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If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

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Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#401

Post by tootie »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #161
davidw wrote: post #125

Here's why investors buy up houses: they know your neighbors will do the dirty work of artificially constraining the housing supply, which makes it a good investment. Here's one who comes right out and explains this: > Meanwhile, local opposition to building is so commonplace and the approval process so cumbersome, time consuming, and expensive, even when a proposed project complies entirely with requirements, approv…

In Queens and Brooklyn, before the Amazon NYC Headquarters was derailed, they had bus tours of Chinese investors, driving around, looking for for sale signs. It was crazy.

That has been very common for the last 30 years and AFAIK hasn't slowed down.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#402

Post by iso1210 »

davidw wrote: post #379
iso1210 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

49 parking spaces for 49 houses seems like a disaster in anywhere other than the densest of US cities. Surely most houses have at least 2 drivers? 5 Acres is 2 Hectares, so that's about 25 houses per hectare. Typical new housing estates in the UK is about 25 hours per hectare, with minimum of 3 parking spaces (including a garage if given) for a 4 bed, and 2 for a 3 bed. Even that number of spaces is too low - especia…

The real disaster (environmental and economic) is that so many places regulate parking so strictly rather than being more market-oriented and allowing people to figure out how much they want. https://www.planetizen.com/features/113459-perils-central-pl...

If nobody was allowed to park on public land, that could work

Certainly in the UK it's common for people to expect to own an extra 50 square foot of land for a car or two, usually abandoned to block the pavement. This impacts everyone, especially those of us who don't drive.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#403

Post by mkr-hn »

throwitaway1235 wrote: post #272
TheCowboy wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People using "The Great Reset" as a pejorative tend to have their views deeply rooted in right-leaning garbage conspiracy theories. Surely there's a better source for what Black Rock is doing than this person's Twitter thread. > Only the worlds largest asset manager and the leading proponent of The Great Reset. https://twitter.com/APhilosophae/status/1402437638423035906

People and organizations with wealth are dumping their money into the stock market or real estate because the dollar is being intentionally devalued. Your complaint is the label? Great Reset sounds apt.

There are many things that would make great labels if not for the history or people associated with them. I would love to make a "Fox News" that shares news about foxes...

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#404

Post by bosswipe »

world_peace42 wrote: post #278
woodruffw wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COVID denialism, election denialism, and “The Great Reset” are high profile crank subjects. Being a conservative Christian doesn’t make you a crank; those things do.

I remember last year when believing COVID may have come out of a lab made one a crank. It was only on certain news channels or specific papers. Of course, let's also assume there are no widespread liberal beliefs (the world is going to end in 12 years) that should label someone as a crank.

Conspiracy theorists were right about so many things last year like hydroxychloroquine and 5g. So we should totally trust them now that Biden and scientists have decided to look more closely into the lab-leak possibility.

/s

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#405

Post by mcculley »

brightball wrote: post #218
davidw wrote: post #125

Here's why investors buy up houses: they know your neighbors will do the dirty work of artificially constraining the housing supply, which makes it a good investment. Here's one who comes right out and explains this: > Meanwhile, local opposition to building is so commonplace and the approval process so cumbersome, time consuming, and expensive, even when a proposed project complies entirely with requirements, approv…

I just experienced something similar to this and it makes me wonder if much of this is just perception. We recently dealt with an out of state builder pushing to have a property that was zoned Neighborhood Commercial to be rezoned to something more flexible so that he could build 49 town homes with 49 parking spots on 5 acres of land. Everybody opposed the rezoning and fought to defeat it. The project would have been…

Congratulations, Central Planner! It sounds like individuals and markets almost won.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#406

Post by opportune »

iso1210 wrote: post #375
brightball wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just experienced something similar to this and it makes me wonder if much of this is just perception. We recently dealt with an out of state builder pushing to have a property that was zoned Neighborhood Commercial to be rezoned to something more flexible so that he could build 49 town homes with 49 parking spots on 5 acres of land. Everybody opposed the rezoning and fought to defeat it. The project would have been…

49 parking spaces for 49 houses seems like a disaster in anywhere other than the densest of US cities. Surely most houses have at least 2 drivers? 5 Acres is 2 Hectares, so that's about 25 houses per hectare. Typical new housing estates in the UK is about 25 hours per hectare, with minimum of 3 parking spaces (including a garage if given) for a 4 bed, and 2 for a 3 bed. Even that number of spaces is too low - especia…

What if I told you that in many areas households don’t even need a single car?

If you require large amounts of parking everywhere and commensurately large roads, everything ends up so spread out that car based transportation seems like a necessity. It’s a self perpetuating cycle. If you don’t require so much land to be dedicated to cars you can build things denser and lower or even remove the need for personal cars.

I think one car per household is fine for townhomes assuming most are 2-3 bedrooms. A lot of families only need one car.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#407

Post by tachyonbeam »

kaibee wrote: post #360
tachyonbeam wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that we need to stop treating houses as investments, because they're a basic fundamental need everyone has. IMO, the problem could be fixed by having stricter laws prohibiting people who aren't residents from owning homes in another country. The requirement to become a resident is only to live in a country for over 6 months out of the year. Before that, you can just rent. We could also do things like limit th…

> but we probably don't want to live in a communist country where the government owns every home and everyone is renting either. Yes, like the famously communist state of, checks notes , Singapore. Sorry for the snarky reply, but I don't think calling the breaking of monopoly power/taxing unearned rents is communism.

Is that how it works in Singapore? I know in China you lease land from the government for 50 or 100 years. I do think it's important to be open to ideas, and I think there probably ought to be redistribution of wealth, particularly when it comes to land ownership. That has to be balanced with some minimum set of rights so that people can't be randomly evicted because people in power want that land, and that when people are evicted, they receive fair compensation.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#408

Post by gfodor »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #392
gfodor wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no objective measure for one to define what is a "good amount" of skepticism. The trap of using this as an excuse to shield yourself from people who have a higher level of conspiratorial or counter-consensus thinking than you prefer or have yourself is one worth trying to be mindful of. Claiming there are people who "question everything" is a yellow flag, imo, because that literally doesn't exist, though I kn…

It sounds like you agree that there is a "bad amount" of skepticism but no way to measure that either? Then it is as easy for me to say you have fallen into the trap of being overly skeptical but are using an excuse to shield yourself from people that would call you a raving nutter. I don't worry too much about finding a way to measure what a "good amount" of skepticism is. Like pornography, I know it when I see, er,…

No, I reject the over-simplified model in general, but my argument is that whatever terms you are, in your own model, using to mean "good" and "bad" and "too much" and "too little" are irrelevant to the question of, even if you could define them clearly, if you can also place and measure a valid threshold. Given the problem here specifically is the epistemological value of consuming views you currently disagree with, by setting yourself up as judge and jury of who is considered worth listening to you're just begging the question, regardless of your framework to act as said judge.

At the end of the day, you have scarce attention, so there are necessarily heuristics you need to use to navigate information and consuming it due to opportunity costs. But my argument is that pegging some people and not others as "too skeptical" is low on the list of good heuristics.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#409

Post by dang »

nathan11 wrote: post #29

Probably worth pointing out this twitter account is promoting the idea that the 2020 election was stolen. To me that casts suspicion on their other assertions.

This comment refers to the original URL, https://twitter.com/APhilosophae/status/1402434266970140676, which we've since replaced with the article it points to (in keeping with the site guidelines).

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#410

Post by dang »

gentleman11 wrote: post #238

Twitter is an awful blogging format when your message takes more than one tweet. It makes you blend in as well, making it easier for fake news to spread - you aren’t that different from a billion other accounts all saying striking things. At least with a blog, you have a more recognizable identity and the ability to write more than a few words at a time

"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27449544.

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