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

economist.com

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

#291

Post by ROTMetro »

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…

The government made me an explicate promise with zoning laws that my neighborhood was a safe investment, just as they make people comfortable that bank accounts are safe via banking laws, or that stocks are somewhat safe. Taking that away is breaking a MAJOR social contract made to the 65% of American's that own their home.

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

#292

Post by ROTMetro »

bobkazamakis wrote: post #255
pessimizer wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody has a place to live. Housing isn't scarce. When housing is scarce, people are homeless or living in extremely tiny spaces. They are not. The problem is that people wouldn't be able to afford to own the places where they live. Housing is only "scarce" in desirable places, and that's simply tautological. The sum of unfulfilled desires is the contrapositive of scarcity. Housing is a market in which a very tiny…

Ah yes, everyone without a home is simply a lazy poor who should just move to Mississipi where the land is cheap and the jobs are abundant.

I left California because I couldn't afford to own a home there.

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

#293

Post by happiness_idx »

mminer237 wrote: post #192
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…

You don't write off your rental income. You depreciate the rental property over 27½ years and write that off against your rental income. Few rental properties will have under a 3.7% ROI where depreciation would cover all the income. At best you might be paying half tax. In your example, you'd pay no tax, but you'd lose out on the potential income you could have had with better investments (and lose about 6 years' wor…

As a home-owner not landlord (I am against the idea of owning more property than my family will use) I WISH I could write off half of my property tax.

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

#294

Post by alistairSH »

valarauko wrote: post #284
Loughla wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy cow, not even a little bit. This is so, so middle- to upper-middle income centered it's not even funny. 1st you are assuming people have one employer to worry about, not multiple. 2nd you are assuming people have a set schedule daily or weekly. 3rd you are assuming people have PTO. 4th you are assuming the employer will give any amount of shit about volunteerism. 5th you are assuming they won't be given a point…

I'm curious as to what the solution in this case is then. If election days were holidays, wouldn't the same people still have the same issues with employers? Do shift workers not work on holidays?

This is why I suggested nationwide mail-in voting as a solution.

A national holiday might help some workers, but not all. Gas stations still need staffed, etc.

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

#295

Post by pessimizer »

bobkazamakis wrote: post #255
pessimizer wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody has a place to live. Housing isn't scarce. When housing is scarce, people are homeless or living in extremely tiny spaces. They are not. The problem is that people wouldn't be able to afford to own the places where they live. Housing is only "scarce" in desirable places, and that's simply tautological. The sum of unfulfilled desires is the contrapositive of scarcity. Housing is a market in which a very tiny…

Ah yes, everyone without a home is simply a lazy poor who should just move to Mississipi where the land is cheap and the jobs are abundant.

> everyone without a home

I guarantee you're not talking about homeless people here, but people who live in a home that they are renting, reasonably near the place they work.

edit: also, somehow these so-called poors are always wealthy programmers trying to buy million-dollar houses.

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

#296

Post by 8note »

ROTMetro wrote: post #283
namdnay wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what universe does paying tax on what you inherit equate to communism?

When you effectively take someone's home for government benefit. People think that when they buy property they own it. You're model is more the China version. You don't own property, you only lease it from the government. Hence, your model looks more like the communist model than the traditional Western one.

It's basically the American model - if somebody isn't improving their land, you take it from them by force and sell it at cheap prices to people who will.

That's why it's a bunch of white people with title now, rather than all being native americans

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

#297

Post by randomdata »

pochekailov wrote: post #47
mantas wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you really meet them if they're scattered over a multi-million city? I find the opposite. A digestible size ( But even here in just-over-500k city people are already resorting to Zoom calls from one's office/home (or lake-side getaways) over meeting in coffeeshop.

I find it easier in the bigger city; but I might be biased as I lived in a big city most of my life. What I meant is an ability to be within the reach of any other person within an hour. Using zoom for 3 years now (for obvious reasons) - I find it inferior to the private in-person communication. Problem that you need to schedule a meeting, which adds some formality and is usually harder, while you can have a pleasant…

> What I meant is an ability to be within the reach of any other person within an hour.

Is that all that significant? I live rurally and can be within reach of any other person in two different large cities (along with some smaller ones) within an hour. Under some circumstances, I can be at a shared meeting place in one of those cities before a person who lives in said city can get there. The highway is incredibly efficient.

Moreover, such proximity to the city – but also off the beaten path – seems to make it an attractive place for the rich and famous to have homes. I run into household names at the small town coffeeshop quite regularly.

What is significant, however, is the the city is much more amenable to wealth concentration. That small town coffeeshop might see 100 customers in a day, while a coffeeshop in a dense city can draw on thousands of customers, allowing a coffeeshop empire to be established. The small town coffeeshop will never be able to grow the same way.

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

#298

Post by jason0597 »

When AMD or NVIDIA sell GPUs to scalpers, and those scalpers resell the GPUs and keep the profit, there's outrage about it. Nobody ever says to "build more GPUs" to fix the problem.

When houses and new developments get snatched up by investors and landlords as buy-to-lets (or even by Blackrock and pension funds), there is little outrage and calls for restricting who can buy them. The same argument is rehashed over and over and over again. Just build more houses!

I feel that there is a disconnect between these two schools of thought. I personally believe that, while indeed more houses should be built, we should also have a serious discussion about whether houses should be sold en-masse to very wealthy investors

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

#299

Post by ouEight12 »

huevosabio wrote: post #281
mminer237 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't write off your rental income. You depreciate the rental property over 27½ years and write that off against your rental income. Few rental properties will have under a 3.7% ROI where depreciation would cover all the income. At best you might be paying half tax. In your example, you'd pay no tax, but you'd lose out on the potential income you could have had with better investments (and lose about 6 years' wor…

You fix it by deprecating only the improved value. The land beneath a building does not deprecate, whereas the value of the building should. Since for most properties the majority of the value is in the land itself, your basis to deprecate would be much lower, and more realistic.

> Since for most properties the majority of the value is in the land itself

I'm not sure that's the case for the majority of the country. At-least it's not here in my greater metro area (suburbs or rural... yuppie downtown areas... perhaps, but again, downtown is not majority for most places)

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

#300

Post by tristor »

finiteseries wrote: post #266
horsawlarway wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> feudal societies developed Sooo... the last thousand some years, given that feudalism was widespread by the 11th century (and housing was absolutely an investment before that). Basically - half of recorded history (~400bc for Europe), and longer than the United States has existed. I don't understand what you think this comment means...

- The last thousand some years (in Europe) - Widespread (in Europe) - Half of recorded (European) history An exclusively European phenomenon, the bulk of which came and went while it was a backwater region with limited effect on the rest of the world.

> An exclusively European phenomenon, the bulk of which came and went while it was a backwater region with limited effect on the rest of the world.

Weird that it had limited effect on the rest of the world, since basically history from now back to about the 15th century represents a European hegemony, now a US hegemony that extends European Western philosophy to the world.

Seems that "limited effect" is pretty big. So much so that we're /literally discussing it now in 2022/.

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