Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New US homeownership measure puts people first

minneapolisfed.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 394 posts

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#281

Post by swiftcoder »

TimorousBestie wrote: post #262
vel0city wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The south and mid atlantic was always a huge share of the population. The population share of the South and West regions of the US have grown while the population share of the Northeast and Midwest have shrunk. https://www.census.gov/popclock/data_tables.php?component=gr... What are the fastest growing metro areas in the US these days? DFW, Austin, Houston, Phoenix, Orlando, Atlanta, Raleigh, Tampa, Nashville. Whic…

To your point about high humidity exacerbating heat, I think it’s relevant to consider wet bulb globe temperatures (WBGT) instead of air temperature. It’s more objective than heat index or the ad hoc “feels like” metrics. Above 30-35C WBGT, humans start dying without intervention. In the United States at least, days with high WBGT have increased and more places experience them. I hear the same is true also in Europe.

They are increasing in Europe, yes, and unlike the American southwest, any sort of artificial cooling is pretty uncommon in most of Europe.

On the flip side, the cost of cooling is steadily falling due to government incentives to replace oil-fired boilers with heat pumps, and the rapid growth of solar driving down daytime market prices for electricity.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#282

Post by tokioyoyo »

ecshafer wrote: post #192

Housing can not be a viable asset class, or it will continue to rise in prices. Step 1 is Land Value Taxes. Step 2 is remove/greatly reduce zoning, allow construction and streamline the process. If you allow density, building up, and incentivize it, then it will be built. Developers spend tens of thousands of dollars in permits and interest payments before they can put a shovel in the ground. Being a landlord isn't r…

I’ve been part of housing-related online discussions for a decade now, and everything reads like a wish-list.

- Majority of people own their homes. So it’s in their best interest for the housing prices at the very least not go down.

- Less, but still, some amount of people are buying houses with sky high prices. After a huge purchase, they will also do their best to ensure prices don’t go down.

- Another good chunk of people are waiting out to inherit homes from their parents.

All these people, in one way or another, will protect asset prices (e.g. voting for certain people to ensure nothing gets built). The only ways I can see it being resolved is:

- China-style benevolent dictatoresque commitment to surgical detachment of housing prices from the general economy (they’re trying, a lot of people are unhappy, but some progress is visible)

- Population collapse, to reduce the demand. But looking at Japan, metro areas will keep skyrocketing, because people will flock to the main cities even more

Any of the options will make a lot of people unhappy. A huge political no-go zone.

All the talks about allowing construction and streamlining the process have been circulated for a decade+ at this point. But incentives for people aren’t there. “I got mine, don’t care about you” is the general attitude of majority of people.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#283

Post by profdevloper »

ecshafer wrote: post #192

Housing can not be a viable asset class, or it will continue to rise in prices. Step 1 is Land Value Taxes. Step 2 is remove/greatly reduce zoning, allow construction and streamline the process. If you allow density, building up, and incentivize it, then it will be built. Developers spend tens of thousands of dollars in permits and interest payments before they can put a shovel in the ground. Being a landlord isn't r…

Why is immigration always absent from these discussions on HN? the US has absorbed millions of people through immigration (both legal and illegal) which puts pressure on housing supply which drives up prices since supply is relatively inelastic. Enforcement of immigration policy would increase housing supply without needing to build more capacity in the short term and would lower prices.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#284

Post by jandrewrogers »

all2 wrote: post #265
FloatArtifact wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get rid of property tax or somebody below a certain income.

Property tax is theft. By applying a tax to a _thing_ that someone owns, you are saying 'actually, this thing you have is mine, and if you don't pay me for the privilege of having it, I will take it away from you'.

Property tax pays for maintaining the utilities and services connected to the property. If you buy land that is completely unconnected from public services, you will find that the corresponding property taxes are extremely low.

I've had annual property taxes as low as $1/acre.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#285

Post by all2 »

itake wrote: post #269
all2 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Property tax is theft. By applying a tax to a _thing_ that someone owns, you are saying 'actually, this thing you have is mine, and if you don't pay me for the privilege of having it, I will take it away from you'.

Maybe I'm beating a dead horse, but who pays for the roads to houses in the suburbs and why is it the people living in apartments that don't use many roads?

I'm not saying taxes are bad. I'm saying specifically that taxing property itself is bad. If someone 'owns' a thing, why would they pay rent to some landlord (the state)?

I acknowledge that I'm indulging in equivocation by saying 'assessing taxes from property is essentially paying rent to the state'. I assert that the equivocation is valid because the outcomes of not paying rent and not paying property taxes is the same: you get evicted.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#286

Post by tndibona »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #256
tndibona wrote: post #73

Actually I don't think this metric goes far enough. In my opinion a homeowner should "own" their home. I.e should have majority equity in his or her home. An owner who pays 3% down is basically a risk bearer for the bank. The bank really owns the majority and is renting out the "owner". I don't think my opinion is fringe. It does measure the risks of not being able to make rent and getting evicted.

That's not a useful metric, because the mortgage interest deduction means that it's almost always financially optimal to take out a mortgage even if you have the assets to pay cash.

Point taken. But surely there must be a way to account for that. Can we assume if the net asset value of the individual is greater than the value of the house by some percentage? Then they are owners instead of renters.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#287

Post by MiscCompFacts »

profdevloper wrote: post #283
ecshafer wrote: post #192

Housing can not be a viable asset class, or it will continue to rise in prices. Step 1 is Land Value Taxes. Step 2 is remove/greatly reduce zoning, allow construction and streamline the process. If you allow density, building up, and incentivize it, then it will be built. Developers spend tens of thousands of dollars in permits and interest payments before they can put a shovel in the ground. Being a landlord isn't r…

Why is immigration always absent from these discussions on HN? the US has absorbed millions of people through immigration (both legal and illegal) which puts pressure on housing supply which drives up prices since supply is relatively inelastic. Enforcement of immigration policy would increase housing supply without needing to build more capacity in the short term and would lower prices.

It was pointed out to me recently that immigration crackdown has maybe already started to affect housing prices in DFW since H1B crackdown. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2026-dallas-h1b-housing-m...

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#288

Post by autoexec »

anal_reactor wrote: post #280
pixl97 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>we have historically low average number of people per house. I'd like to see the actual statistics method used to calculate that. Saying it's marriages alone just doesn't past the smell test for me. Just because people aren't married doesn't mean they don't live together and the number of unmarried people living together is higher than ever. What makes far more sense is the number of children people have has fallen…

https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2024/36/1-op-de-5-mensen-woo... It's basically this graph. In 60's almost nobody was living alone (less than 400k people). In 2024 about 3,3 million people live alone. When you look at the infographic, ages 30-60 add up to like 1,2 million people. https://www.volkshuisvestingnederland.nl/onderwerpen/aanpak-... Here we have an estimation that the country is missing like 400k houses. So…

> In 60's almost nobody was living alone (less than 400k people).

In the US, back in the 1960s you could own a home, a car, and support a family all on a single income. If we got back to that home ownership would skyrocket.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#289

Post by HaZeust »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #282
ecshafer wrote: post #192

Housing can not be a viable asset class, or it will continue to rise in prices. Step 1 is Land Value Taxes. Step 2 is remove/greatly reduce zoning, allow construction and streamline the process. If you allow density, building up, and incentivize it, then it will be built. Developers spend tens of thousands of dollars in permits and interest payments before they can put a shovel in the ground. Being a landlord isn't r…

I’ve been part of housing-related online discussions for a decade now, and everything reads like a wish-list. - Majority of people own their homes. So it’s in their best interest for the housing prices at the very least not go down. - Less, but still, some amount of people are buying houses with sky high prices. After a huge purchase, they will also do their best to ensure prices don’t go down. - Another good chunk o…

I've always wondered if UBI can replace the category of "viable asset class" that homes are now, wherein UBI offers upward mobility now AND generational wealthy in the future - the same way owning a house does. Wouldn't that be a valid populist play, an actual policy rooted in pragmatic, and all-around a winning strategy?

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#290

Post by jltsiren »

ch4s3 wrote: post #211
jltsiren wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I meant by "largely stopped existing". With the decline of agriculture, there was a major decline in food production and therefore a major decline in population.

Again, you don't see a major decline in population in many cases based on the archeology. Insofar as we can tell people would spread out a bit away from the cities. In the fertile crescent early city states attempted to corral people in to controlled zones of production. Absent coercion, people didn't die they just moved.

If you are basing your claims on Against the Grain, Scott focuses on early centralized states, which emerged thousands of years after agriculture and towns.

Such states were by definition exceptional. Most of them were in regions, where rainfall alone was insufficient, and agriculture dependend on irrigation. Such a dependence on centralized infrastructure favored state formation, but it also made the communities fragile. Local population collapses were common everywhere, but the fragility made them worse. When the irrigation infrastructure failed, harvests failed, the town failed, and the survivors dispersed.

But agriculture spread long before states. Where the local conditions were favorable, agricultural communities naturally had a surplus of labor. If there was unclaimed land available, landless men and women would occasionally split from the community and start a new one. That was the primary mechanism of the spread of agriculture.

Post reply on HN