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

Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 817 posts

Re: Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

#231

Post by banannaise »

pochekailov wrote: post #26
kubb wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think there exists a political option that will give more rights to the renters? Do you think there's a correlation between having more leisure time (living from rent) and having more ability to do politics? Do you think blaming the renters for not voting is the most constructive way of going forward, or does it reinforce the status quo?

Q1: Yes, there is. Once a professional politician sees more activity from renters, they will include the renter's interests into their agenda Q2: Yes, obviously there is a positive correlation. This is exactly why renters need to fight: stakes are against them. Current status quo is in favor of homeowners; it will not be possible to change it while being passive. Renters and homeowners have conflict of interests, the…

Local politicians will often discount or ignore the opinions of people they see as renters rather than homeowners, in part because when a renter moves, they often leave the district.

I saw this recently in a fight over parking regulations - all the homeowners wanted strictly regulated street parking in neighborhoods, but none of the renters did. Both parties showed up to the council meeting discussing the regulation. Guess who won? Adding insult to injury, existing laws give owners a process for obtaining extra parking passes for guests, while renters get no such option and need to take a bunch of documents to city hall to get a pass when they move in. For street parking.

Re: Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

#232

Post by lifeplusplus »

fezfight wrote: post #185
datacruncher01 wrote: post #132

It's a simple problem, we turned housing into an investment. Now everyone who owns a home is incentivized to ensure their investment is maximized and that results in a lot of NIMBYism. The simple solution is we need more housing in cities and suburbs. How we get there is an exercise that's taken on by local housing authorities and they are not incentivized to solve the problem. That's because they work for voters who…

So I think folks overlook just how wealthy certain investors are when they propose the fix is to just build new properties. Those will also get snapped up by investors. To fix the problem, investing in housing needs to be either banned or made very unattractive. You only need one house to live in.

Yes zero to low tax for primary residence. 10x tax for all secondary houses

Re: Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

#233

Post by banannaise »

danielrpa wrote: post #16
pochekailov wrote: post #14

Nothing will change while the homeowners have more political power than the renters. Even in the cities where the renter population is bigger than the homeowners, such as in Seattle, half of the votes come from people of > 65 years old (all of whom are homeowners, likely more than one home). Young people simply won't vote at all. There is very little incentives for the young people to vote. Even if you cancel all the…

If you are free and able to vote but won't do it, it's hard for me to feel too much pity for your situation. I started voting when I was 16 (my birth country allows that) and voted on every single election until I immigrated to the US - and then voted on every US election since becoming a citizen.

I voted, but somehow people keep saying my opinion doesn't matter because I, as a demographic, didn't vote.

Re: Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

#234

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

idkyall wrote: post #122

Housing in the US has gotten to where it is due to horrible laws effectively allowing total tax avoidance for landlords. Take some investment property. You buy it at some basis price, let's say 500k. You rent it out for 15k a year. Each year you can offset your rental income against deprecation of the property and property taxes - meaning, you pay no income tax on your rental income. ~30 years later, you've deprecate…

> unless your estate is over 12 million dollars(and double that for a married couple), you pay no estate taxes.

Why aren't estates just taxed as income to the entity who it goes to? If my father croaks and leaves me $1m it should count as an additional $1m of income to me that year.

Re: Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

#235

Post by newsclues »

bbarn wrote: post #92
newsclues wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure. At a certain point, if landlords strangle renters it can make hiring hard (workers can’t afford Cost of living if rents are too high), thus making the business environment uncompetitive. Will the business community have more power than landlords? I think so, eventually.

So far the business community's response has been "no one wants to work." because they can't afford to pay salaries. Ultimately, people vote with their feet, or government intervenes on behalf of those who would lose money.

In Canada business and government says this stuff, to justify importing immigrants to work for low wages and often lower standards of living.

Re: Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

#236

Post by Loughla »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #199
t_mann wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the ownership percentage is negligible, does that mean that most real estate is owned by a few super-wealthy, or who owns it then?

Who else would own it? The government?

That's sort of the question - who owns it? I legitimately do not know.

Re: Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

#237

Post by ThrustVectoring »

Housing crises are a symptom, not a cause. The root issue is demographics, specifically the worker-to-retiree ratio growing at a rate that outpaces productivity growth. Since saving is essentially impossible at societal scales and generational timeframes (how exactly is a car built in 1980 supposed to cause more nurses to provide healthcare in 2020?), tomorrow's workers have to be coerced into transferring real goods and services to tomorrow's retirees. There's essentially two broad categories for this: "saving" by exchanging unconsumed current production for financial assets from retirees, and paying taxes.

If you managed to fix a housing crisis, the only way of doing so is torpedoing retiree financial assets (mix of personal home equity and pension fund), which would shortly cause an increase in entitlement transfers to sustain retiree standards of living. The only way to ease the combined tax and rent-seeking load on younger workers is to reduce the total transfer to non-workers, and the political balance of power forbids this, so things will remain fucked.

Re: Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

#238

Post by kixiQu »

wldcordeiro wrote: post #152
pochekailov wrote: post #14

Nothing will change while the homeowners have more political power than the renters. Even in the cities where the renter population is bigger than the homeowners, such as in Seattle, half of the votes come from people of > 65 years old (all of whom are homeowners, likely more than one home). Young people simply won't vote at all. There is very little incentives for the young people to vote. Even if you cancel all the…

One thing that's missed in the renter vs homeowner thing is that the rules of election systems favors the homeowner too. Renters move more and will need to register to vote over again and the added inconvenience will stop plenty from even bothering.

I will note that Washington state makes this very straightforward; universal mail-in voting with real easy registration has definitely led to me, a disorganized young person, voting when I wouldn't have otherwise.

Re: Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

#239

Post by edmcnulty101 »

QuarterReptile wrote: post #115
edmcnulty101 wrote: post #93

Housing is not the problem. Population is the problem. This is because the 'rich' people countries are having a population explosion despite the native 'rich' people havong a negative birth rate. You can do the math as to why. Housing has never been this much of a problem up until the past decade or two.

>Housing has never been this much of a problem up until the past decade or two. This is certainly untrue. Possibly housing has never been this particular problem in this particular place . Housing affordability plagued Germany of the early 20th century. Low quality housing of the type not possible to obtain in the US was widespread in US cities before the last 50-70 years. >Population is the problem. Misanthropic non…

> Housing affordability plagued Germany of the early 20th century

You gotta reach back to over a hundred years ago to find an example?

> Can you list these rich countries with 'population explosion[s]'?

What the hell are you talking about?

The population in the US is the highest it's been in history.

You're using a bullshit metric like growth rate which is a percentage of constantly increasing number? 1% of 100 is the same as 50% of 2. Of course the growth rate goes down as the population goes up.

The natives to the country have a declining birthrate. This is the responsible thing to do.

This decreases the population and returns the US to a stable population density.

If the US wasn't flooding the country with over a million non-natives every year both population AND housing would stabilize and NOT be a problem.

Population is the issue or more specifically non-native population.

Re: Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

#240

Post by NoSorryCannot »

l33t2328 wrote: post #224
seiferteric wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had to pay the tax you could probably just finance it anyway instead of paying it all at once so it would be just like having a new (small) mortgage.

That’s what every parent hopes to leave their kids with: an obligation

Oooor they can sell it, as originally stated. Goodness.

The point is reduce land entitlement a little bit. Yes, there's going to be some light incentive to cut loose and that's OK.

Post reply on HN