301–310 of 385 posts
I’m not sure why none of the popular narratives are considering that this is just demographics- the boomers are aging out of the workforce. This pushes up the cost of labor due to supply and demand. Which is a good thing, if you’re not a boomer. But it’s going to constrain gdp growth.
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Old ladies in multi-million dollar homes is largely a myth. Sure, there are some of them. But it's absurd to think this is anywhere near the majority. Short Term rentals make up These are just excuses. These aren't real problems. The real problem is artificially low interest rates, artificial scarcity caused by NIMBYism, low downpayments (backed by Fannie & Freddie), tax breaks for home owners but not for renters, hi…
Where do you get stats for short-term rentals? Anecdotally, our last landlady illegally evicted us, converted the house to an airbnb, and then bought the next-door house from the long-time owner to make it an airbnb as well. Not in a vacation town, just downtown in a second-tier city. It seems like a pretty common trend in our neighborhood, I'm wondering if short-term rentals are clustered in dense, walkable areas an…
Here's one of the papers: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10511...
It shows that AirBNBs do push up rents - but even in desirable parts of Boston with a lot of AirBNBs - it's /only/ responsible for a 0.4% increase.
Keep in mind that rents have been increasing by >4% per year for 20 years in Boston. A .4% increase is 10% of that. General inflation is /at least/ 50% of it. The other ~40% is coming from elsewhere.
Unless AirBNBs make up a substantial portion of new sales - it is hard to blame them for the majority of price increases.
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> The proof is in the pudding: "we can't find local workers willing to work for these low wages so we'll import them from abroad". Everywhere in world there are labour shortages, because we just ended lockdowns 3 months ago. In other places they are blaming the shortage on the young being lazy or on unemployment benefits, with the same scientific rigour. So I’m still waiting for a proof (not a pun or an anecdote) tha…
> Whatever the working class is in the UK, if they believe that immigration reduces salaries, they are far removed from any modern notion of truth. Can you provide some references for your (rather strong) claim?
My claim is self-evident, if you believe something absurd, you are by definition “far removed from any modern notion of truth”.
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Wage rises without solving the housing issue is only going to raise house prices further. There's a bunch of potential solutions, but no-one directly benefits from them in the short term. Any attempt to fix it will be met with sob stories about old ladies in multi-million dollar homes being "forced out of their homes". So we'll all just sit and watch as things slowly spin out of control.
Old ladies in multi-million dollar homes is largely a myth. Sure, there are some of them. But it's absurd to think this is anywhere near the majority. Short Term rentals make up These are just excuses. These aren't real problems. The real problem is artificially low interest rates, artificial scarcity caused by NIMBYism, low downpayments (backed by Fannie & Freddie), tax breaks for home owners but not for renters, hi…
Nimbys are simply protecting an investment. In a captalistic society we have to change the incentives to drive action.
Allow renters vote on local zoning regulation. Hell, remove stringent zoning regulations in general. At the same time, put limitations on what HOAs and local.commitees are allowed to impose.
Remove the exorbidant costs/regulations towards building multi family homes. This has been driving the rise 'premium condos' because affordable housing isnt affordable to build.
Impose larger taxes on rent collected on 3rd+ homes. Impose large taxes on vacant properties. Start gently discouraging additional housing as an investment.
Lastly, I strongly support sensible gentrification. Give long term renters first dibs and zero-additional-cost pathways to home ownership.But after that, gentrify and gentrify heavily. A revitalization of innercities is the easiest way to solve the housing problem in our current political climate. (For those who complain that condos arent suburban single family homes.....thats how we got here in the first place)
These are just some ideas .
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Lmao. Have you ever owned a property you were trying to sell or rent out? Every single month of vacancy / no sale hurts, a lot. If there are more units than renters, prices WILL drop, and fast. Landlords compete against each other, which is why you want many of them.
In the world of 20 years ago, I would agree with you. Renting simply wasn't profitable enough to be a problem back then. However, in today's world where AirBNB is unbelievably profitable, more houses than ever can be put up for rent at extreme prices. It heavily restricts the housing supply in a way that wasn't possible before AirBNB came around.
But I don’t think there’s either an infinite pool of AirBnB demand or that every landlord is willing to put up with running an AirBnB regardless of profit (doing AirBnB is more a business than a passive investment).
Maybe limiting AirBnB in residential zones will contribute to the solution, but neither limiting the capital flow into housing nor limiting the number of new units built will ever work.
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If you permanently reduce immigration, including deporting unauthorised migrants, you can achieve both of those things. Given the cost of land and building, we should consider Western nations 'full' and only allow immigration 'swaps' from other highly developed countries.
So your solution to inequity is to pull the ladder up behind you? What did you DO to deserve to be born in a Western nation?
Why do foreign countries not simply develop themselves instead? Build your own ladder, so to speak!
When a few companies or industries can’t find enough labor, the solution is simple: Raise wages to attract a larger percentage of the labor pool. When every company and industry is struggling to hire, raising wages is still necessary but it no longer fixes the bigger problem. Those higher wages aren’t producing more labor, they’re just convincing employees with jobs to switch to other jobs. Switching jobs creates a v…
Many companies don't have sufficient margins to raise wages. Hopefully this isn't confused as me endorsing subpar wages, simply that those business can't be sustained or will just endlessly be looking for someone willing to work for cheap because hiring someone for more will actually cost them money. They may be better of turning away some customers vs. hiring someone for a higher wage to support more demand.
Housing is anything from a third to 50% of the average UK earners take home income. Median house price to median income ratios are at historically high levels[0], and rents are now also rising[1] Either wages need to rise or house prices need to fall. [0] If you look at somewhere mundane like Essex the median 'affordability ratio', as measured by the Office of National Statistics ( https://tinyurl.com/x5jatcx8 ), was…
If you permanently reduce immigration, including deporting unauthorised migrants, you can achieve both of those things. Given the cost of land and building, we should consider Western nations 'full' and only allow immigration 'swaps' from other highly developed countries.
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There is always some inflationary pressure when inequality is reduced. For example, very few can support nannies and home servants like they could in the past (and like in India now), when poor people’s wages were so low that they would give up their life to support anyone that owned land. The only way to prevent inflation is with technology and productivity, for example, people today could have home servants in the…
Eliminating minimum wage would also prevent inflation.