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Public-ownership rental as a third option to renting or owning a house

theatlantic.com

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Re: Public-ownership rental as a third option to renting or owning a house

#171

Post by [deleted] »

closeparen wrote: post #116
eulenteufel wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking about the principles laid down in the article: a) Do not require significant initial funds for buying b) Do not have other people profit of the housing A simple solution congruent with these principles could be: Selling the house should be restricted to yield the amount of money you put in. This excludes money spend on repairs, etc., and is to be adjusted for inflation. You can keep living in the house as lo…

The interesting problems in a price cap system are about allocation. You’ve torn down one way of deciding who gets the house next. What do you replace it with? Do the neighbors vote on their next neighbor? The city council? An impersonal bureaucracy? What factors does it consider? Are there priority quotas for people meeting certain criteria? What criteria? How many people? Who decides? Who decides if an individual m…

[deleted]

Re: Public-ownership rental as a third option to renting or owning a house

#172

Post by 6510 »

refurb wrote: post #131
6510 wrote: post #97

Land tax is a must but I have an even funnier idea. Tax corporations per employee and adjust the amount to the housing shortage. Make the tax truly terrifying if there is a big shortage. If you really must run your shop in that ultra expensive location you just pay for it. If you cant afford it you simply do not have what it takes, the area is not for you and you should leave. Make room for a business that belongs OR…

Taxing new hires? Sounds like a great way to chase jobs away.

More houses can be build, transportation can be improved, people can work from home.

People want to move to expensive areas to work because companies chose to create their jobs there.

If a business is not profitable enough to be there they should move some place else. If you want to allow mediocre businesses people will have to sleep under the bridge, on the sofa with friends or find some other way to live packed up like sardines. The mediocre salary demands it.

We can apparently fit a lot more jobs in a city than it can deal with. The jobs are not the scarce resource. They will continue to exist some place better. Some place where the salary buys a good life.

Re: Public-ownership rental as a third option to renting or owning a house

#173

Post by aidenn0 »

Something that bothers me is this:

In California, 75% of renters support building more housing, 51% of owners support building more housing, and yet housing gets built at a glacial pace. I'd like to know why this is. Some wild-ass guesses:

1. A majority of Californians support housing being built, just not too close to where they are

2. The 75% or Renters and 51% of homeowners skew younger and are thus less likely to vote or complain at community board meetings

3. The permitting process in municipalities near me is so byzantine that it's expensive in both time and money to build new construction; the added time could be particularly problematic because that's greater risk that housing prices will plummet before construction is complete.

Re: Public-ownership rental as a third option to renting or owning a house

#174

Post by MisterBastahrd »

aidenn0 wrote: post #173

Something that bothers me is this: In California, 75% of renters support building more housing, 51% of owners support building more housing, and yet housing gets built at a glacial pace. I'd like to know why this is. Some wild-ass guesses: 1. A majority of Californians support housing being built, just not too close to where they are 2. The 75% or Renters and 51% of homeowners skew younger and are thus less likely to…

If you're paying someone else to live in a house, then you are on the losing side of the power dynamic.

Re: Public-ownership rental as a third option to renting or owning a house

#175

Post by Spooky23 »

rsj_hn wrote: post #170
toomuchtodo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HfH typically provides the mortgage with a 0% interest rate also. They are a tremendous program that should be scaled up.

All these programs that subsidize the cost of borrowing merely drive up the price of houses. This is why things like the mortgage interest deduction or zero percent financing are not in the long term interests of home buyers when they are "scaled up", and when they are niche programs they are basically a convoluted form of charity. There is nothing wrong with that, some people like their charities to be convoluted an…

Not always. The program I described was really a way to transition folks into a sustainable lifestyle. Rents in this place are more than property values, so training to let working class people afford a home and rent the downstairs bring stability to the family and he neighborhood.

Real estate is insane because we’re in an era where wealth is being shoveled into a few peoples hands, and we are literally printing money to extend a boom cycle for as long as possible without regard for the future. The house I grew up in Queens was purchased by my folks in 1976 for $15 and recently sold for $1.3M. My dad was a clerk for the city then, and my uncle, now a millionaire across the street was an able seaman.

Re: Public-ownership rental as a third option to renting or owning a house

#176

Post by InvertedRhodium »

sudosysgen wrote: post #98
InvertedRhodium wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do people who can't afford to buy then survive? I'm in NZ and we've just seen laws introduced that makes being a landlord more expensive and unsurprisingly it's seen rental increases as a result.

You don't make landlordism more expensive. You make it more difficult and less profitable. House prices will go down, and more people will be able to buy. For others, there is public-ownership rental and even public housing (that would be of much higher quality than today)

> You don't make landlordism more expensive. You make it more difficult and less profitable.

How is that any different? If it's more difficult then it inherently consumes more time and/or money - given that money is (arguably) how we measure the value of labour I don't see any way of escaping this.

Re: Public-ownership rental as a third option to renting or owning a house

#177

Post by toomuchtodo »

bombcar wrote: post #134
toomuchtodo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HfH typically provides the mortgage with a 0% interest rate also. They are a tremendous program that should be scaled up.

Like any limited (by funds or numbers) program HfH can do great good but it can also turn away those form whom it wouldn’t work (not capable of meeting the requirements/sticking it out). Handling EVERY case is much more difficult (not that we shouldn’t expand HfH-style programs). A multitude of solutions are needed and trying to limit the types is part of the problem.

Agree entirely.

Re: Public-ownership rental as a third option to renting or owning a house

#178

Post by InvertedRhodium »

eptcyka wrote: post #88
InvertedRhodium wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do people who can't afford to buy then survive? I'm in NZ and we've just seen laws introduced that makes being a landlord more expensive and unsurprisingly it's seen rental increases as a result.

Yeah, I guess that's the logical conclusion. I'd naively expect that the decreased profitability of an asset would decrease its market value, but the owner, banks and government are all interested in keeping the prices high, so instead of offloading less lucrative properties at cheaper prices, the rents get increased :/ I've rented most of my adult life, never did the landlords not be assholes. There must be a better…

> I'd naively expect that the decreased profitability of an asset would decrease its market value

It actually does (kind of), the problem is that the gap between "not profitable" and "affordable" is a chasm. Someone who is currently paying $350/week rent with minimal savings behind them (which statistically is an optimistic assumption) is not going to be able to find a 10% (or maybe higher) deposit on a $500,000+ property.

The other issue is that right now we're experiencing massive inflation of house prices. Median house value in NZ increased 24% in March - that means you'd need to save around $2000/week just to not lose ground. It's madness, I'm glad I bought at what I thought was the top of the market in March 2000.

Re: Public-ownership rental as a third option to renting or owning a house

#179

Post by greggman3 »

mgerdts wrote: post #166
InvertedRhodium wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that differ meaningfully from home owners associations and the like?

The one time I lived in a neighborhood with a HOA, i found it provided a private pool and and a way for neighbors to be more exclusive, not inclusive. For instance, one of the HOA rules was that you cannot have any vehicle with commercial signage or lettering (like a plumber's van) parked outside over night. If my parents were to stay the night, the rules said that their pickup with lettering advertising their small…

I totally get how that sucks but, if I lived in such a neighborhood, for that particular problem, could I solve it by buying a car cover? Not that I should have to, just curious.

Re: Public-ownership rental as a third option to renting or owning a house

#180

Post by clairity »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #127
blacksmith_tb wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Habitat For Humanity[1] works in a similar way. At least in my town, families help to build or renovate the home they move into, and their mortgage payments are capped at a reasonable percentage of their income (I think 30%). 1: https://www.habitat.org/about/faq#homeownership

HfH typically provides the mortgage with a 0% interest rate also. They are a tremendous program that should be scaled up.

based on my experience volunteering for habitat, the hard part of scaling the model is finding affordable and buildable infill in cities (which is where the highest need is). it typically takes years for each project to go from ideation to purchase to design to zoning variances to enviromental review to groundbreaking. the construction itself is only on the order of months. everything that comes before actual construction is what makes it expensive.
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