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

Rents for the rich are going down, rents for the poor are going up. Why?

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 257 posts

Re: Rents for the rich are going down, rents for the poor are going up. Why?

#141

Post by WalterBright »

roguecoder wrote: post #17

While the article is interesting, there is one dynamic it missed: tech debt. Starting around 1975, housing supply stopped keeping up with the growth of housing demand. It picked back up fifteen years later, around 1990: https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-goldilocks-problem-of... (But that is on a national level: in the West, in comparison, housing growth hasn't been sufficient to house the new households formed a…

> Starting around 1975, housing supply stopped keeping up with the growth of housing demand.

That correlates with the boomers entering the housing market.

Re: Rents for the rich are going down, rents for the poor are going up. Why?

#142

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Lammy wrote: post #121
bathtub365 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain the significance of this correlation?

Have you ever seen people talk about how the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution outlaws slavery "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted", leading to the modern prison-industrial complex that overwhelmingly targets black Americans with arrests for petty crimes and traps them in The System? https://sites.lib.jmu.edu/civic/2020/09/17/slaves-of-the-sta... The ECOA makes it il…

> The exception is that discrimination is still totally legal if the person just can't afford the home.

It's also important to remember how this applies to school districts. If you exclude the poor from your neighborhood, you also exclude them from your school district. (This explains part of the otherwise unexpected opposition to school vouchers by college-educated affluent Democrats and the support for them by rural Republicans in bad school districts, when the vouchers would allow students to escape bad school districts.)

> As Atari once told me, Do The Math: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OEHRENWBSHNO

Interestingly the steep curve on the graph is caused in large part by misguided policies claimed to increase home ownership (which is not really possible without increasing the housing supply). You can clearly see the "give mortgages to everybody regardless of whether they can afford it" policies leading up to the housing crisis, followed by the housing crisis, followed by more than a decade of near-zero interest rates inflating housing costs.

It looks like we had completely reinflated the housing bubble by 2016 and have only gone up from there, so that's... not ideal.

Though artificial housing scarcity is still a separate and real problem that compounds with this.

Re: Rents for the rich are going down, rents for the poor are going up. Why?

#143

Post by kube-system »

fowkswe wrote: post #138
toomuchtodo wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old houses in the US come with a lot of costs. They're usually poorly insulated, need to be brought up to code when renovations are performed, can have electrical and plumbing systems that need to be replaced in their entirety, and sometimes are just hard to insure in general (insurers can cancel your homeowners policy on any home in Florida over 40 years old at their discretion when your policy comes up for renewal)…

'Old' houses in the US are different than old houses in the UK. Old in the US usually means 1930s/40s/50s and the majority of that housing stock was poorly constructed leading to the problems that @toomuchtodo alluded to. In the few places where we truly have old houses (19th century) - the North East and central parts of some cities - they do, usually, command a premium.

Usually when I've seen 19th century homes for sale at premium prices, it's because they're of a desirable architecture in old-money neighborhoods and have been well maintained for their entire existence. I think it might be a bit of a survivorship bias.

Re: Rents for the rich are going down, rents for the poor are going up. Why?

#144

Post by [deleted] »

rainyMammoth wrote: post #49
majormajor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't get the same leverage nearly as safely or as easily in the stock market, which is why so many people start to play landlord with second, third, etc, properties that they finance. What changed in the last year is that people want a lot more space which is pulling them out of the "expensive apartment" market and into the "house" market, while also being less concerned about commute distance. So the expensive…

Even with the leverage, it is in most cases still not a good investment. There are a lot of calculator out there that shows you the break even point between renting and buying. You forget all the horrible fees that come with owning a place (HOA, maintenance, property taxes, 6% lost to agents at every transaction)

[deleted]

Re: Rents for the rich are going down, rents for the poor are going up. Why?

#145

Post by toomuchtodo »

kube-system wrote: post #143
fowkswe wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Old' houses in the US are different than old houses in the UK. Old in the US usually means 1930s/40s/50s and the majority of that housing stock was poorly constructed leading to the problems that @toomuchtodo alluded to. In the few places where we truly have old houses (19th century) - the North East and central parts of some cities - they do, usually, command a premium.

Usually when I've seen 19th century homes for sale at premium prices, it's because they're of a desirable architecture in old-money neighborhoods and have been well maintained for their entire existence. I think it might be a bit of a survivorship bias.

Look at the HVAC system (typically boilers/hydronics of various vintages). If they're in good shape, it's likely the rest of the home as been similarly kept up, as that's one of the more expensive systems in such a home to keep in working order.

Re: Rents for the rich are going down, rents for the poor are going up. Why?

#146

Post by pasquinelli »

rogerdickey wrote: post #13

It's not "rents for the rich" it's "rents for higher priced apartments" and it's basic supply & demand. This headline stokes unnecessary class conflict. WaPo should be ashamed.

right, and anyway the rich collect rent.

Re: Rents for the rich are going down, rents for the poor are going up. Why?

#147

Post by BoorishBears »

powersnail wrote: post #40
jakelazaroff wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is renting higher priced apartments if not the rich?

Aren't most rich people living in their own houses? I'd imagine most higher priced apartment renters are middle class.

Across the street from me in a similar building to mine with condos instead of rentals, a studio goes for 1M.

Unless I'm set on living in NYC for the rest of my life I'm not buying real estate here.

I imagine most people apply the same logic

Re: Rents for the rich are going down, rents for the poor are going up. Why?

#148

Post by asdff »

gnicholas wrote: post #116
roguecoder wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

San Francisco also has 26 skyscrapers to Chicago's 130. 80% of the Bay Area is zoned exclusive for single family, to Chicago's 41.1%. It's not landscape and it's not rocket science: it's zoning. San Francisco could build up, letting people live closer to their work & be much better for the environment than encouraging sprawl, but chooses not to. Y'all decided to make housing expensive, so it is.

Zoning is absolutely a big part of this. Though I would expect SF to have fewer skyscrapers than Chicago even if it weren't for zoning differences, given the earthquake risk. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/03/us/earthquake...

There's no reason why the bay area couldn't look like Tokyo today. Earthquake risks in both places.

Re: Rents for the rich are going down, rents for the poor are going up. Why?

#149

Post by coryrc »

gnicholas wrote: post #116
roguecoder wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

San Francisco also has 26 skyscrapers to Chicago's 130. 80% of the Bay Area is zoned exclusive for single family, to Chicago's 41.1%. It's not landscape and it's not rocket science: it's zoning. San Francisco could build up, letting people live closer to their work & be much better for the environment than encouraging sprawl, but chooses not to. Y'all decided to make housing expensive, so it is.

Zoning is absolutely a big part of this. Though I would expect SF to have fewer skyscrapers than Chicago even if it weren't for zoning differences, given the earthquake risk. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/03/us/earthquake...

That's why there are so few skyscrapers in Tokyo, Taipei, etc

Re: Rents for the rich are going down, rents for the poor are going up. Why?

#150

Post by [deleted] »

fowkswe wrote: post #138
toomuchtodo wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old houses in the US come with a lot of costs. They're usually poorly insulated, need to be brought up to code when renovations are performed, can have electrical and plumbing systems that need to be replaced in their entirety, and sometimes are just hard to insure in general (insurers can cancel your homeowners policy on any home in Florida over 40 years old at their discretion when your policy comes up for renewal)…

'Old' houses in the US are different than old houses in the UK. Old in the US usually means 1930s/40s/50s and the majority of that housing stock was poorly constructed leading to the problems that @toomuchtodo alluded to. In the few places where we truly have old houses (19th century) - the North East and central parts of some cities - they do, usually, command a premium.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN