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MIT 11.350: Sustainable Real Estate

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Re: MIT 11.350: Sustainable Real Estate

#111

Post by nradov »

mdp2021 wrote: post #110
nradov wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you joking? Regular houses are nowhere near a million dollars in most of the country.

But where do you need to live? 237 cities does not mean "very special places". See (hours fresh article): > A Thursday report from Zillow indicates that a typical starter home is now worth $1 million or more in 237 cities, up from 84 cities in 2019, underscoring America’s ongoing home affordability crisis https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/26/business/more-starter-hom...

You don't "need" to live anywhere in particular. Many of those 237 cities are part of larger high-cost metro areas.

Move to the Columbus, OH area (or something like that). There are plenty of affordable homes for sale there. Or buy cheap vacant land and build whatever you want. The unemployment rate is low so it's not hard to find a job. Some people are just too picky about location and only want to complain or find excuses instead of doing something to improve their situation.

Re: MIT 11.350: Sustainable Real Estate

#112

Post by yonran »

wholinator2 wrote: post #86
yonran wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is not that rents are too low and sales prices are too high, which might make it appropriate to punish renting a unit and force landlords to sell. The problem is too few of both rental and ownership units.

I see this point oft repeated, usually as a shut-down for the above arguments. But i also see people claiming the complete opposite for their localities (that there are many many extra vacant homes being held than people that need them). It seems like the initial wave of arguments cited tons of statistics but over the months we've just stopped doing that for some reason as everyone's opinions have crystallized. Stati…

I think the best person who explains housing trends is Kevin Erdmann. This article provides an overview of his conceptual model for why prices fell nationwide in the Great Recession (people with bad credit were prohibited from getting a mortgage), why both prices and rents have been increasing since the Great Recession (when the Fed reduced prices too low, the construction industry collapsed), and why it is a mistake to attack build-to-rent landlords (they are a major source of new supply today). https://www.mercatus.org/research/policy-briefs/getting-corp...

Re: MIT 11.350: Sustainable Real Estate

#113

Post by JumpCrisscross »

amluto wrote: post #84
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an actual human needs to be registered as living in that house and live there Relatives. Again, these measures have been implemented across the world. Miraculously, nobody owns two homes. In cities, where competition for land is fiercest, I would further fully expect the tax to be borne by tenants. Because nothing was fundamentally fixed about the supply-demand mismatch.

Did you read the second half of my comment? If each human only gets to reduce tax on, say $500k of residence, then relatives are of limited value for abusing the system. And some of those relatives may prefer to claim their exemption on their own homes…

This is a progressive property-tax system. It works because it avoids counting houses. (It's different because houses are discrete. Housing value is not. Dividing discrete assets is trivial. Dividing continuous ones is not.)

Re: MIT 11.350: Sustainable Real Estate

#114

Post by kkfx »

Mh, I do not see the whole course but... The sustainable real estate is one who can evolve because the best energetic performances of today will be very bad performances tomorrow and the "ideal design" for today will be a very bad one tomorrow. So essentially only small buildings are sustainable because they can be made in an "industrial-like" manner (meaning the same design can fit pretty any needs with just minor changes) and changing them is sufficiently cheap.

Beware that in the past a condo was cheaper than a home per apartment because there was only one roof, a bit less in equipment and so on. BUT that's in the past where there was not much about anti-seismic design, fire safety, HVAC and so on. Today a modern "green" condo cost more in raw materials than equivalent single family homes PLUS the condo can't evolve. A tower? Even FAR worse. Just the mere structure need more steel than homes, just the elevators alone cost more. Similarly modern rails cost MORE than people moving with personal cars. The narrative of course it's the opposite because finance capitalism need big things and profit from rent and services in such setups, but the narrative and the reality are really different.

Today the sustainable real estate economy is those of spread single-family homes mixed with small commercial buildings (sheds, essentially) to reduce significantly the amount of commuting residents needs just to buy some groceries, modern small buildings built locally with mass produced components produced around the territory in most cases in not so big setups simply because there are standards like home appliances sizes or Chinese battery tools connectors (the same battery works essentially any tool from any vendor) or cars (yes, most component of Chinese cars are the same even if cars came from various brands). Essentially today sustainable real estate is a FLOSS/open hardware one spread/personal and built around the world without megafactories for most of the component (we still need some big scale for steel, for some electronics, mining etc, but not much more). This real estate of course is VERY opposed by any means by large actors who know well this model is for individual ownership, SMEs not for them.

Re: MIT 11.350: Sustainable Real Estate

#115

Post by jjav »

jmyeet wrote: post #2

We need to stop treating real restate--especially residential real estate--as a mechanism for creating wealth. there are enough homeowners that they vote for politicians and policies that will increase the value of their "investments". All this does is simply steal money from the next generation. Our entire economic system is designed to transfer wealth from the young and poor and the old and wealthy. There is a dist…

> We need to stop treating real restate--especially residential real estate--as a mechanism for creating wealth.

It's not about treating it this or that way though.

Owning a house is creating wealth, it's not something you can avoid. How could this ever not be the case?

We all agree a home is valuable. So if you buy one (and pay for it over many years), you're acquiring something valuable. As opposed to throwing money away in rent. That's it, you built some wealth. There's no way to make it not be valuable.

Re: MIT 11.350: Sustainable Real Estate

#116

Post by kilotaras »

bryananderson wrote: post #25
jmyeet wrote: post #2

We need to stop treating real restate--especially residential real estate--as a mechanism for creating wealth. there are enough homeowners that they vote for politicians and policies that will increase the value of their "investments". All this does is simply steal money from the next generation. Our entire economic system is designed to transfer wealth from the young and poor and the old and wealthy. There is a dist…

I’m sorry to be negative because I agree with the general sentiment that society needs to stop treating “home value go up” as its primary retirement plan, and get rid of our allergy to social housing, but that first Guardian article about banning rental housing is just so bad on so many levels. He says Britain doesn’t have a housing shortage because the ratio of homes to households hasn’t changed even as prices have…

> homes to households hasn’t changed even as prices have gone up

Office for National Statistics (ONS) definition of a household: one person living alone, or a group of people (not necessarily related) living at the same address who share cooking facilities and share a living room, sitting room, or dining area.

By that definition (occupied homes)/households is always about 1, so homes/households is pretty much just homes/(occupied homes).

Re: MIT 11.350: Sustainable Real Estate

#117

Post by amluto »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #113
amluto wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the second half of my comment? If each human only gets to reduce tax on, say $500k of residence, then relatives are of limited value for abusing the system. And some of those relatives may prefer to claim their exemption on their own homes…

This is a progressive property-tax system. It works because it avoids counting houses. (It's different because houses are discrete. Housing value is not. Dividing discrete assets is trivial. Dividing continuous ones is not.)

I personally think that progressive taxes and benefits can be quite reasonable, as long as they’re kept simple and non-discriminatory. As soon as the designs start to get clever and, say, phase benefits out with increasing wealth or income, they break down quickly.

Medicaid would be an example of getting it very, very wrong.

Re: MIT 11.350: Sustainable Real Estate

#118

Post by addicted »

leehuffman wrote: post #64
hahahacorn wrote: post #5

Genuine Question, why can't we just charge a federal property tax 3-4x local property taxes for individuals who own >1 property (which would likely be distributed back to the locality, specifics not important), apply the same rules we do for pass-through taxation to mitigate loopholes, and automatically charge this elevated rate for properties owned by non-natural persons? I think this would just price in the externa…

> Genuine Question, why can't we just charge a federal property tax 3-4x local property taxes for individuals who own >1 property (which would likely be distributed back to the locality, specifics not important) I am that person. I own two duplexes in addition to my primary residence, for a total of four residential rental units – all 2/1s made up of ~750 sq ft each. Those additional properties that I own provide hou…

If we assume that there is no way around this, and the options you suggest are the only options available. Actually, for the sake of argument, let’s further assume that the only option is the worse option. Razing and putting SFH instead.

That still doesn’t mean anything. Nearly any action, private, public, regulatory, or otherwise, will always have impacts that are on their own negative. The real question is how common your scenario is and as a result how do the negatives weigh against the benefits of the action.

Re: MIT 11.350: Sustainable Real Estate

#119

Post by HPsquared »

nradov wrote: post #106
HPsquared wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Houses are like a million dollars. Some plumbing is maybe 10k?

Are you joking? Regular houses are nowhere near a million dollars in most of the country.

I'm talking about the places with housing shortages where it might make sense to spend money converting an office block.

Re: MIT 11.350: Sustainable Real Estate

#120

Post by pxmpxm »

hahahacorn wrote: post #5

Genuine Question, why can't we just charge a federal property tax 3-4x local property taxes for individuals who own >1 property (which would likely be distributed back to the locality, specifics not important), apply the same rules we do for pass-through taxation to mitigate loopholes, and automatically charge this elevated rate for properties owned by non-natural persons? I think this would just price in the externa…

And you suppose this will solve, what, exactly - besides destryong the rental market and new construction?
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