271–280 of 394 posts
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The issue is not investment at all, we want more investment into housing. But you are absolutely correct you cannot both want housing to be a good investment (increase in value faster than inflation) and an affordable (drop in price lower than inflation). Don’t subsidize demand. Allow more supply. Private homeowners, big developers, all of the above. Build.
Get rid of property tax or somebody below a certain income.
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All of those are free to the poor in the US with our very generous welfare to the bottom and top percentiles.
* assuming you don’t live in a state with a Medicaid work requirement/disqualified by earning “too much” as working poor, and lucky enough/have dependents to win a Section 8 voucher from the lottery after waiting for months to years
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"…not because they are racist/prejudiced or whatever…" Perhaps wealthy actors (or those representing them) are attempting to distract the aggrieved—focus their anger toward some non-wealthy group.
You can spin many things to sound as racism if you want them to. My small eu country has in the recent years started importing workers from asian countries, and people are against that... of course it's branded as 'racism' in the media. The reality is, that some businesses have been having troubles with finding workers to do hard work for minimum wage (which is easily solvable by paying people more and creating bette…
Your small EU country probably has a replacement rate of something like 1.5 which means you're heading towards extinction. This puts a crimp on labor and increases wages, and it leaves openings in higher paying jobs which people want. You end up with no one to do naturally lower paying non-specalized labor.
Modern standards of not having 100 people die in a house fire have changed the dynamics of where immigrants live when they moved to a country. New York City, for example, just shoved people nut to butt in the smallest most unsafe places they could make. We don't do that in first world countries now, so something has to give.
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Property tax is theft. By applying a tax to a _thing_ that someone owns, you are saying 'actually, this thing you have is mine, and if you don't pay me for the privilege of having it, I will take it away from you'.
Land ownership is theft. Why should people have a right in perpetuity to the land that we all share?
The cost to develop the land needs to justify the development. If I spent $500k to build a house on the land, I would like to be able to use that house for as long as the house exists (or I sell it to re-coop the investment).
Many people are really bad at saving properly, but they will pay their mortgage. Landownership enables at least some old people to have a cushion in retirement.
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 r…
I disagree with the Ultra-YIMBYs who believe in removing all zoning and regulation. If you do that, you get Houston. Because that's what Houston is. What we need is to prioritize living over investment returns in housing. Part of this (IMHO) is to have expansive social housing like Vienna to compete private land use "honest". Also, we should really not allow rich enclaves. There should be social housing in every ZIP code.
[1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
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Land ownership is theft. Why should people have a right in perpetuity to the land that we all share?
In the UK, a leaseholders get screwed if they forget to renew their lease before the 80 year mark. The cost to develop the land needs to justify the development. If I spent $500k to build a house on the land, I would like to be able to use that house for as long as the house exists (or I sell it to re-coop the investment). Many people are really bad at saving properly, but they will pay their mortgage. Landownership…
It is possible to protect those two uses you mentioned, and other reasonable uses of land, without at the same time spending state resources in enforcing perpetual, absolute, hereditary, exclusive titles on plots of land.
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Property tax is theft. By applying a tax to a _thing_ that someone owns, you are saying 'actually, this thing you have is mine, and if you don't pay me for the privilege of having it, I will take it away from you'.
Land ownership is theft. Why should people have a right in perpetuity to the land that we all share?
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I’m not sure you’re disagreeing with me: Those who owned the land and didn’t have to migrate / soldier around or work someone else’s land to survive were doing well for themselves!
The people farming didn't really own the land, in many cases they were captured or corralled in place and forced to farm. The were also forced to dig canals and occasionally do the soldiering. All of the early Mesopotamian city states use corvée labor. Being an early farmer was super shitty, and no one did it by choice.
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I don't think anyone is talking about giant houses. Last time I priced a new 1,500 sq ft home they wanted over $800,000. That was an instant nope from me. Another commenter pointed out that their 650 sq ft home would be $400,000 to build new. These are already beyond most people's affordability even before considering the cost of the land. So when we talk about small and affordable we're talking more like 100 sq ft.…
Okay, if you just want to have a conversation with yourself I can see myself out as you addressed literally none of what I said and went off on some affordability tangent about housing in general. Housing prices are too high for most people to afford. That wasn't what the sentence I responded to was asking about.
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I've posted it already, but at least in my country (Netherlands) it seems like the problem isn't the lack of housing, but lack of marriages. If people ages 30-60 married each other at the rate they used to in 60's, then there would be no housing crisis. The statistic that doesn't compute for me is how is it possible that we're having a housing crisis while at the same time we have historically low average number of p…
>we have historically low average number of people per house. I'd like to see the actual statistics method used to calculate that. Saying it's marriages alone just doesn't past the smell test for me. Just because people aren't married doesn't mean they don't live together and the number of unmarried people living together is higher than ever. What makes far more sense is the number of children people have has fallen…
It's basically this graph. In 60's almost nobody was living alone (less than 400k people). In 2024 about 3,3 million people live alone. When you look at the infographic, ages 30-60 add up to like 1,2 million people.
https://www.volkshuisvestingnederland.nl/onderwerpen/aanpak-...
Here we have an estimation that the country is missing like 400k houses. So if two-thirds of those 1,2 million married each other and started living together, they would nicely plug the housing crisis by freeing 400k houses.
Either way, we have a huge societal change that lots of people live alone, which did not use to be the case.