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

Making housing more affordable means your home's value will have to come down

theglobeandmail.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 192 posts

Re: Making housing more affordable means your home's value will have to come down

#121

Post by s1artibartfast »

servus45678981 wrote: post #118
s1artibartfast wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homes are and should always be an investment because they are. They dont have to beat the stock market, but a well maintained home should track inflation at least. They have real and huge replacement costs in materials and labor. If my house burnt down, it would cost $1M to rebuild. Im all for cheap simple houses for those with less money. However, unless they are so cheap as to be disposable, they too will be invest…

I think it would be the best if everyone was forced to live in a flat, which size is determined by the number of people living in that Appartement. It is cool for you that your house is valued at 1 million; that proves my point even more. A house shouldn‘t be an Investment, but your education.

good luck with that. I don't think there is a country on the planet with such radical communism. Maybe some locations at the height of the cold war.

I dont think it is cool that my house costs so much to produce, It would be great if it could be produced more cheaply.

>A house shouldn‘t be an Investment, but your education.

What does this mean? did you leave out several words?

Re: Making housing more affordable means your home's value will have to come down

#122

Post by HDThoreaun »

ElectricBoogie wrote: post #14
daft_pink wrote: post #9

It’s going to be very difficult to make housing more affordable with high interest rates and high inflation. I highly doubt just increasing supply is going to be enough.

Investment banks will just buy up any affordable housing.

Housing is only a good investment if supply is artificially constrained. If we let people build it banks wont want it

Re: Making housing more affordable means your home's value will have to come down

#123

Post by HDThoreaun »

bilsbie wrote: post #32

I think it’s weird we haven’t made any new cities in what, 100 years? We just keep trying to crowd into existing places.

We settled the best spots already. There are huge economic returns for living in an urban area with other people, so its hard to bootstrap new cities. I think it would basically require starting as a company town. Epic medical records sort of did this in Madison

Re: Making housing more affordable means your home's value will have to come down

#124

Post by happytoexplain »

I can't speak for the urban situation, but I don't care about my home value (to a point). I care about the quality of my community. I care about that a lot. Dense housing put in an area that isn't dense just because the area is high-demand is often not productive in the long run, as the effects it can have on the existing community range from nothing (a net positive though, since now there's more housing) to abject disaster.

Part of this is housing, but part of it is just people wanting to live in a high-demand location and thereby tempting politicians and developers. You can satisfy the important part (housing) without the bad part by prioritizing building outward. Create more communities, which have the opportunity to become high-demand, instead of destroying places people have worked hard to live in and in which people have developed solidarity and community.

Re: Making housing more affordable means your home's value will have to come down

#125

Post by voisin »

happytoexplain wrote: post #115
voisin wrote: post #92

The only solution to the housing affordability crisis palatable to current homeowners is to build many new homes of a totally different type that can not be readily substituted. This is already happening where new housing tends to be denser, stacked (apartments) or closer together (row houses). Of course there is some overlap, but to the extent overlap and substitutability can be minimized, current homeowners can enj…

>homes of a totally different type that can not be readily substituted Can you explain what this means? What does "substituted" mean in this context?

People generally wont substitute a single family home on a large lot for a condo on the 16th floor of a building. So if you build a lot of condos and stacked townhomes, etc, then it wouldn’t necessarily affect the price of single family homes on large lots. So young people can get into the housing market without affecting boomer retirement plans (their houses).

Re: Making housing more affordable means your home's value will have to come down

#126

Post by HDThoreaun »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #111
kiba wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how we get urban sprawl in the first place, and it is not a working strategy in the long run. Cities benefit from high urban density, and reducing density means less benefit.

Cities are trash in my opinion. I don't want to live in a city. I'm happy to visit them once every few months, enjoy the cream of the crop of their culture, then leave and forget about them. It's not worth enduring the constant bullshit, traffic, $10 coffee and $20 cocktails so that you have instant access to culture, the mid live culture that's on offer half the time is less appealing than internet content I could c…

This is certainly as valid opinion, but just looking at the cost of housing makes it pretty clear that we have a shortage of housing in cities, and an excess of it in bumfuck where you want it to be built. Lucky for you your preference is to live where its already cheap.

Re: Making housing more affordable means your home's value will have to come down

#127

Post by CuriouslyC »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #126
CuriouslyC wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cities are trash in my opinion. I don't want to live in a city. I'm happy to visit them once every few months, enjoy the cream of the crop of their culture, then leave and forget about them. It's not worth enduring the constant bullshit, traffic, $10 coffee and $20 cocktails so that you have instant access to culture, the mid live culture that's on offer half the time is less appealing than internet content I could c…

This is certainly as valid opinion, but just looking at the cost of housing makes it pretty clear that we have a shortage of housing in cities, and an excess of it in bumfuck where you want it to be built. Lucky for you your preference is to live where its already cheap.

There's a shortage of housing in cities because it's nearly impossible to build in most of them. That's why Dallas and Houston are cleaning up. Hence the original article.

Also, if by bumblefuck nowhere you mean places like Santa Ynez instead of San Francisco, then yes please.

Re: Making housing more affordable means your home's value will have to come down

#128

Post by kkfx »

"making housing more affordable" means start to spread, meaning leaving big dense cities where real estate value is absurdly high, to build a distributed population were LAND value depend much more on the local land characteristics (a safe place for flooding, landslides and so on or not, an easy accessible land or not, ...) than human structure around and is a substantial part of the house price. This means build new, well insulated, ventilated homes with p.v. for all reasonable latitude, and so on.

Like it or not big cities have a future of big ghettos for poor and desperate and the real estate value there will surely drop retargeted to mere local human exploitability index (or hum much you can milk from the desperate before they start looking for you without friendly and civil intents).

Personally I left the big city for a nice mountain area where I built a new home, unfortunately for me my parents (who start to be a bit elder) do not want even if they can economically leave the city, so I'll suffer indirectly the easy foreseeable high entertainment costs of city classic buildings (at least here in EU, where most buildings are terribly designed and for another era) then the big drop of real estate value (plus taxes who will NOT drop) but I've NOTHING against that, it's simply a fact any rational human see if he/she do not want to be blind, the point is that if we start debating and moving slowly with public support we can transform the inevitable storm in an opportunity, otherwise it will be just another 1929-alike crisis probably covered by a concomitant global war.

Re: Making housing more affordable means your home's value will have to come down

#129

Post by fragmede »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #47
r0ckarong wrote: post #20

I really don't give a shit about the financial value of my home to someone else. Sure, my mortgage is calculated on it and I'll be paying that for the rest of my life but the true "value" of my home is the quality of life my family and I can enjoy here. What you're talking about is how much money some investor can make off of the desire of people to have this quality of life value for themselves. And quite honestly i…

I think you are an outlier if resale value doesnt matter. It matters to me for many reasons I doubt you find sickening or sinister. It matters because my family might want or need to move for work. It also forms a major part of my retirement, and how I will feed and take care of myself in advanced age It makes perfect sense that it has financial value to someone else, because it would take a tremendous amount of mate…

what part of your house are you going to eat in your advanced age? if you sell your house, you no longer have a house. What is your plan? Sell your house for money, move to somewhere cheaper, and use that money to live? What will you do when housing is too expensive elsewhere as well? Is uprooting your life near the end when you need the most care really the ultimate plan?

Re: Making housing more affordable means your home's value will have to come down

#130

Post by fragmede »

daft_pink wrote: post #9

It’s going to be very difficult to make housing more affordable with high interest rates and high inflation. I highly doubt just increasing supply is going to be enough.

limitations on what people can buy aren't popular but forcing housing to be owned by local people, who have a stake in the local community, rather than an REIT with investors 5 states away that are only interested in returns, or even an overseas owner. Taxing rental income harshly and the gains from the sale of housing would also contribute to making investment property less attractive, though there are second order effects to consider.

still, I think building more really is what's needed, so subsidies for building would be a great way to stimulate building, as well as better funding for city permit departments, and also challenges to more egregious zoning restrictions.

Post reply on HN