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International investment and local rules push prices up faster than supply

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Re: International investment and local rules push prices up faster than supply

#41

Post by microgpt »

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #26
legitster wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of insane that you look at a city like San Francisco that's on a tiny bit of land in a desirable location and they absolutely refuse to build up. I get that their Victorian houses are pretty, but they're only about a 100 years old and they are now crammed full of people and cars. It's too young of a city to be sycophantically in love with its past self.

> 100 years old It’s 2026, they’re more like 140 year old by now :) > now crammed full of people and cars Funnily enough, if you look at the 1950 census, in every single building I have lived in in San Francisco, there were more people than there are now :). The city has so much underdeveloped land (come on, 2% of of the surface of of the second densest city in the US spent on the lowest density sport ever, golf???),…

Did they change how the census worked? Is any bureaucracy required to claim that you're in a building? Do census forms get forwarded to ICE?

Re: International investment and local rules push prices up faster than supply

#42

Post by microgpt »

mantas wrote: post #36
legitster wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of insane that you look at a city like San Francisco that's on a tiny bit of land in a desirable location and they absolutely refuse to build up. I get that their Victorian houses are pretty, but they're only about a 100 years old and they are now crammed full of people and cars. It's too young of a city to be sycophantically in love with its past self.

Where do you draw a line? 100 years? 200? 500? Especially if buildings age nicely and they’re still considered good-looking. I’m in Europe and here if people suggested to tear down some art noveau buildings because they’re just 100-150 years old… I’d be absolutely furious. Don’t get me started on buildings from 200 or 300 years ago. With US having much less old buildings, I totally get why people want to preserve suc…

Ultimately, variety is key. Let's keep a sample of them to remember the past, and build everywhere else? A city with a mix of building types is much more interesting than a monoculture.

Re: International investment and local rules push prices up faster than supply

#43

Post by dalyons »

carlosjobim wrote: post #32

Housing is globally unaffordable in the entire industrialized world. Everybody knows why, but people are desperately looking for scapegoats because the truth is too uncomfortable. The people to blame can easily be found among your own family and friends. It might even be you yourself. It is probably your parents. Everybody who works for a living has relatives who have become wealthy by real estate value appreciation.…

Having grown up in Australia I agree with everything you say. The percentage of property parasites as a % of the working population is staggering.

Agree with all except maybe this:

> It's a deliberately created problem by tying the money supply to housing as an effort to decrease the population.

I don’t think there’s a grand evil plan. it’s just people acting selfishly, on selfish incentives. It looks similar around the world because property rights and local planning controls look similar around the world, a huge number of such systems derived from common old Europe roots

Re: International investment and local rules push prices up faster than supply

#44

Post by microgpt »

uniqueusername7 wrote: post #28
roenxi wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When a good's supply is constrained, it becomes a store of value. See: gold. That doesn't make sense as stated, because every physical commodity is supply-constrained to some extent, even and especially the ones that are extremely bad stores of value. Picking on Fermium (it has a nice atomic number) - Fermium is supply constrained and it makes a horrible store of value because it rapidly morphs into something else.…

While houses depreciate, both they and the ground they are built on tend to have a very low chance of experiencing spontaneous transmutation, so I'm not sure how good of an example fermium is.

What if we added some kind of artificial spontaneous transmutation to housing? Maybe (this is really dumb but bear with me) every year 200 randomly chosen houses become the property of whoever is living in them at a random moment. What would happen?

Re: International investment and local rules push prices up faster than supply

#45

Post by microgpt »

pydry wrote: post #21
BobbyJo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a good's supply is constrained, it becomes a store of value. See: gold. Strangely enough, if housing got built in response to price increases, there would likely be less unused housing, because it would be seen less as a way to store capital.

When property taxes are higher housing is built more densely. This is because the store of value quickly becomes a millstone around the owner's neck if it isnt being used efficiently. That's a feature if you want a healthy city and a bug if you're one of the ultra wealthy. The UK is a bit like San Francisco in this respect. There are no property taxes, just something called a council tax (which is basically a poll ta…

Competition was supposed to save this though. You have to use it effectively otherwise your neighboring competitor takes all your customers.

Re: International investment and local rules push prices up faster than supply

#47

Post by microgpt »

fragmede wrote: post #12
kurthr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some 10-15% of San Francisco housing is unoccupied. The exact why and how to fix it are arguable, but I'm doubtful the investment is actually helping. https://www.pacificresearch.org/time-to-ask-why-so-many-san-...

Taxing empty housing seems like the obvious answer. Make it more expensive and more work to keep it empty than it is to fill it.

Which form do I file to claim that my empty house is not actually empty?

Re: International investment and local rules push prices up faster than supply

#48

Post by esalman »

leonidasrup wrote: post #4

All kinds of money: "Anyone who’s lived in London as long as I have can’t fail to notice that over the last 30 years, the city’s become awash with money. From the mid-90s onwards (the last time property was affordable to anyone on an average salary) shops have got more designer, cars faster, and property commands ever more eye-watering sums. Knightsbridge and Belgravia have become the playground of oligarchs and at t…

This. And it's not just the Russian oligarchs.

In 2024 a corrupt government was toppled in Bangladesh. In subsequent investigations it was revealed that just one member of the cabinet had bought more than 200 luxury properties across US, UK, and UAE.

The fact that the West welcomes black money from anybody and everybody causes both inflation to go up in the West and exploitation to prevail in less developed countries of the world.

Re: International investment and local rules push prices up faster than supply

#49

Post by cuvert »

carlosjobim wrote: post #32

Housing is globally unaffordable in the entire industrialized world. Everybody knows why, but people are desperately looking for scapegoats because the truth is too uncomfortable. The people to blame can easily be found among your own family and friends. It might even be you yourself. It is probably your parents. Everybody who works for a living has relatives who have become wealthy by real estate value appreciation.…

Am I the only one who barely knows people who think of making money by buying a house? In my circles, everyone buys a house to live in it and that's it. Same goes with NIMBYS, never met someone saying: "Don't build here because the value of my apartment/house goes down." What I've usually met, it's people who just been lucky because grandpa, grandma, and/or other very old relatives, usually after WW2, bought large plots of land and they build there something and now their younglings are asking incredible sums of money for rent or selling.

Re: International investment and local rules push prices up faster than supply

#50

Post by danny_codes »

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #26
legitster wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of insane that you look at a city like San Francisco that's on a tiny bit of land in a desirable location and they absolutely refuse to build up. I get that their Victorian houses are pretty, but they're only about a 100 years old and they are now crammed full of people and cars. It's too young of a city to be sycophantically in love with its past self.

> 100 years old It’s 2026, they’re more like 140 year old by now :) > now crammed full of people and cars Funnily enough, if you look at the 1950 census, in every single building I have lived in in San Francisco, there were more people than there are now :). The city has so much underdeveloped land (come on, 2% of of the surface of of the second densest city in the US spent on the lowest density sport ever, golf???),…

Good luck finding anyone in SF who wants to replace open space with more density. SF is amazingly lucky that it has so much green space and it's a big reason the city is so desirable. Increasing sprawl into our open spaces seems like a really bad idea to me (and I assume most people who live in SF). You could argue we should replace golfing with other green-space uses, and I'm sure you'd find takers, but for more sprawl? I doubt it.

Also I never understood this obsession with "heritage". Why not promote the next generation of SF architecture instead? Modernize the victorian into increased density, create something new and creative. Over time blend the new-ness with the old. This ideology of stasis seems at-odds with SF's image as an innovation hub, both technologically and culturally. Why should our architecture be stagnant when our ethos is to constantly push forward?

This is one of the big loses we've had to NIMBYism / prop 13 / regressive zoning. We could have such cool, interesting architectural advances, but ironically our perverse urban development incentive structure discourages those kinds of innovations.

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