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It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

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Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

#41

Post by dnissley »

xnx wrote: post #5

No shortage of land in the US, but everyone wants to live in the same few places (for good reason), and those places have a lot of restrictions on what can be built where. It's satisfying to blame a big bad "them" for this, but the problem is "us". We all want our properties to increase in value so we collectively conspire to suppress supply that would make our properties less valuable.

I feel like I need to make this point again and again: It's not about increasing the value of properties for most (after all, allowing apartments to be built in your neighborhood would increase the value of the remaining SFHs). It's about keeping the character of the neighborhood the same as it is now (SFH vibes), and all that comes with that ("family friendliness", etc).

Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

#42

Post by theoreticalmal »

delichon wrote: post #16

Nearly 40% of the United States is public land, supported by taxpayers and managed by federal, state, or local governments. -- https://headwaterseconomics.org/public-lands/protected-lands/public-land-ownership-in-the-us/ Allocating a few more percentage points of that for housing could have a large effect on prices.

Probably any land the federal government would be okay selling to developers is also land that no developers would have the capital or physical ability to improve to the point of being valuable. Most of Nevada is federal land. Almost no one wants to live on it.

Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

#43

Post by Aurornis »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #22
xnx wrote: post #5

No shortage of land in the US, but everyone wants to live in the same few places (for good reason), and those places have a lot of restrictions on what can be built where. It's satisfying to blame a big bad "them" for this, but the problem is "us". We all want our properties to increase in value so we collectively conspire to suppress supply that would make our properties less valuable.

The fix is to enshrine remote work for jobs that can be remote (labor regulation and whatnot), enabling labor mobility to where housing is affordable, but the ideological challenges prevent that. So, instead, we gnash teeth and say there is no solution while we slowly build more housing stock and hope that'll catch us up eventually. It will, eventually, as immigration slows, and the death rate exceeds the birth rate…

> The fix is to enshrine remote work for jobs that can be remote (labor regulation and whatnot), enabling labor mobility to where housing is affordable,

Not really a fix. When people's location becomes free from their jobs, they don't move to remote locations where land is cheap. They move to cities they want to live in, or cities where they have friends and family.

The subset of people who prefer to move to the middle of nowhere and prioritize the cheapest housing above all else is very small (and probably overrepresented online)

Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

#44

Post by sroussey »

the_gastropod wrote: post #7
mikece wrote: post #2

Cornering the market, or a sufficiently large portion of it, doesn't necessarily drive prices higher. Demand plus cheap credit (and Wall Street shenanigans) are at least as much to blame.

Interest rates tripled in the past few years, and home prices continued their upward march throughout most of the U.S. Do you mean something else by "cheap credit"?

Tripled from a hundred year low. Kinda normal to mildly low still.

Prices are up since people did 30yr mortgages at obscenely low rates, and don’t sell/move in order to keep them. That group will eventually rotate out. Ironically, somewhat lower rates will cause a housing price decline.

Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

#45

Post by pdonis »

lapcat wrote: post #28

One of the worst aspect of these big home builders is that they impose homeowners associations on all of their new homes. It's difficult to find new homes free of HOAs.

I think this is at least partly driven by the locality (city or county) wanting more property taxes from the new homes. In a city near me, there have been five new subdivisions approved in the past few years, all of which have not only HOAs but CDDs, which are basically extra property taxes (ostensibly to fund the building of more amenities in these communities like pools and community centers) that get split between the developer and the city/county until the community is fully built out, and then the city continues to collect them for an additional period that, I believe, is something like 30 years. The city/county required the HOA/CDD setup as a condition for the subdivisions to be developed.

Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

#46

Post by toomuchtodo »

Aurornis wrote: post #43
toomuchtodo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fix is to enshrine remote work for jobs that can be remote (labor regulation and whatnot), enabling labor mobility to where housing is affordable, but the ideological challenges prevent that. So, instead, we gnash teeth and say there is no solution while we slowly build more housing stock and hope that'll catch us up eventually. It will, eventually, as immigration slows, and the death rate exceeds the birth rate…

> The fix is to enshrine remote work for jobs that can be remote (labor regulation and whatnot), enabling labor mobility to where housing is affordable, Not really a fix. When people's location becomes free from their jobs, they don't move to remote locations where land is cheap. They move to cities they want to live in, or cities where they have friends and family. The subset of people who prefer to move to the midd…

Can you provide a citation with data demonstrating this? Here's mine:

https://www.yardikube.com/blog/remote-workers-leading-the-mi...

https://www.wcnc.com/article/money/charlotte-north-carolina-...

https://www.fanniemae.com/media/48891/display

https://www.americanexperiment.org/study-finds-that-remote-w...

https://web.archive.org/web/20230127175520/https://www.rural...

(also, I said where housing is affordable, not the middle of nowhere)

Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

#47

Post by delichon »

warkdarrior wrote: post #26
delichon wrote: post #16

Nearly 40% of the United States is public land, supported by taxpayers and managed by federal, state, or local governments. -- https://headwaterseconomics.org/public-lands/protected-lands/public-land-ownership-in-the-us/ Allocating a few more percentage points of that for housing could have a large effect on prices.

Yes, and nobody wants to live there.

Look at a digital U.S. map with a private / public land overlay and zoom in on the satellite images. It quickly becomes clear that people will live wherever they are allowed to. Sometimes the population stays low and sometimes bare desert turns into the Las Vegas metropolitan area.

Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

#48

Post by JackYoustra »

xt00 wrote: post #36

If the companies that are holding land are able to maintain steady profits with minimal competition, then the logical approach is to say we should incentivize them to build on the land, make improvements etc now to ideally decrease the value of the existing land to make it more affordable to people. So could you essentially say "if you own more than 20 properties that are not owner occupied, you have to pay a tax.. b…

Changing financing doesn't actually change underlying affordability. If your distinction is "rent vs own" and you ban doing it primarily you're either going to have pretty miserable housing outcomes or essentially shadow mortgages.

As well as push things to subletting or force people to stay in one place for most of their life.

Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

#49

Post by 1986 »

xnx wrote: post #5

No shortage of land in the US, but everyone wants to live in the same few places (for good reason), and those places have a lot of restrictions on what can be built where. It's satisfying to blame a big bad "them" for this, but the problem is "us". We all want our properties to increase in value so we collectively conspire to suppress supply that would make our properties less valuable.

Did you know that a third of the US population lives in a rental property?

Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices

#50

Post by aorloff »

dnissley wrote: post #41
xnx wrote: post #5

No shortage of land in the US, but everyone wants to live in the same few places (for good reason), and those places have a lot of restrictions on what can be built where. It's satisfying to blame a big bad "them" for this, but the problem is "us". We all want our properties to increase in value so we collectively conspire to suppress supply that would make our properties less valuable.

I feel like I need to make this point again and again: It's not about increasing the value of properties for most (after all, allowing apartments to be built in your neighborhood would increase the value of the remaining SFHs). It's about keeping the character of the neighborhood the same as it is now (SFH vibes), and all that comes with that ("family friendliness", etc).

Everyone wants to keep the character of their neighborhood.

Forget that ! When you go to a dense city like Barcelona where every block is nearly 4 story high rise apartments, its wonderful.

Change is beautiful, people enhance neighborhoods

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