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New US homeownership measure puts people first

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Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#191

Post by carlosjobim »

scottious wrote: post #116
AbsurdCensor wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renting isn't 'good' though in many metrics. Ownership is, and that's what the push should be for, rather than promoting basically a monthly subscription to have a roof over your head.

It's not that simple. Owning a home is not just a better version of renting. It's a whole different thing with pros and cons. Your mortgage is the lowest amount you'll pay. On top of that you have to manage the upkeep of the house, which costs both time and money. Lots of people go through phases in their lives where they move around and owning just doesn't make sense for a few 1 to 2 year stretches. On the other han…

> On top of that you have to manage the upkeep of the house, which costs both time and money.

Well guess who has to pay for that in a house that is rented? It's the renter!

Just the same as when you rent a car, the cost for maintenance is included in your rental fee.

You're just as free to move if you own a house: Just sell it, or rent it out. Any inconvenience from doing that is easily worth the money you save by not giving it away in paying rent.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#192

Post by ecshafer »

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 really an issue, morally, ethically, or with regards to people buying houses. The issue is when there are limited number of units, and people turn them into investments.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#193

Post by francisofascii »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #50
GodelNumbering wrote: post #33

There was a youtube video sometime ago that argued about how life has vastly improved in every single aspect (with numbers about how 'stuff' has gotten universally more affordable), only housing has gotten more expensive relative to income and how that proves we have a better quality of life because of that. It got me thinking that maybe the home ownership, or having a place you can call yours, disproportionately aff…

Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives. It's undeniably a little cool that luxuries got cheap, but it's severely un-cool that necessities got expensive. I'm glad to see a focus on pushing statistics to do a better job of reflecting that, but yeah, this is all downstream of structural incentives so fixes are only going to happen through legislative ch…

> Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives.

Definitely true for my household. The mortgage, college for the kids, and health insurance for a family takes up a huge amount. Not to mention the housing expenses like HVAC fixes, trash collection, sewer, utilities, etc.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#194

Post by baggy_trough »

carlosjobim wrote: post #191
scottious wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that simple. Owning a home is not just a better version of renting. It's a whole different thing with pros and cons. Your mortgage is the lowest amount you'll pay. On top of that you have to manage the upkeep of the house, which costs both time and money. Lots of people go through phases in their lives where they move around and owning just doesn't make sense for a few 1 to 2 year stretches. On the other han…

> On top of that you have to manage the upkeep of the house, which costs both time and money. Well guess who has to pay for that in a house that is rented? It's the renter! Just the same as when you rent a car, the cost for maintenance is included in your rental fee. You're just as free to move if you own a house: Just sell it, or rent it out. Any inconvenience from doing that is easily worth the money you save by no…

> Well guess who has to pay for that in a house that is rented? It's the renter!

On average, over time, in a free market, yes. But not necessarily in any specific case. The rent is a cap during the lease period, no matter what the landlord has to pay for maintenance.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#195

Post by runako »

jenniferhooley wrote: post #111
inigyou wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of housing mostly isn't in the building. If it was, we'd just build smaller and have houses. But you can't because the land costs too much.

Huh? I have a 650sqft house, it costs 430K in a small town. I looked at building a new place, it would cost roughly the same to hire a building team to make it - not to mention years of waiting on development. The land is fairly affordable if I buy a little bit out of town. It's the cost of building that is stopping me.

If it's costing $650+ per sqft to build, it sounds like there may be some externalities about the site(s) that might be relevant here?

For scale, in much of the country it is possible to build a new home for well under $200/sf. New detached homes retail for <$175/sf, which includes the builder's profit.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#196

Post by grvdrm »

GodelNumbering wrote: post #85
smallmancontrov wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives. It's undeniably a little cool that luxuries got cheap, but it's severely un-cool that necessities got expensive. I'm glad to see a focus on pushing statistics to do a better job of reflecting that, but yeah, this is all downstream of structural incentives so fixes are only going to happen through legislative ch…

> undeniably a little cool that luxuries got cheap, but it's severely un-cool that necessities got expensive Well said. Being told that 'you should be happy without owning' to a party that can't afford to own by another party who is actively scooping up the same resource can feel extremely invalidating. My personal take is that a lot of support for contemporary political extremism in many countries comes from the fac…

I like your take. Do you feel it also a lack of interest in genuine evaluation of hard options?

Not all policy is easy to understand, but I feel (anecdote) that lots of folks don’t want to understand what isn’t an obvious benefit to them, especially if benefits accrue over a longer period.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#197

Post by jimberlage »

mauvehaus wrote: post #164
repeekad wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does being in a city “naturally” mean less home ownership? More demand and higher prices yes, but you also should be earning more and dense housing projects should be trivial to justify. It’s legislation all the way down, politicians protect the interests of the wealthy who want to rent seek regardless of location. Look at how mamdani got a common sense luxury home tax in NYC, before that ultra wealthy owned mult…

Because multi-family buildings (required for higher density) come with more complicated ownership models. Owner occupied triple deckers in Boston, for example, often come with their own condo associations because there needs to be some way to handle the shared maintenance and expenses. That's for a three unit building. Now scale that to a twenty or one hundred unit building. At some point, it makes sense for a single…

A counterpoint is that a huge number of suburban Americans already have experience with a condo association through being in an HOA.

Rural homeowners and people with single family homes in streetcar suburbs or cities don't, but most new developments already have an organization with dues for shared maintenance.

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#198

Post by Xirdus »

usui wrote: post #187
Xirdus wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say it's nice to downsize. I said it's possible to downsize.

Fair enough, you're correct. It is... possible

Which is an extremely important point to make when the claim is "you don't even have a choice" and "you can't scale".

There is a choice. We would just prefer nobody had to make that choice. We consider it a failure of the modern society that this choice is on the table. But housing consumption can be scaled, and that it can has important economic implications (such as, social housing can be made cheaper by making units smaller. It literally wouldn't be possible to pull it off if housing consumption was perfectly inelastic.)

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#199

Post by RationPhantoms »

randusername wrote: post #84

I find it hard to trust economic narratives when so many metrics cited upon further inspection do not really measure what they are implied to measure. Or maybe we measure what is easiest to measure, not what is best. I see this everywhere, though. Jobs data is really job openings not actual hires. Unemployment data is really paperwork filing not people out of work or retiring early. And now home ownership is really "…

To your last point, the Minneapolis Fed just put out a call for a new actual-owner backed housing occupancy rate called HPOP which I think is a step in the right direction: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2026/new-homeownershi...

Re: New US homeownership measure puts people first

#200

Post by pavon »

jvanderbot wrote: post #27
ajross wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If however you care about the housing development decisions that will incentivise owner occupancy Genuine question: who, precisely, cares about "incentivising owner occupancy" as a policy goal? What interest does that serve and why should the government prioritize maximizing that metric? Basically right now we measure "what fraction of homes are occupied by an owner" and not "what fraction of people live in their o…

A key difference is illustrated in TFA. To maximize fraction of people owning a home, you dislike people renting or living with a homeowner. A spouse that marries a homeowner, for example. It would be "better" if they broke up and owned their own separate homes. Or perhaps they could buy two homes, one for each. Or they could by two homes and rent a third to actually live in - same metric value. To maximize fraction…

> A spouse that marries a homeowner, for example. It would be "better" if they broke up and owned their own separate homes.

No, if you look at the first example explaining how the two metrics are calculated, it is clear that both spouses are considered homeowners for HPOP.

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