hence the political push to see an increase in demand. i.e. Enabling those with only desire to also find willingness by finding a way to lower prices (which means addressing supply).
You know what always happens when the status quo everyone is depending on to get money changes? People freak out and they overreact. Everyone loves it when they can keep doing the same thing and make money and they hate it when it looks like that is going to change. You what what always happens a bit later? They adjust to the new normal and make money slightly differently and then get used to that and don't want that…
> Let's keep moving towards what will benefit everyone And what is that?
They can't be rationed with.
Social housing is the only thing that will really work.
This article is a mess. From the third paragraph: > What happens when prices actually start to fall? Because that’s not just a hypothetical. It’s already happening in places like Phoenix, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas... Then two paragraphs later > In The Atlantic, Rogé Karma recently pointed out that housing prices are rising fastest in the very cities once seen as escapes from high-cost coasts, places like Phoenix and Dal…
3. Financ[ing] entry-level housing locally by using the city’s position to unlock favorable financing without incurring unprotected financial risk.
while performing the patented Obi Wan Jedi Hand Wave I would think.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now if you want prices to go down, are you really going to do it by trying to decrease demand? What are you going to do, make your neighborhood a slum on purpose? Absolutely nobody is doing that. No matter how nice a place people live, they always want it to be nicer. They want better schools, nicer parks, clean streets, quality infrastructure. They want to attract nice businesses and cultural institutions. The probl…
> No matter how nice a place people live, they always want it to be nicer. I'm trying to make sense of your argument. No matter how nice a vehicle people have, they always want to have a nicer one. But we don't see normal cars costing 50-80 years of your life to purchase.
A public park, a street, a school, these also depreciate, but most of them can not be thrown out and replaced like a car. They require constant maintenance. They also have nearly unlimited capacity for upgrades. The school gym can get new equipment. The street can be repaved. The park can get new landscaping. Wherever you live, the public amenities can always be improved. There is always demand from the residents to make those improvements.
Nobody ever tells their town to uglify the neighborhood. They always ask to beautify it. That means they are always asking to increase demand, and therefore to increase housing prices.